In this paper we describe the data gathering work done within a large research project, CompMusic, which emphasizes a culture specific approach in the automatic description of several world music repertoires. Currently we are focusing on the Hindustani (North India), Carnatic (South India) and Turkish-makam (Turkey) music traditions. The selection and organization of the data to be processed for the characterization of each of these traditions is of the utmost importance.The CompMusic project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement 267583