MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-01-19

Another year starts, and another MusicBrainz update that brings with it small improvements and fixes a bunch of bugs! In addition to a good amount of URL handling improvements, we have found the tables of contents for our documentation which had decided to play hide and seek over the holidays.

Additionally, we have blocked submitting tags that include commas via the API. Tags with commas were never supposed to be supported (commas are generally our tag separator character), and their existence broke in-site tag handling, but the API would until now accept them without complaints. From now on they will be rejected and you will be asked to try again without the commas.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to helpimnotdrowning, kellnerd, Shreeshanth Shetty and SuperSaltyGamer for having contributed to the code. Thanks to chaban, helpimnotdrowning, HibiscusKazeneko, ivoireshi, jesus2099, kellnerd, SuperSaltyGamer, wileyfoxyx and yomo12 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to -alex., Besnik, KenParker_CN, NorwayFun, Philipp Wolfer, dumbbird, gaahmua, imgradeone, liilliil, salo.rock, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-01-19.0.

Year in Music 2025 – new and improved!

#YearinMusic 2025 is out now!

A bit like Spotify’s Wrapped (but way super better, in my extremely biased opinion) your ListenBrainz Year in Music report summarizes your listening habits from throughout the year 2025… and now, back through time!

Read more after the jump, or just check it for real real by clicking here to see your report or here if you don’t have an account.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-12-16

We are back with one last small release before the holidays, which mostly improves URL handling, fixing some broken cleanups and allowing linking to a few new databases. We are also including one small new feature, allowing to browse events by series in the API (to get, for example, all the concerts in a tour in one go). And finally, recording and release group edits entered while editing a release will now also indicate the release they were entered from, mirroring the feature that we recently added for the relationship editor.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to Jim DeLaHunt and owlpharoah for having contributed to the code. Thanks to Anesidora, Aszazin, dvirtz, fabi123, finalsummer, Griomo, Raman Sinclair, Relaxo5, sanojjonas, yindesu and xodus for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Avava_Ava, Besnik, Echelon, GABG, LeoVallejo, Pioneers, kKZvtcqX, karpuzikov, mfmeulenbelt, miausalvaje, salo.rock, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2025-12-16.0.

We can’t have nice things… because of AI scrapers

In the past few months the MetaBrainz team has been fighting a battle against unscrupulous AI companies ignoring common courtesies (such as robots.txt) and scraping the Internet in order to build up their AI models. Rather than downloading our dataset in one complete download, they insist on loading all of MusicBrainz one page at a time. This of course would take hundreds of years to complete and is utterly pointless. In doing so, they are overloading our servers and preventing legitimate users from accessing our site.

Now the AI scrapers have found ListenBrainz and are hitting a number of our API endpoints for their nefarious data gathering purposes. In order to protect our services from becoming overloaded, we’ve made the following changes:

The /metadata/lookup API endpoints (GET and POST versions) now require the caller to send an Authorization token in order for this endpoint to work.
The ListenBrainz Labs API endpoints for mbid-mapping, mbid-mapping-release and mbid-mapping-explain have been removed. Those were always intended for debugging purposes and will also soon be replaced with a new endpoints for our upcoming improved mapper.
LB Radio will now require users to be logged in to use it (and API endpoint users will need to send the Authorization header). The error message for logged in users is a bit clunky at the moment; we’ll fix this once we’ve finished the work for this year’s Year in Music.

Sorry for these hassles and no-notice changes, but they were required in order to keep our services functioning at an acceptable level.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-11-03

For this release we have a bunch of URL improvements, a couple of bug fixes (including one which was causing broken cover art reorder edits), and some progress in the React conversion. Additionally, address verification emails will be sent with the new email service now, and look substantially nicer!

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to dvirtz, Jade Ellis, jesus2099 and owlpharoah for having contributed to the code. Thanks to dvirtz, Freso, Jade Ellis, jesus2099, nope, practik, Time Dilation and zabey for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, craftersmine, Dino RTX, Echelon, hamaryns, KenParker_CN, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, vacuousVersifier, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2025-11-03.0.

Ensembling: Veena MiniVersion or Indian chordophones oh my!

Hello! It’s been a while! Well but good things come to those who wait..

Today we have exciting news about the long awaited Veena mini version!!

(Do you remember the Veenas? We started work on this a whopping 7! years ago, waay back in 2018, when we had Google Code-In students helping us, especially the finalist antara which did a lot of research for us on veena tickets!
As such we did actually resolve several of these already in 2019 and 2020, but it was hard, then stuff happened. Covid happened, genders happened, new computer, the the-whole-world-is-now-a-parody-of-itself timeline happened, lol 😭)

If you remember from way back in 2020 we also added a Indonesian rebab separate from the rebab we already had – this is because that, similar to the Veena, the Rebab is one heck of a complicated matter! (so complicated, in fact, that it and its brethren have gotten their own mini-version!). We’ll get to this one later.

