CritiqueBrainz – MetaBrainz Blog

The MetaBrainz Foundation is seeking a new Executive Director (ED)

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.

Tasks

The ED’s primary responsibility is to ensure MetaBrainz fulfils its mission with integrity, transparency, and respect for its community. They will:

Work to keep the MetaBrainz community healthy: welcoming, fair, and constructive.
Represent MetaBrainz, to its community, the public, and the industries it supports, ensuring the Foundation’s strategy and operational activities are communicated appropriately.
Work with the Board to build the Foundation’s strategy and the operational plan to realize it, including budget setting and management, ensuring the organization remains financially stable.
Oversee agreements with commercial partners and suppliers.
Make sure MetaBrainz meets its nonprofit and data-related legal obligations across jurisdictions.
Preempt emerging regulatory and industry changes that could affect the MetaBrainz mission.
Maintain strong, trust-based relationships with current commercial users and sponsors.
Grow relationships with current and prospective partners, encouraging them to support the ecosystem they rely on.
Support and manage the in-house team.

Requirements

Ideally the incoming ED will have:

An excellent understanding of the international music industry.
Experience maintaining healthy, vibrant online communities.
Open source project governance experience.
Knowledge of international copyright frameworks and the commercial framework for music.
Fluency in English (Spanish and other languages a plus).
Experience managing physical and digital events such as community meet-ups, summits, and development intensives.
Knowledge of local and international regulatory frameworks for non-profit organizations.
Experience managing complex software development projects.

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!

New MetaBrainz translation platform

MetaBrainz project translation has officially moved from Transifex to Weblate! This is a big step forward, with improvements like single 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.

Your central information page for all MetaBrainz internationalization is now: https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Internationalization

Your new translation platform is (MusicBrainz login required):
https://translations.metabrainz.org/

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!

Delhi Mini-Summit 2018

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!

MessyBrainz
With all these talks, a critical need to build some matching and clustering infrastructure was highlighted. Rob has written a possible roadmap for the project trying to compose his thoughts!

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!

Param is really into (a lot of) selfies.