September 2025 – MetaBrainz Blog

The European Open Source Academy: First impressions

Earlier this week we posted a blog post about me joining the European Open Source Academy. While the responses to this blog post have been positive, they have been muted and I fully understand why – so far, very little is known about this organisation.

Which is why I wanted to follow up that blog post with a more details to let you know more about the history, context and our vision of the future of this new organization. Because in reality the Academy simply does not exist yet – is this a scam or a bait and switch? No. It’s an amazing opportunity for Europe, for the Open Source community and its numerous developers and also for me personally.

Europe welcomes mayhem: Robert Kaye inducted into the EU Open Source Academy!

The European Open Source Academy is “The home of European excellence in Open Source” – or it was, until it decided to induct our very own Robert Kaye (aka mayhem/rob). Now it is the home of excellence and total mayhem! Congratulations Rob, this is a very well deserved honour 🎉

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 25

MetaBrainz Summit 25 is upon us! September 15-19 in Barcelona, Spain.

We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.

GSoC 2025: Building Libretto, a Matrix Archiver

This post is also available on Jade’s blog

Hello! I’m Jade Ellis, AKA JadedBlueEyes. You might know me from my project with MetaBrainz last year – if not, I’m happy to have the chance to introduce myself. I’m an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of Kent in England, a music enthusiast and (in my spare time) a climber.

The Setting

In September 2024, MetaBrainz switched from IRC to Matrix as our primary form of communication. Matrix is a more feature-rich alternative to IRC, with capabilities like replies, edits, and reactions, while still being open source and aligning with the principles of our project.

When MetaBrainz primarily used IRC, we had a piece of software called BrainzBot. This was a multi-functional Python app that, most importantly, created a web-accessible archive of all messages in the MetaBrainz channels. Thanks to the bridges between IRC and Matrix, BrainzBot continued to trundle along, but it couldn’t understand modern features like edits, replies, or media. The code itself was also becoming decrepit—a fork of an abandoned project, showing its age.

This led to my GSoC project: to build a replacement for BrainzBot’s archival function – a chat archiver that natively understands and preserves Matrix’s rich features.