Author: Freso

MetaBrainz Community Manager and Scandinavian activist and content creator.

MetaBrainz IRC migration

Due to recent changes in the administration of the freenode IRC network, all MetaBrainz IRC channels have migrated to the Libera.Chat network effective immediately.

The main channel names are all the same, #metabrainz, #musicbrainz, and #bookbrainz, though some special purpose channels were renamed in the move to better align with our project namespace (e.g., #brainzbot is now #metabrainz-bot).

Most of the MetaBrainz team will be around using the nicks you know already (e.g., bitmap, yvanzo, reosarevok, Freso, zas, …) but a few have had some changes: Mr_Monkey is now monkey and _lucifer is now lucifer.

Hopefully this will have minimal impact on users beyond having to update your IRC server in your client. If needed, Libera Chat provides a guide for how to connect to their network, including client specific guides for a number of IRC clients. They’re working on their own web client, but for now, Kiwi IRC can be used if you don’t have a local client running. For those of you relying on Matrix or Tor to connect: Libera.Chat staff is working on both of those and they should hopefully both be up within a week. Stay tuned on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/LiberaChat

As always, you can find information about our IRC channels and guidelines on our IRC documentation page. Wikimedia have also migrated to Libera.Chat and have written this handy guide which might also come in useful for migrating: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Migrating_to_Libera_Chat

As a last note (and I am admittedly biased being both former freenode staff and current Libera.Chat staff myself): it is my personal belief, as community manager, that freenode is no longer a safe network to be on for our users. The new freenode staff does not seem trustworthy, making policies to retroactively justify their own breaches of their policies, refusing to give a clear answer on “whether slurs, racism and transphobia are allowed on Freenode”, getting staff on board that were kicked from other networks for privilege abuse, and leaking staff-internal information (channel closure reasons) to non-staffers. I highly recommend disconnecting from the network ASAP and, if possible, overwrite your NickServ registered e-mail and password and possibly dropping your NickServ registration as well if you can and are able and willing to. If you have used your NickServ password for anything else, my recommendation is to consider that password compromised.

MusicBrainz introducing: Genres!

One of the things various people have asked MusicBrainz for time and time again has been genres. However, genres are hard to do right and they’re very much subjective—with MusicBrainz dealing almost exclusively with objective data. It’s been a recurring discussion on almost all of our summits, but a couple years ago (with some help from our friend Alastair Porter and his research colleagues at UPF), we finally came to a path forward—and recently Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) finally turned that path forward into code… which has now been released! You can see it in action on e.g., Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero release group.

How does it work?

For now genres are exactly the same as (folksonomy) tags behind the scenes; some tags simply have become the chosen ones and are listed and presented as genres. The list of which tags are considered as genres is currently hardcoded, and no doubt it is missing a lot of our users’ favourite genres. We plan to expand the genre list based on your requests, so if you find a genre that is missing from it, request it by adding a style ticket with the “Genres” component.

As we mentioned above, genres are very subjective, so just like with folksonomy tags, you can upvote and downvote genres you agree or disagree with on any given entity, and you can also submit genre(s) for the entity that no one has added yet.

What about the API?

A bunch of the people asking for genres in MusicBrainz have been application developers, and this type of people are usually more interested in how to actually extract the genres from our data.

The method to request genres mirrors that of tags: you can use inc=genres to get all the genres everyone has proposed for the entity, or inc=user-genres to get all the genres you have proposed yourself (or both!). For the same release group as before, you’d want https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release-group/3bd76d40-7f0e-36b7-9348-91a33afee20e?inc=genres+user-genres for the XML API and https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release-group/3bd76d40-7f0e-36b7-9348-91a33afee20e?inc=genres+user-genres&fmt=json for the JSON API.

Since genres are tags, all the genres will continue to be served with inc=tags as before as well. As such, you can always use the tag endpoint if you would rather filter the tags by your own genre list rather than follow the MusicBrainz one, or if you want to also get other non-genre tags (maybe you want moods, or maybe you’re really interested in finding artists who perform hip hop music and were murdered – we won’t stop you!).

I use the database directly, not the API

You can parse the tag→genres from entities.json in the root of the “musicbrainz-server” repository which will give you a list of what we currently consider genres. Then you can simply compare any folksonomy tags from the %_tag tables.

Note about licensing

One thing to keep in mind for any data consumers out there is that, as per our data licensing, tags—and thus also genres—are not part of our “core (CC0-licensed) data”, but rather part of our “supplementary data” which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license. Thus, if you wish to use our genre data for something commercial, you should get a commercial use license from the MetaBrainz Foundation. (Of course, if you’re going to provide a commercial product using data from MusicBrainz, you should always sign up as a supporter regardless. :)).

The future?

