MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
Our apologies if you are experiencing outages or slowness on ListenBrainz currently. First it was AI scrapers, now it’s K-pop fans…
In short, we are experiencing massive server load from an unexpected and massive increase in listen submissions. Please bear with us as the small (but mighty) ListenBrainz team works on possible mitigations.
None of your listens are being lost, they are all sitting safely in our (massively overloaded) processing queue:
Today, we’re making available the fifth beta version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. This new versions brings some important changes:
Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 4 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.
While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.
Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the beta version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.
Continue reading “Picard 3 beta 5 released”We are excited to announce the 7 GSOC participants working with us this summer on MetaBrainz projects!
Our apologies for not publishing this sooner, in this complicated first part of the year we simply forgot the announcement, but rest assured the work is progressing on all projects.
As always, the selection process was incredibly tough. We received a great batch of proposals and had a limited number of slots.
We want to sincerely thank everyone who took the time to meet our community and submit a proposal with us!
The whole list of selected proposals can be found on the GSOC website but here is a TL;DR breakdown:
MusicBrainz has data about past and upcoming concerts that ListenBrainz users can’t see yet. This project will bring live music events directly into ListenBrainz, allowing you to discover shows tailored to your favorite artists.
Currently, ListenBrainz has a native Android app but no iOS version. This project will migrate the app to a single, shared codebase using Kotlin Multiplatform. This means future features and bug fixes will launch on both Android and iOS at the same time.
Giving ListenBrainz playlists a massive user-experience upgrade. Users will soon be able to search through playlists, organize them using custom tags, sort tracks (by artist, title, or date added), and convert their MusicBrainz collections straight into playlists.
Cleaning up the under-the-hood engine that powers MusicBrainz search (Solr). By upgrading internal configurations and removing data redundancy, this project will optimize performance and make searching for music faster and more efficient.
Building a fast, modern alternative way for external developers to request MusicBrainz data. This makes it significantly easier and more efficient for third-party developers to build apps using our database.
Breaking down language barriers! BookBrainz is currently English-only. This project lays the technical groundwork to support multiple languages and sets up a BookBrainz project on translations.metabrainz.org where volunteer translators can start translating the site immediately.
Connecting BookBrainz with Calibre (the popular e-book management software). This plugin will allow Calibre users to automatically pull book metadata and collections directly from BookBrainz to organize their personal digital libraries.
Reading this and feeling inspired for contributing to the code still? Volunteer contributors are very welcome all year round even though we might have slightly less time available to help you during the summer. It is also putting you in an ideal situation for applying to next year’s GSoC. You can find some tips for applying to GSoC with us in one of our previous posts. When you are ready, join us on the MetaBrainz Matrix Channel and showcase your initiative and your skills!
We are in the process of moving user accounts, authentication and OAuth applications from the MusicBrainz website to the MetaBrainz website.
This centralizes our account management between all the *Brainz projects, along with some security improvements.
Historically, all accounts were managed on the MusicBrainz website simply because it existed before the MetaBrainz Foundation itself. However, creating a MusicBrainz account just to use ListenBrainz or our other sister projects doesn’t make much sense.
We are changing this legacy setup to improve the user experience and bring better cohesion to the entire MetaBrainz ecosystem.
Here is what you need to know about how this transition affects you:
Continue reading “Upcoming changes to user accounts and authentication”
There have been reports of users receiving phishing messages via the MetaBrainz messaging service.
Remember: MetaBrainz staff will never ask for your password. MetaBrainz staff will never ask you to log in to a third-party site (or ‘verify’ your username and password in any other way).
Continue reading “Phishing attempts using MetaBrainz messages”