MetaBrainz Blog – MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog

Spotify users will need to reconnect every 6 months to ListenBrainz

Spotify recently announced a drastic change in their API: connections to your account will now expire after 6 months, starting July 20th.

If you have your Spotify account connected to ListenBrainz, this means you will have to reconnect your Spotify account every 6 months, or ListenBrainz will not be able to keep your listening history in sync.
To get us started, all users will need to reconnect their Spotify account this coming Monday July 20th.

In addition to sending you an email, you will see an error message at the top of the page in ListenBrainz:

To minimize disruption and potential loss of listening history in the future, we will send you an email a month ahead, and one week ahead of the disconnection for you to disconnect and reconnect your Spotify account in your music services settings.

This is quite the thorn in our side but alas we have no other choice as the internet continues to enshittify.

Picard 3 beta 7 released

Today, we have released MusicBrainz Picard 3 beta 7. This new versions brings several fixes over the last beta 5 (yes, we have skipped a beta number again), but also improvements and some new features. Among the highlights are:

Option profiles can now be exported and imported as TOML files. This makes sharing options much easier. We are excited to see how this will be used by you all.
Artist name standardization can now be set to one of three values: no standardization, standardizing only variations of the artist name (“Beatles” vs. “The Beatles”) or standardizing also actual artist name changes (“Diddy”, who previously performed under the names “P. Diddy” and “Puff Daddy”). Standardizing name variations is the new default setting. See also the documentation.
Plugins can now implement custom CD ripper log file support, and there is built-in support for Cyanrip log files.
Picard can now much better handles wrongly or differently encoded filenames when loading files.
The setup wizard got some improvements, allowing users to configure their update notification settings for the app and plugins. Also the setup wizard can now be started again from the help menu. This is not yet the final version of the wizard, but it’s getting closer.
The User Guide was updated to document the latest changes.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 5 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the beta version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

libdiscid 0.7.0

Version 0.7.0 of libdiscid has been released. libdiscid is a C library that allows applications to easily calculate MusicBrainz and freedb disc IDs from audio CDs or CD TOC details. It also can extract MCN and ISRC information.

This release fixes several issues with the build system and addresses compiler warnings. As a compile time option it is now possible to have methods returning URLs to use HTTPs instead of HTTP, see then changelog for details. Thanks to Riku Viitanen for this contribution. Also the binary packages now include a build for the Windows ARM64 platform.

Version 0.7.0 of libdiscid provides the following changes:

Current ListenBrainz server issues/high load, Part 2

This follow-up post covers how and why our servers are still being impacted, an explanation and examples of what we consider “botting” in ListenBrainz – and an apology, because our last post had some baaad comms!

Firstly, we are still experiencing massive server load from an increase in listen submissions related to the BTS fan exodus from last.fm (not all bad! more on this below) – and we are now being hit by another influx of AI scrapers.

Our apologies to our users, new and old, as we continue to work to mitigate the extra load. Remain assured that listens are not being lost – our processing queue is lagging behind, so listens may take (up to) hours to appear.

LB radio and the popularity endpoints have been temporarily disabled, to reduce server load.

Current ListenBrainz server issues/high load

Our apologies if you are experiencing outages or slowness on ListenBrainz currently. First it was AI scrapers, now it’s K-pop fans…

In short, we are experiencing massive server load from an unexpected and massive increase in listen submissions. Please bear with us as the small (but mighty) ListenBrainz team works on possible mitigations.

None of your listens are being lost, they are all sitting safely in our (massively overloaded) processing queue:

Picard 3 beta 5 released

Today, we’re making available the fifth beta version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. This new versions brings some important changes:

The Options menu was reworked with generalized quick settings and easier access to scripts and options.
Handling of the Options dialog and the File Naming Script Editor was streamlined. Editing file naming scripts is now available in the menu in Options > File naming scripts > Edit scripts… or via Ctrl+Shift+S.
Option profiles can now be used with plugin settings, the “Attached option profiles” dialog allows changing selected options.
Plugins can be installed from a local directory without git, which simplifies local development and plugins created just for personal use.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 4 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

Welcome Summer of Code 2026 contributors!

