We are thrilled to announce the selection of 8 contributors to work with us for this year’s Google Summer of Code program!
MetaBrainz received many great applications this year. Selecting the final contributors was tough and involved deliberating various factors – what these contributors did right is getting in early, engaging with our community, presenting specific and detailed proposals, and proving excellent communication skills and the ability to integrate our feedback back into their proposals.
Thank you to all contributors who submitted a proposal with us!
The whole list of selected proposals can be found on the GSOC website but here is a TL;DR breakdown:
MusicBrainz proposals
Email service with internationalisation and MJML-based formatting (Jade Ellis AKA JadedBlueEyes)
This project will create a new service written in Rust that leverages MJML for email markup and integrates with existing translation infrastructure to create and send emails. The new service will send multipart emails with HTML formatting and plain text alternatives, achieve significant performance improvements, and enable email translation.
Internet Archive integration: saving external URLs via Wayback Machine (Ashutosh Aswal AKA yellowhatpro)
MusicBrainz database sees a lot of edits made on a daily basis. With each edit, there’s associated an edit note which provides additional information about the edit. Often, these edit notes, as well as some edits, contain external links, which we want to archive for reference in the future. This project idea aims at creating a Rust application that can archive the external URLs using Wayback Machine APIs provided by the Internet Archive.
BookBrainz proposals
Importing Entities With Relationships (David Kellner AKA kellnerd)
The project involves processing large data dumps (e.g., MARC records or
JSON files), transforming them into the BookBrainz schema, and ensuring
no duplicate entries. This is continuation of a GSoC 2023 project that laid down the groundwork for importing entities and addressed imports for standalone entities. This year’s project will focus on the additional work needed to import related entities like authors, works, and editions, and handling various edge cases.
MusicBrainz Picard proposals
Add cover art image processing options to Picard (twodoorcoupe)
This project intends to allow Picard to post process cover art images obtained from the providers. There should be provider independent options to restrict image sizes, resize images if it exceeds a maximum allowed size or automatic format conversion. Also, there should be image post processing plugin hooks to allow plugins to do additional image manipulations.
ListenBrainz proposals
Exporting and Importing Playlists Between SoundCloud and Apple Music (Rimma Kubanova AKA kubrimskii)
ListenBrainz generates music recommendation playlists. Users can configure such playlists to be automatically exported to the music service of their choice. Currently, only Spotify playlist export is supported. This projects aim to add support for exporting playlists to SoundCloud and Apple Music as well. Furthermore, it will feature of importing playlists from these music services such into ListenBrainz.
Add Syndication Feeds to ListenBrainz (Eric Deng AKA ericd)
This project aims to add syndication feeds, specifically atom feeds, to ListenBrainz. Users will be able to subscribe to various feeds to access data in a more unified and customized way. In addition to the basic infrastructure to create and subscribe to feeds, the project will add syndication feeds for timeline events, statistics, fresh releases and stats cover art generator.
Dashboard Page and Feed revamp in ListenBrainz iOS (Gaurav Bhardwaj AKA theflash_)
This project aims to seamlessly integrate all functionalities of the ListenBrainz website’s Dashboard into the ListenBrainz iOS app. The project will also involve revamping the feed section of the app to maintain design consistency with the ListenBrainz website. The final dashboard will offer a variety of features such as detailed music listening statistics, recent listens, taste, and more, all within a user-friendly and engaging mobile interface.
Artist, Album, User Pages in ListenBrainz Android (Pranav Konidena AKA pranavkonidena)
The ListenBrainz website contains many features, such as User Pages, Album Pages, and Artist Pages, which offer a holistic experience to the users. However, there is a lack of unified experience for users as some of the features provided by the LB Website listed above need to be present in the app. For any music app, a fusion of social media, user, artist, and album pages are a must, and this project aims to achieve that.
What if you’re not in GSoC 2024?
Reading this and feeling inspired for contributing to the code still? Volunteer contributors are very welcome all year round even though we might have slightly less time available to help you during the summer. It is also putting you in an ideal situation for applying to next year’s GSoC. You can find some tips for applying to GSoC with us in one of our previous posts. When you are ready, join us on the MetaBrainz IRC channel and showcase your initiative and your skills !
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