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.
MetaBrainz project translation has officially moved from Transifex to Weblate! This is a big step forward, with improvements likesingle sign-on using your MusicBrainz account, proper attribution to translators, unified handling of glossaries, custom checks for MusicBrainz variable syntax, better integration with our development workflow, and supporting a libre software organization. We also tidied up the documentation and the forums about translation and more generally about internationalization of all aspects of MetaBrainz.
This is also a great opportunity to give translating a go if you’ve never done it before. In the second half of this blog post we will walk you through getting started. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be an expert translator!
Rob, Suyash, Param and I met in the bustling city of Delhi where “horns are applied very liberally” (it is a very noisy city!) for a mini summit. Some may even call it elaborate break-out sessions on ListenBrainz and CrtiqueBrainz. We had discussions over a span of two days over laptops and notebooks, riding on bumpy roads in tuk-tuks and over spicy chicken biryanis. Here is a summary of all that we discussed:
ListenBrainz Data Visualizations We started Day 1 with graphs for ListenBrainz. After a long marathon of heavy development weightlifting tasks by Param and Rob (how do we work with BigQuery correctlty?), we are finally at a stage, where we can have some really cool amazing visualizations out of our dataset. What will they be? Where will they be? How will we implement them? Can our community pitch in with requests and maybe even play around with code?
After scrounging through a lot of other websites which do music-y data visualizations, and the few responses on our user survey, we started listing various ideas, and went through ideas on our community forum. We ended up dividing the data visualizations (from now on, called graphs) into two categories:
User specific graphs: showcasing a user’s listening history and taste Site-wide graphs: showcasing the overall listening patterns on ListenBrainz
We had to make some tricky calls based on technical constraints, but overall, for starters, we decided some cool user graphs. We have detailed 6 of them over the summit:
Listening history of a user: how much have you listen-ed, what you have you listened too, listen counts, etc
Your top artitsts
Your tracklist (listen history)
How much music did you explore
Which artists are trending in what parts of the worlds
Listener count across the world
All these graphs will be available over different time durations (last week, month, year) and will also have handles to manipulate them. They will also have tools to easily share them on social media networks. We think, our community will really enjoy tracking their listening history with these. We also discussed a few ideas of how we can create a sandbox so our community can pitch in with ideas, vote on ideas and send pull requests for new graphs. More on that later, as we get there!
Rating System If you are listening to a tracklist while working over something, how possible it is that you will rate a track saying “This is 3.5? This is 4.2? That is 5 stars!” So you see, ratings on ListenBrainz are tricky. It is very dynamic and interactive in real time, unlike other dear *Brainz projects, so we think that a Last.fm-like rating i.e like and dislike makes sense for ListenBrainz. There was also some discussion about where the ratings should reside — is CritiqueBrainz the correct place?
Home Page We worked on redesigning the “My Listens” page as well the home page. We now plan to include, apart from the graphs, an infographic explaining how ListenBrainz works and things you can do with it! I will further detail out the mockup later this week.
Potential Roadmap After almost two days of discussions, we could chalk up a rough roadmap for ListenBrainz, which include data visualizations, ability to rate/like tracks, create collections, follow users, and more. This also includes encouraging cross brainz pollination!
CritiqueBrainz With Suyash around (he worked on Critique Brainz as part of GSoC last year, and has been actively involved since), there were obviously a lot of discussions on reinvigorating the project. We discussed quite a few ideas, which included innovating ways of writing and sharing reviews, sharing it on social media, cross *brainz interactions, a few UI changes, etc. We’re considering allowing Quick Reviews that, like Twitter, are limited to 280 characters. What do you think? Suyash has written down his ideas for the same and would love some feedback from the community!
And of course! We couldn’t let Rob’s first visit to India be all about work. After the sunset, we went exploring the city of Delhi. That included rides in tuk-tuks, spicy chicken biryanis, shopping for some colorful clothes and definetly, the Indian chaat 🙂
All in all, it was a very productive mini summit and definitely made us all, more excited to start working on the ideas we discussed. We will keep you updated and post more soon!
