Tag: music

The Strangest Releases in MusicBrainz: Weird and Wonderful

MusicBrainz is a treasure trove. Open the lid and you will find glittering piles of release metadata. Mountains of precious artist information. Gold nuggets of high resolution artwork. Everything you can imagine – provided you mainly imagine music data. And also, at the bottom, tucked into the corners, some really weird shit. And some MusicBrainz editors just having the time of their life, adding to the pile. One of those editors has agreed to have a chat with me.

A photo of a dungbeetle on top of a ball of dung. A lot of strange audio releases are sticking out of the dung ball.
One person’s treasure is another person’s…

Thank you for answering my questions, sound.and.vision! I am really regretting the poop analogy, my deepest apologies. But we are dung-beetle editing buddies, and I know that your additions to the database are a treasure to many. Shall we ‘roll’ with it?

Continue reading “The Strangest Releases in MusicBrainz: Weird and Wonderful”

Towards Fair Streaming: Introducing the FairMusE project

Hello ListenBrainz community!

As you know, we’ve been working hard on building recommendations and other music discovery tools as part of ListenBrainz. Our frustrations with online streaming providers and their questionable discovery features have long been a source of frustration for us, so we worked hard to build recommendations with as little bias as possible.

Fortunately, we’re not alone in our frustration with the steaming providers – researchers at Aalborg University, Denmark and Lille University, France are currently questioning the fairness of these music recommendations and have asked ListenBrainz and its community to help them with this task.

The researchers are looking for ListenBrainz users to give their permission for their public ListenBrainz data to be used as part of this research. If fair music discovery services are of importance to you, please read on and consider granting the researchers permission to use your data:

Share your listening data with the researchers and help us fight for a fair and transparent music streaming ecosystem! 

Continue reading “Towards Fair Streaming: Introducing the FairMusE project”

ListenBrainz: 2023 Recap

Strap in, because we’re going to recap all the ListenBrainz changes in the whirlwind year that was 2023! For the full ListenBrainz changelog you can visit: https://github.com/metabrainz/listenbrainz-server/releases

For those who peeped at the changelog, yes, the ListenBrainz team managed over 60 releases in 2023… let’s check out some of the highlights.

Continue reading “ListenBrainz: 2023 Recap”

How five Queen songs went mainstream in totally different ways

Making graphs is easy. Making intuitive, easy-to-understand graphs? It’s harder than most people think. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, the ISTE-260 (Designing the User Experience) course teaches the language of design to IT students. For an introductory exercise in the class, students are tasked to visualize any set of data they desire. Students David Kim, Jathan Anandham, Justin W. Flory, and Scott Tinker used the MusicBrainz database to look at how five different Queen songs went mainstream in different ways. Continue reading “How five Queen songs went mainstream in totally different ways”

Picard 2.0.1 released! (Windows and macOS users rejoice)

Note – There are no changes for Linux users, so they can safely skip this release if they want.

Given the massive feedback about the shortcomings of the Windows and macOS versions of Picard, we decided to do a minor release addressing some of the issues with our executables.

As usual, you can find the latest downloads on Picard’s Website.

The change-log is as follows –

Bug-fix

  • [PICARD-1283] – Fingerprinting not working on macOS in Picard 2.0
  • [PICARD-1286] – Error creating SSL context on Windows

Improvement

  • [PICARD-1290] – Improve slow start up times by moving to a non single file exe
  • [PICARD-1291] – Use an installer for Picard 2.x windows exe

Basically, the Windows executable is now a proper installer and some missing SSL dependencies are bundled with it.

The macOS builds also include the missing AcoustID fingerprinting binary.

The startup time for both the Windows and macOS version has been improved as well.

Have fun tagging your files!

samj1912 signing off o/

 

Picard 2.0 released

Hey people, samj1912 here again o/

This time we are announcing the release of a new Picard!

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 2.0 is now out, containing many fixes and new features and much needed upgrades!

The last time we put out a major release was more than 6 years ago (Picard 1.0 in June of 2012), so this release comes with a major back-end update. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependencies a bit. Python should now be at least version 3.5, PyQt 5.7 or newer and Mutagen should be 1.37 or newer. A side effect of this dependency bump is that Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive.

A couple of things to note – with Picard 2.0, Picard Windows builds will be portable standalone binaries. Also, we will only be supporting 64-bit Windows officially because of lack of resources to build a 32-bit image. The macOS requirements were also bumped up for the same reasons, with macOS 10.10 being the lowest version that is supported.

As such, Picard 1.4.2 will be the last version that is supported for both Windows 32 and macOS 10.7-10.10. You can find it in the Picard downloads section as well.

You can find a detailed change-log on the Picard webiste.

The highlights of this update are –

  • Retina and Hi-DPI display support
  • Improved performance
  • UI improvements

We would like to thank all contributors, from all around the world, who helped for this release: Laurent Monin, Sophist, Wieland Hoffmann, Vishal Choudhary, Philipp Wolfer, Calvin Walton, David Mandelberg, Paul Roub, Yagyansh Bhatia, Shen-Ta Hsieh, Ville Skyttä, Yvan Rivierre and also all of our translators!

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

Note:  If you are facing errors while tagging releases on Windows, do take a look at this FAQ about SSL errors.