AcoustID will stop accepting fingerprints without metadata

Many years ago, I decided to open AcoustID to fingerprint submissions without metadata. The idea was to have a pre-populated fingerprint database, even if we don’t have the metadata yet. However, this turned out not to be useful and it creates quite a bloat. Out of approximately 70 million tracks in the AcoustID database, only 20 million have associated MusicBrainz recording. A little more tracks have user-submitted text metadata, but the majority of fingerprints in the database is still unidentified. In order to make the project sustainable and still free to use for non-commercial applications, we are going to stop accepting submissions without metadata starting on February 1st, 2025.