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A compilation album is an album (music or spoken-word) featuring tracks from one or more performers, often culled from a variety of sources (such as studio albums, live albums, singles, demos and outtakes.) The tracks are usually collected according to a common characteristic, such as popularity, genre, source or subject matter. When the tracks are all essentially by the same recording artist, a compilation album is often referred to as a retrospective album. Compilation albums may employ traditional product bundling strategies.
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Common types of compilation include:
In the United Kingdom, The Official Charts Company compiles a weekly compilation albums chart, limited to Various Artists compilations and soundtrack compilations.[1]
MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content music database. Similar to the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB. However, MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured open online database for music.
MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of 25 October 2015, MusicBrainz contained information about roughly one million artists, 1.5 million releases, and 15 million recordings.
End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.