GSoC 2024: Artist, Album, User Pages in ListenBrainz Android App for all users

Introduction

Hola everyone!

I am Pranav Konidena (you may know me as pranav on IRC, or pranavkonidena on GitHub.). I am a junior at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IITR) pursuing a degree in engineering with a major in Electronics and Communication. I learnt about Google Summer of Code from my club seniors and was instantly drawn towards it. While I was going through the potential organizations to which I could contribute, I was instantly drawn towards MetaBrainz as it combined my love for music and programming.

I wanted to explore further the field of Mobile Development, I had sound knowledge of Flutter, but I didn’t know Native Android Development and decided to try and contribute to ListenBrainz Android. With that goal in mind, I started learning about Kotlin and JetPack Compose, as they were mentioned as the tech stack for the LB Android app in its General Overview Doc on its GitHub Repository. My first contribution to LB Android was fixing a minor text overflow bug.

Picard 2.12.1 released

Picard 2.12.1 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.12 with fixes for reported issues and updated translations.

Most importantly this release fixes a crash when genre filters result in an empty genre list and long standing issues with Picard crashing on macOS when opening the preferences while the UI language is set to Spanish.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.11 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.12.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues. Special thanks to salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, brtc and ApeKattQuest / MonkeyPython for updating the Italian, Lithuanian, Turkish and Norwegian translations.

Happy Birthday to us: 25 years of MusicBrainz and 20 years of Picard!

Hello!

Today is the 25th anniversary of me registering the musicbrainz.org domain. I told the story of how that happened two years ago, if you’re curious about that story. 25 years is a long time for sure and I had zero ideas that this little project would end up so enormous with users from literally all over the world.

Thanks to everyone who had/has a part in it. ❤️

Also, let’s talk about the 20th anniversary of the Picard Tagger! The beginning of Picard has a less clear starting point — at least not one that is easily Googleable 20 years on. At least ChatGPT suggests that Picard came into this world as vaporware on Februrary 9th, 2004 when the Real Networks sponsored Helix Community made a number of grants to support several open source projects.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-07-11

Keep enjoying your summer with this refreshing release dessert, mainly fixing bugs and making improvements after the large two-course meal that was the database schema change and the addition of event art.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to chaban, Piotr, Relaxo5, salo.rock, and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ApeKattQuest/MonkeyPython, Aszazin, Early6431, Felipe Silva, Lunae_XD, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, wileyfoxyx, WorldPioneerXXX, yyb987, and yyoung for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-07-11.0.

Announcing the Event Art Archive

In 2012 we proudly announced the Cover Art Archive (CAA), a cooperation between MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive to store and deliver high resolution release imagery in multiple formats. Today we have over 2.5 million releases with cover art, making up 60.7% of all releases in MusicBrainz! Every day another ~1,300 releases have cover art added (CAA statistics/timeline).

Now we take the next step, and are proud to announce the Event Art Archive (EAA). Again we have worked with our friends at the Internet Archive to transform MusicBrainz into, potentially, the internet’s greatest repository for event art. Once again supporting multiple formats (jpg, gif, png, htm, html, jpe, jfif, pdf) in any resolution/size, now all that is needed is for music lovers and archivists to add event art. Since the feature has been in beta we have already had 700+ b e a u t i f u l (and attractively u g l y) pieces of event art added. Browse all the event art edits (EAA statistics/timeline).

Picard 2.12 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that version 2.12 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release focuses on fixing bugs and providing minor improvements with the goal of providing a stable Picard version 2. In the meantime we are focusing on Picard 3, which will provide more significant changes.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-06-24

You may notice some exciting changes to event pages today. We’ll be making a proper announcement of the “EAA” in a separate post soon. 🙂

We have several other bug fixes and improvements as part of today’s release, plus a new report about video recordings for editors.

In the back-end, we’re making better use of our PostgreSQL standby, which should help with scalability. Development-wise, we’ve done a lot of JavaScript refactoring and upgrading of dependencies.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to JadedBlueEyes for aligning release titles in release groups. Thanks to Aerozol, atj, chaban, Chiark, Mathias Kunter, RVMWSN, sammyrayy, UltimateRiff, VBZPPlNQyJ, wileyfoxyx, yindesu and zas for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ApeKattQuest, BestSteve, BlueCamille, Felipe Silva, kellnerd, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, wileyfoxyx, yyb987, and Zetas70, for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-06-24.

ChatBrainz: IRC, Matrix & Discord

Have you ever joined the MetaBrainz chat? Team and community members have been getting up to mischief (and, occasionally, work) using IRC since 2003 and earlier – with the logs to prove it. Today, over twenty years later, we say ‘oh hi’ to ChatBrainz.

With the launch of ChatBrainz we have officially moved to Matrix! Matrix has ease of access and some modern conveniences that make access to chat possible for more contributors and users. Not a fan of the change? Not a problem – ChatBrainz also has IRC and Discord bridges, that allow cross-platform chat with the three main Matrix rooms/channels.

Click here to get chatting!

Picard 3.0 Q&A

MusicBrainz Picard is a core piece of MetaBrainz. According to the 2017 user survey, ‘Using a tagger which relies on MB’ was the second most common way that editors found out about the existence of MusicBrainz, with 27.1%. Only narrowly beaten by the ever-popular ‘Don’t know/don’t remember’ option, at 28.8%. If MusicBrainz provides the metadata lifeblood, then MusicBrainz Picard is the conduit that splashes that bloody metadata across the globe, onto billions of music files. Gross! But also awesome!

Now MusicBrainz Picard is entering the next stage, with development moving onto version 3.0. What does this mean? outsidecontext, long-time voluntary MusicBrainz Picard contributor, maintainer and user support-er, has agreed to answer some of our questions.

Welcome Summer of Code 2024 contributors!

We are thrilled to announce the selection of 8 contributors to work with us for this year’s Google Summer of Code program!

MetaBrainz received many great applications this year. Selecting the final contributors was tough and involved deliberating various factors – what these contributors did right is getting in early, engaging with our community, presenting specific and detailed proposals, and proving excellent communication skills and the ability to integrate our feedback back into their proposals.

Thank you to all contributors who submitted a proposal with us!