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 !