Category: Google Programs

Summer of Code ’16 with Picard

Hi! I’m Rahul Raturi, GSoC participant for Picard. This was my first GSoC, and it’s been a pretty awesome experience. Following is the overview of my project.

About the project

The outline of the project is to allow searching for albums, artists and tracks from within Picard. This avoids switching back and forth between web browser and Picard for searching, say release. If Picard fails to auto tag a file usual flow to tag the file with correct metadata is to first select the file, then click on “Lookup in Browser”, then search correct release, and load it into Picard by clicking the green “Tagger” button. In some systems, the “Tagger” button wouldn’t show, which was also a nuisance. With this patch, the entities can be searched and optionally loaded into Picard using built-in search dialogs, so no application switching.

Search dialogs

Picard already provides search options (through a web browser) for three entities; namely track, artist, and album. So I’ve built search dialogs for these three.

  1. Track Search Dialog — Searches for tracks and allows optionally loading corresponding album back into Picard. track_dialog
  2. Album Search Dialog — Searches albums and optionally allows loading the selected one into Picard. Screenshot from 2016-08-15 17-08-09
  3. Artist Search Dialog —  Displays basic information about the artists. To get more information about the selected artist, there’s an option to lookup him/her in browser. Screenshot from 2016-08-20 15-55-42

Searching similar tracks/releases

This is another important part of the project. Sometimes Picard fails to auto tag a file (or a cluster), or incorrectly tag it. These dialogs may prove useful here. To get expected data, right click on the file (should be in “Unmatched Files” cluster), and select “Search for similar tracks…”. The track search dialog would pop up, and expected release can be looked up there. Same procedure is for searching clusters.

Links to my work

Each PR is based on the previous one. A new dialog in each, plus some improvements to existing dialog. For trying the dialog, clone the artist search branch, until it gets merged into master. It has the most recent changes.

Note: To use these dialog for searching, an option in User Interface setting about built-in search needs to be enabled.

Conclusion

It was quite fun doing this project. Thanks to Michael Wiencek (mentor) for the guidance and leniency :). Also the Picard team for the reviews. I look forward to contribute more to Picard, now that I’ve a better understanding of the code. Also for another Summer of Code.

BookBrainz GSoC Gamification/Achievement System

Hi guys, I’m Max (AKA QuoraUK), a university student working with BookBrainz as part of Google Summer of Code. My project this summer has been to build a new gamification system, that introduces rewards for BookBrainz users and recognises their achievements. Here I will explain the system and the features I’ve implemented.

Overview

My original specification for the gamification system is here. To summarise, the idea behind gamification is to add game-like elements to the site in order to make it more engaging for users. The plan for the gamification of BookBrainz was:

  • Add badges and titles for users to earn on the BookBrainz site
  • Allow users to display badges and titles on their profile page
  • Encourage regular and high quality content

To implement this plan we have added 12 achievement tracks – once an achievement track is completed a title is unlocked. The artwork for the badges is currently “programmer art” and we are very open to other people designing replacements for them. This could be a part of this year’s Google Code-In. The achievements that will be available on launch are:

revisioncreator
Revisionist: Perform (1, 50, 250) Revision(s); Creator Creator: Create (1, 10, 100) Creator(s)
limitedpublisher
Limited Edition: Create (1, 10, 100) Edition(s); Publisher: Create (1, 10, 100) Publication(s)
pubcreatworker
Publisher Creator: Create (1, 10, 100) Publisher(s); Worker Bee: Create (1, 10, 100) Work(s)
runnerexplorer
Sprinter: Create 10 revisions in an hour; Fun Runner: Create a revision a day for a week; Marathoner: Create a revision a day for 30 days; Explorer: View (10, 100, 1000) Entities
timetrack
Time Traveller: Create an edition before it is released; Hot Off the Press: Create an edition within a week of release

All of these are unit tested and have unique badges for each tier on the track. If you would have already unlocked these achievements before the system was launched, you will earn them with your next revision/creation. Badge templates are available for developers to introduce new badges and adding achievements can be as simple as making a badge and adding a few lines of code.

Profile Page

profilednd
Profile Page, Drag and drop badge selector

The gamification system also brings some changes to the profile page. There is now a badge box which can contain your three favorite badges. Additionally, your selected title is shown next to your username. You can select your favorite badges in the new achievements menu on the profile, then drag and drop your favorites into the boxes. Titles can be selected by going to Edit Profile, and selecting them from the drop down menu.

Other Areas

2016-08-20_16-12-21
Achievement Alert

On creation of an entity or revision you will now see an alert if an achievement is unlocked. This will prompt you to go to your profile page and set the ones you want to display. Usernames in other areas of the site can be hovered over in order to see the title they have set.

