May 2023 – MetaBrainz Blog

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.

Planned downtime for Monday, May 29, 15:00 UTC

We’ll be performing maintenance on our database servers starting at 15:00 UTC today, May 29. It’ll take about 15 minutes to transfer services from our primary database server to our standby, after which normal service will resume. Thanks for your patience during this time.

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.

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.

Metadata Matters: Article 1 of 3

We’re pleased to announce that article 1 of our 3 part article series on why music Metadata Matters in the modern digital world is now live: The Basics of Metadata.

We’d like to thank our friends at Byta for working on this series with us — thanks so much!

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.

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.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-05-02

In our last version before the May 15 schema change release, we are mostly releasing a fair amount of React conversion work for smaller pages. We’ve also tried to make some error messages more clear and helpful and made a few improvements to ETI guess case, alongside other small bits and pieces.

The most significant change for editors is the standardization of all auto-deletion waiting periods to 48 hours. Until now, most entities would be removed when empty for 24 hours, while unused artist credits would take a full week to go away. This meant removing the last artist credit usage for an otherwise empty artist would lead to an eight days wait for that artist to be automatically deleted; now it will be four. As a reminder, 48 hours is also the minimum time needed for a merge edit to pass. As such, it’s not always faster anymore to let an entity be removed automatically rather than merging – hopefully this will encourage more autoeditors to merge rather than delete!

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 CatQuest, chaban, jesus2099, Lotheric, and rdswift for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to okaits#7534 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-05-02.