Month: November 2017

Classical Clean Up #2: Mahler. The Conclusions!

As we published at the start of October, during the last month we’ve been trying to clean up our data for Gustav Mahler. October is over now, and you might be wondering how that went. Well, no need to wonder anymore, because our users have made a fantastic job not just of cleaning Mahler’s data up, but of showing us how clean it is!

Our editor stupidname took statistical snaps at the start, the midpoint and the end of the project:

Oct 1st Oct 18th Nov 2nd
Recordings 2361 66 (-2295) 11 (-2350)
Tracks 11866 14094 (+2228) 15228 (+3362)
Releases 924 1192 (+268) 1363 (+439)
Release Groups 720 871 (+151) 986 (+266)

As we can see, the existing recordings where mostly cleaned up 18 days in, but a lot of new releases kept being added up until the end of the month.

Additionally, stupidname also checked the amount of recordings for some of the main works by Mahler to see the changes over time (specifically, due to the way our works… err.. work, the data is for one movement of each work rather than the main work itself):

Oct 1st Oct 18th Nov 2nd
Symphony no. 1 95 115 (+20) 120 (+25)
Symphony no. 2 114 145 (+31) 149 (+35)
Symphony no. 3 108 141 (+33) 144 (+36)
Symphony no. 4 68 82 (+14) 85 (+17)
Symphony no. 5 92 93 (+1) 98 (+6)
Symphony no. 6 65 74 (+9) 87 (+11)
Symphony no. 7 76 86 (+10) 96 (+20)
Symphony no. 8 89 108 (+19) 106 (+17)
Symphony no. 9 125 141 (+16) 176 (+51)
Das Lied von der Erde 47 53 (+6) 55 (+8)
Kindertotenlieder 41 52 (+11) 62 (+21)
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen 54 63 (+9) 68 (+14)

This data is a bit less precise, because some of these recordings are partial (and the specific organization of Symphony no. 8 makes it especially tricky to count), but it is still a very nice view of how we’ve gotten extra recordings of basically everything!

Our editor loujin made graphs with the amount of edits per editor during the cleanup. There are too many editors for the legend to show them all, but the graph shows that the two biggest contributors by far were ListMyCDs.com (green) and stupidname (light blue), with a bunch of other editors making several hundred edits as well.

And finally, also thanks to loujin, you can see how the cleanup affected the amount of edits done on Mahler (no prizes for guessing which bar it is!):

Thanks to all this hard work, our entry on Mahler should be a particularly good example of the amount and quality of classical data you can get from MusicBrainz, and an inspiration for other composer pages! Thanks so much to everyone, and we’ll be back with more in December!

Mahler is impressed

MetaBrainz Summit 17

While the streets of Barcelona were filling up with the referendum conundrum, a bunch of people were spotted chattering and bantering, sometimes with pillows and colorful socks, searching for gelato.

Yes, that bunch of people would be us. 😀

Our annual MusicBrainz summit was held on September 30th–October 1st in the colorful, lively city of Barcelona. We had people (and chocolates) from nine countries: Spain, India, Germany, UK, USA, France, Estonia, Denmark, and Iceland.

Summit participants with *Brainz pillows
From left→right, top: Wieland (Mineo), Sambhav (samj1912), Sean (Leftmost Cat), Nicolás (reosarevok), Ben (LordSputnik), Jérôme (loujin), Alastair (alastairp); middle: Leo Verto, Freso, Michael (bitmap), Elizabeth (Quesito), Chhavi; bottom: Yvan (yvanzo), Rob (ruaok), Param (iliekcomputers), Suyash (ferbncode). Laurent (zas) behind the camera.


Having a majority of our team in a room with food obviously lead to lots of productive discussions. We talked about translations, recommendations engines, voting, and packaging. We also talked about SpamBrainz, user scripts being included as part of our projects, documentation, single sign-on for all Brainz, and a bunch of other things.

One of the nice things we could do this summit was to go over our user survey results. As you might remember, we had this banner on our site asking us to take part in a survey. The results gave us a good idea of our community in regards to what language they use, what Brainz project they use more, how do they come to know about us, and so on.

Summit session in progress
Summit session in progress.

We got to know what you like, but more importantly what you don’t. We heard all of you, and we are on it. We will publish a detailed report on that soon.

You cannot be in Barcelona with such a good lot of people and not end up exploring the city. The team ended up cycling on the streets of Barcelona (many times on the wrong side), climbing up to the mosaic-y Park Güell, snacking on pinchos and tapas, visiting the Pompeu Fabra University (where our AcousticBrainz project resides) and taking their daily after-lunch strolls through the Arc de Triomf.

Apart from that, some of the record-breaking points from the summit would be:

  • We had nice colorful pillows with all our kids (we mean, Brainz projects) printed on them. And summit t-shirts too.
  • The summit was live streamed on our YouTube channel, for all those who couldn’t make it. That went pretty well, with only minor technical difficulties, and it provided a good overview (literally! 🙂 ). For those who missed it (or want to rewatch it), the archived streams are available on YouTube.
  • We finally decided to improve the user experience of our projects (more on the blog about that later).
  • We worked on a new wonderful Sound Team recording while having a terrace barbeque hosted by Elizabeth.
  • More gelato was eaten than ever before. (That shouldn’t be surprising.)

We’re wrapping up the summit with this blog, but we have all the memories preserved. Find the amazing moments captured by our in-house photographer Zas in his Facebook gallery, and those moments in motion in my own video here:

Until next year,
Cheers 😀