We are excited to announce the 7 GSOC participants working with us this summer on MetaBrainz projects!
Our apologies for not publishing this sooner, in this complicated first part of the year we simply forgot the announcement, but rest assured the work is progressing on all projects.

As always, the selection process was incredibly tough. We received a great batch of proposals and had a limited number of slots.
We want to sincerely thank everyone who took the time to meet our community and submit a proposal with us!

The whole list of selected proposals can be found on the GSOC website but here is a TL;DR breakdown:

ListenBrainz proposals:

Integrate MusicBrainz events into ListenBrainz (Shirsak)

MusicBrainz has data about past and upcoming concerts that ListenBrainz users can’t see yet. This project will bring live music events directly into ListenBrainz, allowing you to discover shows tailored to your favorite artists.

Compose Multiplatform Migration of ListenBrainz-Android (Nirvan)

Currently, ListenBrainz has a native Android app but no iOS version. This project will migrate the app to a single, shared codebase using Kotlin Multiplatform. This means future features and bug fixes will launch on both Android and iOS at the same time.

Playlists Sorting and Organization (Yateen)

Giving ListenBrainz playlists a massive user-experience upgrade. Users will soon be able to search through playlists, organize them using custom tags, sort tracks (by artist, title, or date added), and convert their MusicBrainz collections straight into playlists.

MusicBrainz proposals:

Modernize search storage format for the MusicBrainz database (Junaid)

Cleaning up the under-the-hood engine that powers MusicBrainz search (Solr). By upgrading internal configurations and removing data redundancy, this project will optimize performance and make searching for music faster and more efficient.

GraphQL Server as a Musicbrainz API Alternative (Sreehari)

Building a fast, modern alternative way for external developers to request MusicBrainz data. This makes it significantly easier and more efficient for third-party developers to build apps using our database.

BookBrainz proposals:

Set Up BookBrainz for Internationalization (Garv)

Breaking down language barriers! BookBrainz is currently English-only. This project lays the technical groundwork to support multiple languages and sets up a BookBrainz project on translations.metabrainz.org where volunteer translators can start translating the site immediately.

Development of a new Calibre plugin for BookBrainz (Waqib)

Connecting BookBrainz with Calibre (the popular e-book management software). This plugin will allow Calibre users to automatically pull book metadata and collections directly from BookBrainz to organize their personal digital libraries.

What if you’re not in GSoC 2026?

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 Matrix Channel and showcase your initiative and your skills!

Upcoming changes to user accounts and authentication

We are in the process of moving user accounts, authentication and OAuth applications from the MusicBrainz website to the MetaBrainz website.
This centralizes our account management between all the *Brainz projects, along with some security improvements.

Historically, all accounts were managed on the MusicBrainz website simply because it existed before the MetaBrainz Foundation itself. However, creating a MusicBrainz account just to use ListenBrainz or our other sister projects doesn’t make much sense.
We are changing this legacy setup to improve the user experience and bring better cohesion to the entire MetaBrainz ecosystem.

New MetaBrainz login page

Here is what you need to know about how this transition affects you:

Continue reading “Upcoming changes to user accounts and authentication”

Phishing attempts using MetaBrainz messages

There have been reports of users receiving phishing messages via the MetaBrainz messaging service.

Remember: MetaBrainz staff will never ask for your password. MetaBrainz staff will never ask you to log in to a third-party site (or ‘verify’ your username and password in any other way).

Picard 3 beta 4 fixes startup issues on macOS

We have released Picard 3 beta 4. The recently released beta 3 did crash on macOS and when running the picard-plugins command line tool, both has been fixed in this. In addition beta 4 fixes display issues in the new log view.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 3 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.