Have you ever joined the MetaBrainz chat? Team and community members have been getting up to mischief (and, occasionally, work) using IRC since 2003 and earlier – with the logs to prove it. Today, over twenty years later, we say ‘oh hi’ to ChatBrainz.
With the launch of ChatBrainz we have officially moved to Matrix! Matrix has ease of access and some modern conveniences that make access to chat possible for more contributors and users. Not a fan of the change? Not a problem – ChatBrainz also has IRC and Discord bridges, that allow cross-platform chat with the three main Matrix rooms/channels.
Expect MusicBrainz and services that depend on its database (MetaBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, CritiqueBrainz, BookBrainz) to be down for the hour, but we’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible.
Afterward, we’ll post instructions here on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server (whether using musicbrainz-docker or otherwise).
P.S. The initially announced upgrades for MusicBrainz search engine are just about to reach our beta website, and thus are postponed for mirrors too.
MetaBrainz project translation has officially moved from Transifex to Weblate! This is a big step forward, with improvements likesingle sign-on using your MusicBrainz account, proper attribution to translators, unified handling of glossaries, custom checks for MusicBrainz variable syntax, better integration with our development workflow, and supporting a libre software organization. We also tidied up the documentation and the forums about translation and more generally about internationalization of all aspects of MetaBrainz.
This is also a great opportunity to give translating a go if you’ve never done it before. In the second half of this blog post we will walk you through getting started. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be an expert translator!
This is a maintenance-only release of the CritiqueBrainz server. It fixes a potential security vulnerability (unexploited so far) and tests. It also updates a bunch of important dependencies to their latest version (Node.js…).
From the users’ point of view, it fixes the preview feature of the text editor in the critique submission form, thanks to the new Markdown text editor, EasyMDE, an actively maintained fork of the abandoned SimpleMDE.
This update is delivered to you by ansh, lucifer, and monkey, to keep CritiqueBrainz alive. As a reminder, this project has currently no dedicated developer. Code contributions, even small ones, would be more than welcome!
The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt
After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.
We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!
A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
I am Ansh Goyal (ansh on IRC), an undergraduate student from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and introduced a new feature, CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities.
I was mentored by Alastair Porter (alastairp on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions made for this project and my experiences throughout the journey.
Hi! I am Jason Dao, aka jasondk on IRC. I’m a third year undergrad at University of California, Davis. This past summer, I’ve been working with the MetaBrainz team to add some neat features to the project ListenBrainz.
I’m pleased to announce that Kartik Ohri, AKA Lucifer, a very active contributor since his Code-in days in 2018, has become the latest staff member of the MetaBrainz Foundation!
Kartik has been instrumental in rewriting our Android app and more recently has been helping us with a number of tasks, including new features for ListenBrainz, AcousticBrainz as well as breathing some much needed life into the CritiqueBrainz project.
These three projects (CritiqueBrainz, ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz) will be his main focus while working for MetaBrainz. Each of these projects has not had enough engineering time recently to sufficiently move new features forward. We hope that with Kartik’s efforts we can deliver more features faster.
Hello everybody! My name is Shamroy Pellew, and I am a rising sophomore at SUNY Buffalo.
This summer, as part of Google Summer of Code, I collaborated with the MetaBrainz Foundation on CritiqueBrainz, the foundation’s archive of user‐written music reviews. I have accomplished much in these past four months, and it has been a great experience working under the guidance of my mentor, Suyash Garg. Even though there is still some work to be done, most of the code I wrote has either been merged or is in code review, and I believe it is safe to say I achieved the goal of my original proposal.
Proposal
I initially planned to use the mbdata package to query the MusicBrainz database for information regarding artists, labels, recordings, and works, so I can achieve my goal of supporting reviews for these entities on CritiqueBrainz. However, I soon discovered that there exists BrainzUtils, a Python package with “common utilities used throughout MetaBrainz projects.” So it was decided that it would be best to use those utilities, instead of writing my own. Of course, a few changes had to be made. CritiqueBrainz had features that BrainzUtils was missing, so those had to be moved over and merged. The inclusion of BrainzUtils was the only real divergence between my original proposal and my actual course of action. Otherwise, everything went according to plan.
Phase 1
Adapting CritiqueBrainz code to be used in BrainzUtils was a bit of a learning curve, and took up a good majority of the first phase. I had to gain familiarity with both code bases and the difference between Python 2 and 3. I also had to write some new unit tests, to ensure everything was functioning as it should, which I’ve never done in Python before. The existing BrainzUtils code and feedback from my mentor were a great help though.
After I finished moving features to BrainzUtils, but before I could add support for reviewing new entities, I had to convert the existing CritiqueBrainz functionality to use BrainzUtils for data retrieval. This was a simple change, as the same code was being used, but from a different source. Once that was done, I moved on and began to work on the reviewal of new entities.
