The amount of data is amazing – but I find that it's both a blessing and a curse. It absolutely excels at the use case of tagging audio files (as a lot of people here are noting), and as an encyclopedic reference (its purpose). For other software integration use cases, where there is any ambiguity involved whatsoever, a huge portion of code needs to be dedicated to deciding which recording/release/etc. is the likely intended or "canonical" entity. I find that the rankings from the search API are not nearly good enough for this.
Consider a recording search for "smells like teen spirit". Any human with cursory knowledge of pop music would point you at the Nirvana single from the 1991 release of Nevermind (in this particular case, it's likely even true in every locale). But MusicBrainz has no notion of popularity, common sense, or the real-world context of any of its entities, so the recording from Nevermind isn't even on the first page of results. Heck, the first result isn't even a Nirvana recording. The second result is from an obscure live bootleg album. In my opinion this should be considered a bug. This stuff matters!
This is an area I've dedicated a lot of time to when integrating MusicBrainz with my project, and it strikes me as something that MetaBrainz could spend time on to make the platform more accessible. Answering simple questions about music is currently quite difficult to newcomers on account of the overwhelming amount of data. Consider a world where it's possible to stream every recording from every release in the MusicBrainz database: it should be easier to make "Alexa, play Dark Side of the Moon" work without it needing to ask whether I mean the 1994 Netherlands CD release.
(FWIW, it's totally possible to build these heuristics on top of MusicBrainz today, but having better built-in support for determining this stuff would be nice. Spotify is absolutely amazing at figuring out what song in its entire catalog should be the top result even when I've only typed a few characters.)
Consider a recording search for "smells like teen spirit". Any human with cursory knowledge of pop music would point you at the Nirvana single from the 1991 release of Nevermind (in this particular case, it's likely even true in every locale). But MusicBrainz has no notion of popularity, common sense, or the real-world context of any of its entities, so the recording from Nevermind isn't even on the first page of results. Heck, the first result isn't even a Nirvana recording. The second result is from an obscure live bootleg album. In my opinion this should be considered a bug. This stuff matters!
This is an area I've dedicated a lot of time to when integrating MusicBrainz with my project, and it strikes me as something that MetaBrainz could spend time on to make the platform more accessible. Answering simple questions about music is currently quite difficult to newcomers on account of the overwhelming amount of data. Consider a world where it's possible to stream every recording from every release in the MusicBrainz database: it should be easier to make "Alexa, play Dark Side of the Moon" work without it needing to ask whether I mean the 1994 Netherlands CD release.
(FWIW, it's totally possible to build these heuristics on top of MusicBrainz today, but having better built-in support for determining this stuff would be nice. Spotify is absolutely amazing at figuring out what song in its entire catalog should be the top result even when I've only typed a few characters.)