We are hoping to get a better coverage of genres (especially genres outside of the Western tradition, of which we have a very small amount right now) with your help! That applies both to expanding the genre list and actually applying genres to entities. For the latter, remember that everyone can downvote your genre suggestion if they don’t agree, so don’t think too much about “what genres does the world think apply to this artist/release/whatever”. Just add what you feel is right; if everyone does that we’ll get much better information. 🙂

In the near future we’re hoping to move the genre list from the code to the database (which shouldn’t mean too much for most of you, other than less waiting between a new genre being proposed for the list and it being added, but is much better for future development). Also planned is a way to indicate that several tags are the same genre (so that if you tag something as “hiphop”, “hip hop” or “hip-hop” the system will understand that’s really all the same). Further down the line, who knows! We might eventually make genres into limited entities of a sort, in order to allow linking to, say, the appropriate Wikidata/Wikipedia pages. We might do some fun stuff. Time will tell!

Live streaming MB Summit 17

The MetaBrainz Summit 17 is slowly starting up, with everyone having arrived in Barcelona now, and people have already started discussing a bit in the corners of the MetaBrainz office. (As well as devouring a lot of chocolate!)

The summit officially starts tomorrow however (we’re aiming to begin at around 11 AM Barcelona time (CEST)), and while we’re having probably the most people at a summit ever, we recognise that a lot of people from the community are not able to be here for one reason or another, so we’re going to try something new tomorrow: live streaming the summit!

We’ll be live streaming on our YouTube account at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClC89t81khDKLCVs45prLqg/live – there will be a live chat as well, which I will try to monitor as best as I can. Keep in mind that this is a first for us, so sorry in advance for the technical difficulties we will almost certainly encounter. 🙂

MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes: May 18th, 2017 (and November 21st, 2016)

Here’s the second round of board meeting minutes. We have had board meetings both in November and in May, but the November board meeting only consisted of Robert, Sophie, Rassami, and Matthew meeting up in London approving the minutes of the prior meeting and agreeing to only hold 3 meetings in 2016. So we decided to kind of skip over reporting on that meeting and just include the summary when posting the minutes for the May meeting. Which I now just did. 😉

These minutes have been reviewed by the board but have not been formally approved at a board meeting yet, meaning that it is subject to change if the board feels something is wrong or missing. Also note that discussion related to personnel or confidential topics have been/will be redacted. Furthermore we may also add more text to the notes in order to give context and background, while not altering the meaning of these notes.

Let’s dive in!

MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes 2017-05­-18

Continue reading “MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes: May 18th, 2017 (and November 21st, 2016)”

Community Recap April 2017

Hello, and welcome to the April recap of what’s happened in MetaBrainz land!

Compared the first quarter, April was somewhat on the slow side (reflected on the blog with only three posts that month). I’m guessing this is a mix of both recovering from all the activity in the first few months and a lot of work going on in the background—incl. preparing for Google Summer of Code. However, some stuff did happen, so let’s talk about those things! Continue reading “Community Recap April 2017”

MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes: September 15th, 2016

In an effort to try and be even more open and transparent, the MetaBrainz Foundation’s board of directors agreed last year to publicise the minutes from its board meetings. This is the first entry of that new series. The board meets up 3–4 times a year, so don’t expect these postings to be too frequent. 🙂

These particular minutes have been approved at its following board meeting, but we will try and get future meeting minutes up prior to the next one, which means that future posts will be subject to change if the board feels something is wrong or missing in the minutes. Also note that discussion related to personnel or confidential topics have been (and will be) redacted. Furthermore we will also add more text to the notes in order to give context and background, while not altering the meaning of theses notes.

With all that said, let’s get started!

MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes 2016­-09­-15

Attendees: Robert Kaye, Nick Ashton ­Hart, Sophie Goossens, Rassami Hok ­Ljungberg, Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Cory Doctorow
Absent: Paul Bennun, Matthew Hawn

Agenda

0. Call to order.
Rob called to order at 18:15 CEST.
Editor’s note: Unless otherwise noted, Rob will be the one speaking in the notes below.
1. Approval of last meeting minutes
Moved by Rob. Rassami objects to all board members sending chocolate, but with that removed, she seconded. Unanimous. Motion carried.
2. Board changes
Editor’s note: Christina, our former biz dev manager, used to be on our board of directors as both Secretary and Treasurer. Since she was no longer with us, we needed to replace her positions in the board.
Rob moves that Christina is replaced by Rassami as Treasurer. Sophie seconds. Vote is unanimous. Motion carried.
Rob moves to replace Christina with Frederik “Freso” Olesen, our community manager, as the new Secretary of the board. Having Freso as our secretary gives the community some insight into the board meetings. Rassami seconds. Rob suggests that Freso should take the board meeting notes and remove private/confidential points and release a version that is suitable for public consumption.
3. Old business:
  • General update: It’s been a challenging year: Planned for a lot, had a lot of set backs. Series of perfect storms, causing extremely and challenging year for me personally, but I am finally climbing out. I’m digging out and focusing on the core issues.
  • Office: Power, plumbing issues resolved. Ready for use with the hack day next week.
  • Hosting: We’ve been moving services away from Digital West and to Google. At the same time we continue to get more traffic and asking people to be polite in using our service isn’t really working anymore, thus the focus on NewHost. Another perfect storm. Now have 4 servers at Hetzner in Germany, working to move in. We’ll order more servers closer to migration time. Been working all summer to move services to containers. We gain flexibility and mobility, but there is loads of work.
  • Summit: We’re not going to have a summit this year, but opted for a smaller hack weekend where we iterate faster to get to NewHost.

