Gracenote

Gracenote can refer to two main things: a musical term and a media metadata company.

In music, a grace note is a short, ornamental note printed smaller than the main notes and played quickly before the main note. Grace notes are used to decorate melodies and do not typically have a fixed rhythmic value of their own. They come in two common forms: acciaccatura, usually written with a slash through the note stem, and appoggiatura, without a slash. Grace notes appear in classical, folk, and contemporary repertoire, and their execution can affect the expressive character of a passage.

Gracenote, Inc. is a digital metadata and content recognition company that provides information and identification services for music, video, and related media. The company operates a large database and uses audio fingerprinting and other recognition technologies to identify tracks, episodes, and other content. In use, Gracenote supplies metadata such as artist name, track title, album, release year, genre, and cover art, and it also provides related data like track length and credits. Its technology is embedded in a wide range of consumer devices and software, including music players, streaming services, and car infotainment systems, to enable automatic tagging, discovery, and display of media information.

Gracenote’s roots trace back to the CDDB (Compact Disc Database) project, which aimed to catalog metadata for audio CDs. In 2011, Gracenote was acquired by Nielsen, and it operates as part of Nielsen’s data and analytics offerings. The company remains a widely used source of music and video metadata in the entertainment ecosystem. The term grace note in music is unrelated to the company, though both share the same spelling.