RWC Music Database

There is a newer version of the record available.

Published February 1, 2026 | Version v1
Dataset Open

RWC Music Database

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
  • 2. ROR icon International Audio Laboratories Erlangen
  • 3. Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

Contributors

  • 1. ROR icon International Audio Laboratories Erlangen
  • 2. Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • 3. ROR icon Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • 4. ROR icon National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
  • 5. New York University
  • 6. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

Description

This data repository contains a re-release of the RWC Music Database, which was originally published in 2002 (Goto et al., 2002) and subsequently extended in 2003 (Goto et al., 2003). In 2026, the dataset was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), making it available online for research purposes. Users are requested to credit the original authors and publications when using this data.

The RWC (Real World Computing) Music Database (RWC-MDB) is a copyright-cleared music database that is available to researchers as a common foundation for research. It was built by the RWC Music Database Sub-Working Group of the Real World Computing Partnership (RWCP) of Japan. Details on the creation process are described in the original release papers (Goto et al., 2002; Goto et al., 2003), a 2025 interview with Masataka Goto (Müller et al., 2025), and a 2026 paper that revisits the historical significance of RWC-MDB and outlines its transformation into an open, community-driven MIR corpus (Balke et al., 2026). This re-release effort, informally referred to as "RWC 2.0," represents the next phase of the RWC Music Database.
 
This repository contains audio data only. The current version of the dataset annotations, including the AIST Annotations, is maintained separately and can be found in the following repository:
 
If you use this dataset in your research, please cite the following publications:

Masataka Goto, Hiroki Hashiguchi, Takuichi Nishimura, and Ryuichi Oka:
RWC Music Database: Popular, Classical, and Jazz Music Databases
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2002), pp.287-288, October 2002.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1416473
 
Masataka Goto, Hiroki Hashiguchi, Takuichi Nishimura, and Ryuichi Oka:
RWC Music Database: Music Genre Database and Musical Instrument Sound Database
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2003), pp.229-230, October 2003.

Meinard Müller, Stefan Balke, and Masataka Goto
The Story Behind the RWC Music Database: An Interview with Masataka Goto
Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), Vol.8, No.1, pp.154–164, June 2025.
https://dx.doi.org/10.5334/tismir.261

Stefan Balke, Johannes Zeitler, Vlora Arifi-Müller, Brian McFee, Tomoyasu Nakano, Masataka Goto, and Meinard Müller:
RWC Revisited: Towards a Community-Driven MIR Corpus
Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), Vol.9, No.1, pp.21-35, February 2026.

Technical info

Contents:

  • RWC-C/: Audio data of the Classical Music subset (RWC-MDB-C-2001; 50 musical pieces in WAV format)
  • RWC-G/: Audio data of the Genre subset (RWC-MDB-G-2001; 100 musical pieces in WAV format)
  • RWC-J/: Audio data of the Jazz Music subset (RWC-MDB-J-2001; 50 musical pieces in WAV format)
  • RWC-P/: Audio data of the Popular Music subset (RWC-MDB-P-2001; 100 musical pieces in WAV format)
  • RWC-R/: Audio data of the Royalty-Free Music subset (RWC-MDB-R-2001; 15 musical pieces in WAV format)
  • changelog.txt: Documentation of the dataset releases
Note that the Musical Instrument Sound Database (RWC-MDB-I-2001), originally published in 2003, is distributed separately in a dedicated repository.

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