July 2026 – MetaBrainz Blog

Spotify users will need to reconnect every 6 months to ListenBrainz

Spotify recently announced a drastic change in their API: connections to your account will now expire after 6 months, starting July 20th.

If you have your Spotify account connected to ListenBrainz, this means you will have to reconnect your Spotify account every 6 months, or ListenBrainz will not be able to keep your listening history in sync.
To get us started, all users will need to reconnect their Spotify account this coming Monday July 20th.

In addition to sending you an email, you will see an error message at the top of the page in ListenBrainz:

To minimize disruption and potential loss of listening history in the future, we will send you an email a month ahead, and one week ahead of the disconnection for you to disconnect and reconnect your Spotify account in your music services settings.

This is quite the thorn in our side but alas we have no other choice as the internet continues to enshittify.

Picard 3 beta 7 released

Today, we have released MusicBrainz Picard 3 beta 7. This new versions brings several fixes over the last beta 5 (yes, we have skipped a beta number again), but also improvements and some new features. Among the highlights are:

Option profiles can now be exported and imported as TOML files. This makes sharing options much easier. We are excited to see how this will be used by you all.
Artist name standardization can now be set to one of three values: no standardization, standardizing only variations of the artist name (“Beatles” vs. “The Beatles”) or standardizing also actual artist name changes (“Diddy”, who previously performed under the names “P. Diddy” and “Puff Daddy”). Standardizing name variations is the new default setting. See also the documentation.
Plugins can now implement custom CD ripper log file support, and there is built-in support for Cyanrip log files.
Picard can now much better handles wrongly or differently encoded filenames when loading files.
The setup wizard got some improvements, allowing users to configure their update notification settings for the app and plugins. Also the setup wizard can now be started again from the help menu. This is not yet the final version of the wizard, but it’s getting closer.
The User Guide was updated to document the latest changes.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 5 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.

libdiscid 0.7.0

Version 0.7.0 of libdiscid has been released. libdiscid is a C library that allows applications to easily calculate MusicBrainz and freedb disc IDs from audio CDs or CD TOC details. It also can extract MCN and ISRC information.

This release fixes several issues with the build system and addresses compiler warnings. As a compile time option it is now possible to have methods returning URLs to use HTTPs instead of HTTP, see then changelog for details. Thanks to Riku Viitanen for this contribution. Also the binary packages now include a build for the Windows ARM64 platform.

Version 0.7.0 of libdiscid provides the following changes:

Current ListenBrainz server issues/high load, Part 2

This follow-up post covers how and why our servers are still being impacted, an explanation and examples of what we consider “botting” in ListenBrainz – and an apology, because our last post had some baaad comms!

Firstly, we are still experiencing massive server load from an increase in listen submissions related to the BTS fan exodus from last.fm (not all bad! more on this below) – and we are now being hit by another influx of AI scrapers.

Our apologies to our users, new and old, as we continue to work to mitigate the extra load. Remain assured that listens are not being lost – our processing queue is lagging behind, so listens may take (up to) hours to appear.

LB radio and the popularity endpoints have been temporarily disabled, to reduce server load.