Now things are as chaotic as ever, but after our summit in India last year, I decided there is no better time to finish up the remaining tickets in this version.

Continue reading “Ensembling: Veena MiniVersion or Indian chordophones oh my!”

MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-10-13

Do you remember us? Late Summer and then our September summit has meant again a long break between releases – hopefully we’ll get back to a more consistent update schedule soon (releasing at least once a month if not biweekly).

Other than fixing a bunch of bugs, this release includes one significant new feature and a few noticeable improvements.

It’s now possible to use an API browse query to get all sub-events of a specific event. This means you can get all the events that are part of a specific festival: for example, all events from Wacken 2024 (and the same query including artist and event relationships).

When entering edits from the release relationship editor, the edit will include information about the release it was entered from (no more wondering about which release’s cover art that “See cover art” edit note refers to!).

After not running any captchas for a couple years since we turned off Google’s reCAPTCHA in 2023, we are now running MTCaptcha, a GDPR-compliant captcha. Hopefully this will limit the amount of spammers a bit.

Additionally, you can now select the language you want to receive emails in from your user preferences. This only affects emails that are using our new email service; for now, that is just messages sent to you by other editors.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to dvirtz and Piper McCorkle for having contributed to the code. Thanks to angriestchair, chaban, dvirtz, Jade, KenParker_CN, Muxxer, Piper McCorkle, RandomMushroom128, Relaxo5, rinsuki, sanojjonas and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to aboettger, Beteix, djdhsjhshsh, Echelon, erykmichalak, KenParker_CN, Languages add-on, Libra, Ljcbaby, Manuela Silva, matecik, Metafono, mfmeulenbelt, MoeCaa, nitzanakrai, Philipp Wolfer, Poesty Li, Puyol, robertgarrigos, salo.rock, TefWw, tuba56, Vaclovas Intas, vacuousVersifier, vimutti, wileyfoxyx, yyb987 and לוכסן for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2025-10-13.0.

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 25

MetaBrainz Summit 25 is upon us! September 15-19 in Barcelona, Spain.

We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.

GSoC 2025: Building Libretto, a Matrix Archiver

This post is also available on Jade’s blog

Hello! I’m Jade Ellis, AKA JadedBlueEyes. You might know me from my project with MetaBrainz last year – if not, I’m happy to have the chance to introduce myself. I’m an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of Kent in England, a music enthusiast and (in my spare time) a climber.

The Setting

In September 2024, MetaBrainz switched from IRC to Matrix as our primary form of communication. Matrix is a more feature-rich alternative to IRC, with capabilities like replies, edits, and reactions, while still being open source and aligning with the principles of our project.

When MetaBrainz primarily used IRC, we had a piece of software called BrainzBot. This was a multi-functional Python app that, most importantly, created a web-accessible archive of all messages in the MetaBrainz channels. Thanks to the bridges between IRC and Matrix, BrainzBot continued to trundle along, but it couldn’t understand modern features like edits, replies, or media. The code itself was also becoming decrepit—a fork of an abandoned project, showing its age.

This led to my GSoC project: to build a replacement for BrainzBot’s archival function – a chat archiver that natively understands and preserves Matrix’s rich features.

GSoC 2025: Onboarding Revamp in ListenBrainz Android

Hi everyone,

I’m Hemang Mishra (hemang-mishra on IRC and hemang-mishra on GitHub). I’m currently a pre-final year student at IIIT Jabalpur, India. This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code with MetaBrainz. My mentor for the program was Jasjeet Singh (jasje on IRC).

I contributed to ListenBrainz Android, where I worked on revamping the onboarding experience, improving login, adding listen submission apps, integrating Listening Now, and setting up app updates. The journey has been both exciting and full of learning, and I’m truly grateful for this opportunity.

Project Overview

ListenBrainz is a powerful platform that helps track listening history, share music tastes, and build a community around music.

The main goals of my project were:

Revamping onboarding – introducing users to the app’s core features and handling permissions with clear rationale.
Improving login –replacing simple web pages with a custom Compose-based UI, and experimenting with the DOM tree of the web page to automate form submissions and token extraction in the background.
Listen submission apps – prompting users during onboarding to select which apps to collect listens from, preventing unwanted submissions.
Listening Now integration – adding “Listening Now” into BrainzPlayer.
App updates – enabling updates for both Play Store and non-Play Store (F-Droid or sideloaded) releases.