  • Non paying companies: Data is wide open, and commercial customers can legally make use our data and API. Soon we will prevent them from using our API (by using API keys), but abuse is still possible. How can we deal with non-supporting companies? So far, we would put companies into the penalty box and then send a tweet to that effect. This has been our practice and I explained this to our biz dev manager, but due to other issues compounding she decided to pick this issue to start a war over. So, how should we deal with non paying companies? How far can we go in pestering companies to do the right thing?

    Nick states that the heaviest offenses will be eliminated by introducing API keys. Rob notes that he still wants to bring attention to people for leech our data outside of the WS and data dumps.

    Rob asks if we should try and keep track of people who download our data, but there might be some legal concerns related to (knowing if pirates download the data).

    Rob to-do: ask our pro bono lawyer legal question about keeping track of people.

    Rob asks: Do anyone have an objection to the “penalty box” idea?

    Cory suggests to perhaps get a pro bono lawyer to send a letter to bad actors telling them they’re bad actors.

    Cory also suggested that the board should be consulted before a company goes into the penalty box. Rob agrees and will write follow-up email to this point.

4. New business:
  • Big Query: Make MusicBrainz, AcousticBrainz and ListenBrainz available on BigQuery — Google would like better and more dynamic data sets to show off their service. We get free data hosting and people will be able to query their own LB (last.fm) data on their own if they want to. Game changer. We’ve moving LB/AB, Google is adding MB. Once this is done, Google will do some publicity for this.
  • Dec board meeting: London. I’ll pick a date soon.
5. Finances:
  • Moved to new EUR capable accounting system, which took time to do, but now saves time.
  • Income is increasing, this is the most amount of money we’ve had in the bank ever! > $200k!! \ø/
  • Moving forward with new Biz Dev: I’m not going to replace biz dev manager right this second. I’m managing the influx of new customers, and need to focus on moving servers to new hosting facility (NewHost). Once our hosting setup is stable, I’ll work to hire more people in order to make my life more sane.
5. Adjourn
18:57 CEST

Footnotes

  1. Q2 P&L: https://metabrainz.org/finances/files/MetaBrainz_Foundation_profit_loss_2016_Q2.pdf
  2. Aug P&L: https://metabrainz.org/finances/files/MetaBrainz_Foundation_profit_loss_20160831.pdf
  3. Aug Balance sheet: https://metabrainz.org/finances/files/MetaBrainz_Foundation_balance_sheet_20160831.pdf

Wrapping up Google Code‐in 2016

As Google has now announced the finalists of this round of Google Code-in, it feels only right that we also take a look back at what’s been taking up a large chunk of our time the last couple of months.

Divya Prakash Mittal (India – returning from last year!), Daniel Theis (Germany), and Tigran Kostandyan (Russia) all made it to the finalists, with Anshuman Agarwal (India) and Daniel Hsing (Hong Kong) additionally taking home the Grand Prize Winner positions! Congratulations to all of you and thank you so much for your contributions this year. 🙂 Continue reading “Wrapping up Google Code‐in 2016”

Final sprint towards NewHost

So tomorrow is the day when the old servers at Digital West will be put to rest. Our developers and system administrator have been hard at work over the last few weeks (and especially the last few days!) getting everything ready for a hopefully smooth transition to hosting everything at Hetzner in Germany.

The vast majority of our sites and services are in fact already being served from Germany, but the largest one—musicbrainz.org—remains in the US for another night.

Our transition of the final services, such as musicbrainz.org, has already started, but the very last sprint of moving the remaining bits over will start tomorrow, November 8th, at around 6 AM EST / noon UTC / 13:00 CET and will follow the plan laid out in this Google document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MgqZ4hiKC0MZJ400ZCOD8JlcjBjh4GNpakauf51YKQQ/edit?usp=sharing

Expect some downtime, plenty of read-only time, and general wonkiness as we get the last gears set in place to hopefully keep us running smoothly for the next several years to come!

September, October, and November 2015 Community Recap

Jeez. This has been overdue! So a lot of things happened, and this Community Recap series kind of got put on the back burner, which obviously means a lot of things have piled up, so if I forgot something you thought should have been mentioned, please share it in the comments below. 🙂 I will be doing a few months at a time until I’ve caught up to the now().

With that said, let’s proceed!
Continue reading “September, October, and November 2015 Community Recap”