September 2023 – MetaBrainz Blog

Picard 2.10 Release Candidate 1

The Picard team is happy to announce that a release candidate for version 2.10 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release brings compatibility with Python 3.12 and improvements to both the translation process and the translations themselves. While the functional changes are relatively small, a lot of code restructuring took place. Hence we want to give this release wider testing before releasing the final version. More details below.

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 23

Has it been a year already? MetaBrainz Summit 23 is one week away! Mark it in your calendar – October 2-6 at MetaBrainz HQ in Barcelona, Spain.

We would love for you to join us remotely. All summit information and links are in the Summit 2023 wiki page. You are invited, regardless of how long you have been in the MeB community, or your MeB interests.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-09-18

A tiny release this time. The main change if you are hosting your own server is that we’ve upgraded to Node 18 since Node 16 is EOL. For everyone else, now you can see if someone has been blocked from editing or leaving edit notes before you report them (look for “Restrictions” in their profile); this can also help explain why some user is not answering your notes.

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 HibiscusKazeneko, jesus2099 and kakawup for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to claybiockiller, mfmeulenbelt, outsidecontext, salo.rock and Vac31. for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-09-18.

Welcome Ansh Goyal to the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve added yet another former Summer of Code student/mentor to our team: Ansh Goyal. Welcome to our team, Ansh!

After Alastair Porter decided to not resume his position with MetaBrainz after his 6-month break, we were lucky to have Ansh ready to jump in to join our team. Thank you for your hard work over the years, Alastair!

Ansh will be focusing on Javascript programming, in particular React, on the BookBrainz and ListenBrainz projects. Both of these projects desperately need a lot of UI/UX work, and Ansh has proven himself that he’ll be able to help us tackle our backlog of UI projects that we need to accomplish in the short term.

Welcome to the team Ansh — we’re looking forward to your contributions!

Picard 2.9.2 released

Picard 2.9.2 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.9 with fixes for reported issues. In particular this solves an issue where Picard could crash on exit leaving a thread running in the background, which prevented Picard to be started again.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.8 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.9 and Picard 2.9.1.

On a special note the Picard website is now also available in Italian. Thanks to salo.rock who did the translation.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.

ListenBrainz App: Feed and UI Revamp (Release 2.3.0)

We are pleased to release the Feed for the ListenBrainz Android app, as well as a new settings page!

Three new feeds now allow app users to keep up with the activity of their ListenBrainz friends, as well as discover new music from listeners with similar music tastes.

My Feed shows the activity of your follows, including what they’ve reviewed, pinned, recommended, and more. Follow Listens displays the listens, chronologically, of all your follows, so you can check on what your friends are jamming right this second. Similar Listens displays, chronologically, the listens of your closest musical ’neighbours’, a great way to discover new music and perhaps even make new friends.

MusicBrainz website mirror will require Node.js 20 starting from November 13, 2023

This announcement is uniquely intended for administrators having installed any mirror of MusicBrainz website with manually installed dependencies instead of using the Docker Compose project musicbrainz-docker.

MusicBrainz website is rendered using Node.js whose minimum required version was 16 so far. This version is reaching end-of-life next week according to their Release Working Group. Therefore MusicBrainz Server will switch to the active LTS Node.js 18 for a transitioning period of two months. It will still support Node.js 16 for previous installations during this period. After that, Node.js 20 will enter its active LTS phase and be required by MusicBrainz website. It has already been used locally in development for a long time, so we don’t expect any major issue when switching mirrors to it.