September, October, and November 2015 Community Recap

Jeez. This has been overdue! So a lot of things happened, and this Community Recap series kind of got put on the back burner, which obviously means a lot of things have piled up, so if I forgot something you thought should have been mentioned, please share it in the comments below. 🙂 I will be doing a few months at a time until I’ve caught up to the now().

With that said, let’s proceed!

September

September was marked by two new additions to the MetaBrainz team: Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov as part-time developer and software engineer and Laurent “zas” Monin as system administrator.

It was also the month where we had a big change in our IRC structure: the old #musicbrainz-devel was renamed to #metabrainz which also had the two BookBrainz channels, #bookbrainz and #bookbrainz-devel, folded into it. (For those few who remember it, #musicbottle also got included in this merge.)

On the forums, there was a request for a guide to help with scanning cover art, for which mfmeulenbelt pulled through and created a guide on scanning cover art using the GIMP. Thanks mfmeulenbelt!
Another user, neonihon, discovered a free O’Really book called Music Science: How Data and Digital Content Are Changing Music which apparently mentions MusicBrainz. Go ahead and give it a read if that’s your kind of thing! 🙂

The month also saw a couple of MusicBrainz server releases (2015-09-07, 2015-09-21) and a Style update.

October

In October, #musicbrainz saw a 3 hour(!) discussion about labels; e.g., “what is a label?” Go ahead and dig in. 😉
CallerNo6 also (accidentally?) started a discussion about the future of our Area entities. Some of the points from this have already been acted on, but if you’re into Areas, it might be worth going through the discussion anyway.

In the forums, cbedgar started a discussion on best practices for adding iTunes releases to MusicBrainz.

Out in the real world, the MusicBrainz Summit 15 took place in Barcelona, with the MetaBrainz employees at the time as well as some of our volunteers attending.

October also saw two MusicBrainz server releases: 2015-10-05 and 2015-10-19.

November

In November we prepared for our participation in the Google Code-in.

The month also saw a couple of MusicBrainz server releases: 2015-11-02, 2015-11-16, and 2015-11-30. One of things introduced in these server releases is that German, French, and Dutch translations (finally!) got released on the main https://musicbrainz.org/ site instead of only being available on beta.