Author: ruaok

Welcoming Hazel Savage to our Board of Directors!

I am pleased to announce that Hazel Savage of SoundCloud and Musiio has joined our Board of Directors! Hazel is practically the perfect person for our Board of Directors right now: Knowledgeable in music recommendations and music AI, she brings deep experience in two fields that are quite important to the Foundation at this time. We’ve already been dealing with some tough questions on AI in the past year and her experience will lend us another voice in determining our AI policies going forward.

Hazel replaces outgoing Director Paula LeDieu whose life has recently gotten much more busy, not leaving enough time for her role at MetaBrainz. We’re sad to have Paula leave the team, but are pleased to have Hazel as her replacement.

Thank you to Paula for your time on our Board of Directors — we very much appreciate your time and efforts!

Welcome Hazel Savage!

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!

Happy 23rd Birthday, MusicBrainz!

23 years is a quite a long time and I had never thought that this little project I was starting in 2000, would grow into what it is today — it has been an amazing journey with many ups and downs. Despite many early hardships, I’m extremely happy that I stuck with it and nurtured the project into an important resource for the internet today.

With that in mind, I feel compelled to tell a story of where the name MusicBrainz came from and how July 17, 2000 was the first day that the name has ever been uttered and the domain was registered seconds later.

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How to build your own music tagger, with MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata

In the blog post where we introduced the new Canonical Metadata dataset, we suggested that a user could now build their own custom music tagging application, without a lot of effort! In this blog post we will walk you through the process of doing just that, using Python.

Continue reading “How to build your own music tagger, with MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata”

New dataset: MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata

The MusicBrainz project is proud to announce the release of our latest dataset: MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata. This geeky sounding dataset packs an  intense punch! It solves a number of problems involving how to match a piece of music metadata to the correct entry in the massive MusicBrainz database.

The MusicBrainz database aims to collect metadata for all releases (albums) that have ever been published. For popular albums, there can be many different releases, which begs the question “which one is the main (canonical) release?”. If you want to identify a piece of metadata, and you only have an artist and recording (track) name, how do you choose the correct database release?

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MusicBrainz & Byta: Metadata Matters

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been collaborating with our friends over at Byta on a 3 article series: Why Metadata Matters.

Update: You can now read Part 1 here

Many artists, especially the ones starting out, often do not realize the value of correct metadata and the various ins and outs of music metadata. In this 3 part series we’ll dive into why metadata is important and what artists can do to improve the metadata for their own music.

I highly recommend this article series. Stay tuned!