MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-06-07

We have a small release this time, slightly delayed because of maintenance work on our servers for the last couple days. The most noticeable changes are probably 68 new locales available for aliases (for example, we can now specify an alias is in Latin language), and a fix to a bug where a small amount of tracks would not be shown in their release’s relationship editor and as such couldn’t have relationships added from that page.

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 salo.rock, UltimateRiff and yyoung for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-06-07.

Continue reading “MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-06-07”

Picard 2.9 Beta 1

The Picard team is happy to announce the availability of the first beta release for the upcoming Picard 2.9. This is a pre-release we put out for wider testing and to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.9 release.

Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback. This release contains contributions by Laurent Monin, Philipp Wolfer, Bob Swift, David Kellner, Tushar Rohith, Aerozol and certuna.

Continue reading “Picard 2.9 Beta 1”

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-05-22

As announced for our schema change release, after a week of beta testing, the ability to modify or remove edit notes is fully delivered in today’s release! A few other unrelated but small improvements and fixes are included too.

As an editor, you are now able to modify or remove your own edit notes if they’re not older than 24 hours and nobody else has replied; you can see the full set of conditions in our edit note documentation. Admins are allowed to modify or remove any edit note from anyone at any time, and have already been using this to remove some spam and inappropriate comments during the beta period.

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 ShivamAwasthi for contributing code and to kellnerd for helping with code review. Thanks to chaban, Cyberskull, jesus2099 q_fdb and yurim for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-05-22.

Continue reading “MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-05-22”

We are ready for Summer of Code 2023 !

A belated congratulations to the 7 contributors that we selected to work with for this year’s Google Summer of Code program! 

The competition was fierce this year. MetaBrainz received a huge amount of high quality applications. Narrowing it down gets harder every year – 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.

You can find the whole list on the GSOC website but here is a TL;DR breakdown for you:

MusicBrainz proposals

Automate areas management (Prathamesh Ghatole)
MusicBrainz refers to external databases like Wikidata & GeoNames to keep its area metadata up-to-date. However, currently this is done with a cumbersome manual process. We aim to tackle this issue by building a new “AreaBot” to automatically maintain and update areas in MusicBrainz using Wikidata.

ListenBrainz proposals

Interactive artist similarity graph (Arshdeep Singh)
Provide an intuitive way for users to analyze relationships between artists and discover new artists with a music style similar to their favorites. 

Feed Section in Android app (Jasjeet Singh)
Similarly to the feed page on the ListenBrainz website, the up and coming ListenBrainz Android app is missing a feed section to keep users up to date with music recommended by their friends, discover new favorite songs and send music to one another.

Dataset Hoster improvements (Vishal Singh AKA Pixelpenguin)
The Dataset Hoster is one of those behind-the-scenes projects that enables us to very quickly upload queryable datasets to be used for music recommendations. The goal of this GSOC project is to improve its usability both in terms of the interface as well as the formatting of the resulting data.

Integrating Apple Music for playback (Vardan Saini AKA Vscode)
ListenBrainz users will soon be able to link their Apple Music account to play music directly from ListenBrainz, like we currently do for Spotify users.

(And if one day Apple decides to return a time and date in their user history, we’ll be able to save a user’s playback!)

BookBrainz proposals

Import open databases (David Kellner AKA kellnerd)
We want to provide a way to import available open-source and public collections of library records into the database while still ensuring that they meet BookBrainz’ high data quality standards with manual user verification.

Administration system (Shivam Awasthi)
BookBrainz is direly missing an administration interface and a flexible privilege hierarchy to allow selected users to filter spam entries and take special actions such as adding entity or relationship types without requiring direct database modification.

And thank you to everyone else who submitted a proposal with us !

What about GSOC 2024?

Reading this and feeling inspired for next year’s GSoC?
Ongoing connection and communicating is key. To ascend to the next level of GSoC eligibility, join us on the MetaBrainz IRC channel early on and show us your initiative and your skills !

MusicBrainz schema change release, 2023-05-15 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2023 schema change today! Thanks to all who were patient during today’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers, and thanks to CatQuest, jesus2099, and yindesu for creating tickets.

This is a fairly small schema change release which mostly removes unused code and improves things behind the scenes. Of the schema change tickets, there are only two that will directly affect users as they browse and edit in MusicBrainz.

The first (MBS-12800) makes it so that cancelled releases are ignored when calculating the first release dates for recordings and release groups; since something that was cancelled was by definition not released, it should not be used as a first release date.

The second (MBS-11312) lays the foundation for a new feature (MBS-4685) that will allow users to edit or delete their edit notes, as long as a set of conditions are met (see the edit note docs for details). Admins will be able to edit or delete any edit notes at any time (MBS-13084), mostly to get rid of spam or offensive content, but also to help any editor who cannot change their note anymore but has an important reason why they need to do so. This feature will be available for testing in our beta server on Tuesday and we expect to release it next week, assuming our beta testers don’t find any too big issue with it by then.

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

Continue reading “MusicBrainz schema change release, 2023-05-15 (with upgrade instructions)”

MusicBrainz & Byta: Metadata Matters

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been collaborating with our friends over at Byta on a 3 article series: Why Metadata Matters.

Update: You can now read Part 1 here

Many artists, especially the ones starting out, often do not realize the value of correct metadata and the various ins and outs of music metadata. In this 3 part series we’ll dive into why metadata is important and what artists can do to improve the metadata for their own music.

I highly recommend this article series. Stay tuned!

Redesigning ListenBrainz

Today we are pleased to present the new and improved ListenBrainz website!

Since 2019, we have been adding features and pages to the ListenBrainz website without a clear plan as to what we wanted the interface to look like.
The result is a website that is not very user friendly, with poor mobile screens support and features hidden behind menu items that are hard to discover. It’s a mess.

We have been working hard to redesign the website with those goals in mind: simplify the menu and navigation into clear sections, make it easier for users to find what they are looking for, and refresh and improve the overall look and feel of the website.

The new user Dashboard

The main menu now has three top-level categories:

Feed: the social side of ListenBrainz; expect big improvements to these pages
Dashboard: for everything related to your (or other users) music taste and stats
Explore: all the nifty features we come up with will have a home here and be easily discoverable

The new Explore page


This is only the first step of this redesign; in the coming months we will continue improving the layout and functionality page by page, as well as reviewing the sign-up and onboarding process to make it easier for new users.

If you have feedback for us (and we welcome it!) please come talk to us in this forum post

None of this would have been possible without @aerozol‘s exceptional efforts making UI mockups for our websites.
Thanks also to everyone who gave feedback on the community forums and helped with beta testing.