Adding support for reviewing of new entity types required the same simple steps for each new type. First, the new types were each added to the existing SQL script which declares entity types, and for each new type, an ALTER script was made. Then, I retrieved information about each entity through BrainzUtils, including any necessary supplementary data. The searching for the new entity types also had to be implemented, using musicbrainzngs, a Python binding for the MusicBrainz web API. So, I wrapped the musicbrainzngs searching API call in a function and created new HTML templates, using Jinja, for finding the new entities. Finally, I had to enable reviews for the new entity types. I edited the list of reviewable entity types and the existing review templates to include data about the new types.
Naturally, by this point in the project, a few bugs had popped up. There were problems with handling deleted entities, some with data not being displayed, and even cases where data was completely missing. These were solved as they appeared, and were only minor headaches.
Overall, there was also some human error on my part that slowed things down. I could have communicated more effectively and delivered each task piece by piece, which would have resulted in better feedback from my mentor.
Conclusion
In total, I have opened a total of 17 pull requests across BrainzUtils and CritiqueBrainz. If I had more time, though I would have liked to work on my stretch goal of incorporating entity ratings from MusicBrainz into CritiqueBrainz. Although I did manage to open a BrainzUtils pull request for serializing the MusicBrainz ratings when fetching information, I did not get a chance to do anything with this data.
I’d like to thank the MetaBrainz Foundation for this amazing opportunity. Thanks to the team and thanks to Google, I was able to produce something that people everywhere will be able to use. I learned a lot about open source this summer, and I was able to polish up on my Python skills. I’m looking forward to continuing work on CritiqueBrainz and the continued support from the MetaBrainz team!
Rob, Suyash, Param and I met in the bustling city of Delhi where “horns are applied very liberally” (it is a very noisy city!) for a mini summit. Some may even call it elaborate break-out sessions on ListenBrainz and CrtiqueBrainz. We had discussions over a span of two days over laptops and notebooks, riding on bumpy roads in tuk-tuks and over spicy chicken biryanis. Here is a summary of all that we discussed:
ListenBrainz Data Visualizations We started Day 1 with graphs for ListenBrainz. After a long marathon of heavy development weightlifting tasks by Param and Rob (how do we work with BigQuery correctlty?), we are finally at a stage, where we can have some really cool amazing visualizations out of our dataset. What will they be? Where will they be? How will we implement them? Can our community pitch in with requests and maybe even play around with code?
After scrounging through a lot of other websites which do music-y data visualizations, and the few responses on our user survey, we started listing various ideas, and went through ideas on our community forum. We ended up dividing the data visualizations (from now on, called graphs) into two categories:
User specific graphs: showcasing a user’s listening history and taste Site-wide graphs: showcasing the overall listening patterns on ListenBrainz
We had to make some tricky calls based on technical constraints, but overall, for starters, we decided some cool user graphs. We have detailed 6 of them over the summit:
Listening history of a user: how much have you listen-ed, what you have you listened too, listen counts, etc
Your top artitsts
Your tracklist (listen history)
How much music did you explore
Which artists are trending in what parts of the worlds
Listener count across the world
All these graphs will be available over different time durations (last week, month, year) and will also have handles to manipulate them. They will also have tools to easily share them on social media networks. We think, our community will really enjoy tracking their listening history with these. We also discussed a few ideas of how we can create a sandbox so our community can pitch in with ideas, vote on ideas and send pull requests for new graphs. More on that later, as we get there!
Rating System If you are listening to a tracklist while working over something, how possible it is that you will rate a track saying “This is 3.5? This is 4.2? That is 5 stars!” So you see, ratings on ListenBrainz are tricky. It is very dynamic and interactive in real time, unlike other dear *Brainz projects, so we think that a Last.fm-like rating i.e like and dislike makes sense for ListenBrainz. There was also some discussion about where the ratings should reside — is CritiqueBrainz the correct place?
Home Page We worked on redesigning the “My Listens” page as well the home page. We now plan to include, apart from the graphs, an infographic explaining how ListenBrainz works and things you can do with it! I will further detail out the mockup later this week.
Potential Roadmap After almost two days of discussions, we could chalk up a rough roadmap for ListenBrainz, which include data visualizations, ability to rate/like tracks, create collections, follow users, and more. This also includes encouraging cross brainz pollination!
CritiqueBrainz With Suyash around (he worked on Critique Brainz as part of GSoC last year, and has been actively involved since), there were obviously a lot of discussions on reinvigorating the project. We discussed quite a few ideas, which included innovating ways of writing and sharing reviews, sharing it on social media, cross *brainz interactions, a few UI changes, etc. We’re considering allowing Quick Reviews that, like Twitter, are limited to 280 characters. What do you think? Suyash has written down his ideas for the same and would love some feedback from the community!
And of course! We couldn’t let Rob’s first visit to India be all about work. After the sunset, we went exploring the city of Delhi. That included rides in tuk-tuks, spicy chicken biryanis, shopping for some colorful clothes and definetly, the Indian chaat 🙂
All in all, it was a very productive mini summit and definitely made us all, more excited to start working on the ideas we discussed. We will keep you updated and post more soon!
Some A lot of Indian food!The troope at India GateParam is really into (a lot of) selfies.
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