RWC 2.0 | Stefan Balke

RWC 2.0 revisits the Real World Computing Music Database, one of the long-standing reference corpora in Music Information Retrieval. The project renews access to the dataset and its annotations while preserving the role RWC has played for MIR research across popular, classical, jazz, genre, and instrument recordings.

The dataset work combines preservation, documentation, and community infrastructure. Audio recordings are made available via Zenodo, while curated annotations are maintained in a dedicated GitHub repository. The annotation collection focuses on simple, documented formats and includes preprocessed material such as aligned MIDI, beats, and chords for different RWC subsets.

Beyond the data itself, RWC 2.0 is also about sustainable research practice: making legacy resources easier to cite, inspect, extend, and maintain collectively.

Data: Zenodo community
Annotations: rwc-music/rwc-annotations

Associated Publications

2026

RWC Revisited: Towards a Community-Driven MIR Corpus

Stefan Balke, Johannes Zeitler, Vlora Arifi-Müller, Brian McFee, Tomoyasu Nakano, and 2 more authors

Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 2026

DOI Bib Code

@article{BalkeZAMTGM26_RWCRevisited_TISMIR,
  author = {Balke, Stefan and Zeitler, Johannes and Arifi-Müller, Vlora and McFee, Brian and Nakano, Tomoyasu and Goto, Masataka and M{\"u}ller, Meinard},
  title = {{RWC} Revisited: {T}owards a Community-Driven {MIR} Corpus},
  journal = {Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval},
  volume = {9},
  issue = {1},
  pages = {21--35},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5334/tismir.326},
  url-demo = {https://zenodo.org/communities/rwc-music/},
  url-details = {https://transactions.ismir.net/articles/10.5334/tismir.326},
}