MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
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”On Monday, May 11, at 15:00 UTC (8am PT, 11am ET, 5:00pm CEST), we’ll be:
See the previous announcement for more information.
We’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible, but expect MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, and BookBrainz to be down for the hour. Thanks in advance for your patience!
Afterward, we’ll post instructions on the blog about how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server.
This is a copy of the job description at:
https://join.com/companies/metabrainzorg/15986127-executive-director
Please use the above link to apply.
The MetaBrainz Foundation is seeking a new Executive Director (ED) to lead it during a time of great change for how music, data, and code are made, shared and used.
The MetaBrainz Foundation is a non-profit that provides free, open access to data. It is the steward of open source databases and software, including MusicBrainz (a community-maintained open source music metadata encyclopedia that supplies infrastructure to many of the world’s most-used music products and services), and Picard (an open source software application for identifying, tagging, and organizing digital audio recordings). MetaBrainz is supported by its community, sponsors, and by the commercial organizations who rely on what it does.
In collaboration with the Foundation’s Board of Directors, the ED is ultimately responsible for delivering the MetaBrainz mission, guaranteeing the organization’s top priority: the good health of its community. The ED is also in charge of maintaining excellent relationships with industrial partners. Ultimately, you will ensure that MetaBrainz operates with integrity, efficiency and transparency, that it remains in financial good health, and that its small in-house team of developers is supported and managed with sensitivity and professionalism.
Our new ED will be based in Europe. The role involves some travel, as well as virtual meetings in Europe, Asia and the Americas. They will be someone of integrity and good judgement, ideally someone with stature in either the open source or music communities. They will understand the ethical and regulatory requirements of NPOs. They’ll understand the history & mechanics of recorded music and be open to the possibilities and threats from a very rapidly changing technical, commercial and artistic world beyond music.
The ED’s primary responsibility is to ensure MetaBrainz fulfils its mission with integrity, transparency, and respect for its community. They will:
Ideally the incoming ED will have:
We have now completely moved off X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). It has been a long time coming, with rampant enshittification, uncertainty around platform changes, and content that has been increasingly unpleasant to interact with. Politics aside, we’re sick of going to check notifications and getting blasted with a feed largely consisting of violence, porn, advertising, the owner, and AI grifters*.
Instead, come join MetaBrainz, MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz and BookBrainz on Bluesky and/or Mastodon!
Continue reading “X-odus: Find our projects on Bluesky and Mastodon”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.
Continue reading “ChatBrainz: IRC, Matrix & Discord”Hi, I am David Kellner (aka kellnerd), an electrical engineering student from Germany, who has finally found the time to participate in Summer of Code after four years of contributing data, bug reports and a bit of code to MetaBrainz projects (mostly to MusicBrainz and related tools such as userscripts).
Although I had mostly worked with MusicBrainz so far, I decided to apply for the BookBrainz importer project as I was already familiar with the underlying JavaScript technology and saw the huge potential of the idea to transform and import external datasets into the cleverly designed BookBrainz database schema. My proposed project was accepted by the MetaBrainz team and I have been working on it for the last six months under the mentorship of monkey.
This post gives an overview about my GSoC project and the challenges which I encountered during this summer.
If you’ve been lurking on our forums, you will know that our style guidelines have been receiving lots of attention lately! Both MusicBrainz docs and BookBrainz docs have been getting new additions and updates, and there’s still plenty being discussed. As I type these very words, there are greased-up editors in what’s known to us only as “the pit” – pitting their words, experience, and muscular bodies against each other in a bid for dominance over typographical punctuation.
Okay, okay, so there’s not really a pit, but here’s a rundown of some of the style discussions that are taking place, or have taken place, this year:
Continue reading “Style Guideline Updates”Hello!
The only constant in the world is change, right?
First off, the somewhat sad news: Sambhav, AKA samj1912, has left MetaBrainz the team as a contractor and has moved to London. The upside of this news is that he will continue to work on Picard for us and will remain a part of our team as a volunteer, but his presence will not be quite as intense as before. Thank you for your hard work these past months, especially for finishing the impossible Solr search project!
With Sambhav’s departure and our improved finances, I’m proud to announce that we’re taking on two new contractors!
Nicolas Pelletier AKA Monkey: You may remember the talented Monkey from when we designed our new logos. He was the designer who created the logos and our new bootstrap theme that adorns most of our pages now. Working with Monkey was straightforward, effective and the results were great, so when he expressed interest in working on BookBrainz, I was pleased to hear this news. Monkey will be working for us full time and spending 75% of his time on BookBrainz and 25% of his time to help with design and UX work for the rest of our projects. In the next blog post I’ll talk more about BookBrainz and what we can expect from that project in the future.
Nicolás Tamargo AKA Reosarevok: Reosarevok is no stranger to our community — he’s made 1.7M edits to MusicBrainz, is our Style BDFL and answers all of our support@ emails. He’s been learning more programming and asked to be part of the MusicBrainz team part time. We agreed to give this a go and in the short term he will be focusing on genre support and helping with the React migration among other tasks. If this trial run works out, we’ll see about expanding his scope on our team.
Welcome on board Monkey and good luck with the new position, Reo!