Demonstration

Here is a demonstration video I’ve made for the system:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZROTq1lY0]
Continue reading “BookBrainz GSoC Gamification/Achievement System”

GSoC 2016 students and projects

Google announced the final list of Google Summer of Code 2016 students and their projects yesterday. The list of MetaBrainz’ projects can be seen at our page on the GSoC site, but just for good measure, here’s the rundown:

MusicBrainz
Jeff Weeks (weeksio) returns to finish up the SOLR search server. We’re really hoping that this will be the end of our current search server woes. He will be mentored by the German duo of Ulrich Klauer (chirlu) and Rob Kaye (ruaok).
MusicBrainz Picard
Rahul Raturi (rahulr) will be working on improving searching MusicBrainz from within Picard, mentored by MusicBrainz’ senior developer Michael Wiencek (bitmap).
BookBrainz
Max Prettyjohns (QuoraUK) is going to try and take on adding gamification to our fledgling book/literature database. He will be supervised by the BookBrainz project leads and lead developers Ben Ockmore (LordSputnik) and Sean Burke (Leftmost).
ListenBrainz
Pinkesh Badjatiya (armalcolite) has pledged to tackle adding a much requested feature for our youngest project: implementing a Last.FM compatible submission API. Robert Kaye (ruaok) will be the one guiding him along.
AcousticBrainz
Daniele Scarano (hellska) will be spending the summer writing a toolkit for creating datasets, which should help researchers using AcousticBrainz. He will be mentored by MetaBrainz software engineer Roman Tsukanov (Gentlecat).
Kartik Gupta (kartikgupta0909) has set out to create an offline client for computing AcousticBrainz dataset evaluations. Alastair Porter (alastairp), the AcousticBrainz project lead, will be their mentor.
Goran Cetusic (cetko), our final student of this year, will be exploring how AcousticBrainz data can be utilised within Google’s BigQuery storage under the guidance of Alastair Porter.

Congratulations and good luck to all our students! We’re looking forwards to following your progress over the summer and see what you end up with. 🙂

For all the students that applied but did not get accepted: we appreciate your applications, and even if you did not make the cut this year, we hope that you will stick around and apply with us again next year when we know you better – and you know us better.

For now, let the community bonding… begin! 🙌

MetaBrainz & GSoC 2016

Google announced who the chosen organisations for their Google Summer of Code were earlier tonight… And MetaBrainz was amongst them for yet another year (our 10th!)!

If you’re a prospective GSoC student who is hoping to apply with MetaBrainz this year, be sure to check out our guide to getting started and our currently suggested projects – but also note that we’d love for you to come up with your own suggestion! You may also want to take a look at the application template, which contains suggestions about
some of the things you should do and know before submitting your proposal.

For those of you who are already members of our community, you’re also welcome to add ideas to the suggestions page, and please be gentle when the GSoC hopefuls come along. 🙂

That’s really all for now, but expect to hear more about GSoC and our participation over the coming months!

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2015

The Google Code-in Google Code‐in is pretty much over for this time, and we’ve had a blast in our first year with the competition in MetaBrainz with a total of 116 students completing tasks. In the end we had to pick five finalists from these, and two of these as our grand prize winners getting a trip to the Googleplex in June. It was a really, really tough decision, as we have had an amazing roster of students for our first year. In the end we picked Ohm Patel (US) and Caroline Gschwend (US) as our grand prize winners, closely followed by Stanisław Szcześniak (Poland), Divya Prakash Mittal (India), and Nurul Ariessa Norramli (Malaysia). Congratulations and thank you to all of you, as well as all our other students! We’ve been very excited to work with you and look forwards to seeing you again before, during, and after coming Google Code-ins as well! 🙂

Rayna Kanapuram MusicBrainz presentation
Indian student Rayne presenting MusicBrainz to her classmates.

In all we had 275 tasks completed during the Google Code-in. These tasks were divided among the various MetaBrainz projects as well as a few for beets. We ended up having 29 tasks done for BookBrainz, 124(!) tasks for CritiqueBrainz, 95 tasks for MusicBrainz, 1 task for Cover Art Archive, 6 tasks for MusicBrainz Picard, 3 tasks for beets, and 17 generic or MetaBrainz related tasks.

Some examples of the tasks that were done include:

Ariessa MetaBrainz infographic
Finalist Nurul Ariessa Norramli’s MetaBrainz infographic.

In all, I’m really darn happy with the outcome of this Google Code-in and how some of our finalists continue to be active on IRC and help out. Stanisław is continuing work on BookBrainz, including having started writing a Python library for BB’s API/web service, and Caroline is currently working on a new icon set for the MusicBrainz.org redesign that can currently be seen at beta.MusicBrainz.org.

Again, congratulations to our winners and finalists, and THANK YOU! to all of the students having worked on tasks for MetaBrainz. It’s really been an amazing ride and we’re definitely looking forward to our next foray into Google Code-in!

One month of Google Code-in

So today it is a month ago since the Google Code-in competition started and 18 days until it is ending. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk a bit about some of the things that have happened so far and where we’re at.

Google Code‐inSince December 7th when Google Code-in started, we have been in touch with 107 students on the Google Code-in site, of which 70 have completed at least one task and thus earned a digital certificate from Google. 11 students have so far earned themselves a t-shirt from Google by completing 3 or more tasks. The student with the highest number of completed tasks right now sits at 17 tasks, followed by one at 16 and another at 15 completed tasks. The student with the 10th most tasks completed has 3 tasks to their name.

Stanisław Szcześniak presenting about MusicBrainz
Stanisław Szcześniak, GCI student from Poland, presenting about MusicBrainz.
We have had 7 students do presentations on MusicBrainz in at least India, Romania, England, and Poland; about 50 reviews written for CritiqueBrainz with a few more in progress; a couple of MusicBrainz how to’s written for the wiki; one video tutorial made (which hasn’t been uploaded yet); a bunch of tests written for BookBrainz; updated and have had made a bunch of icons/logos in various places; a bunch of code patches and tests written for almost all our projects, as well as for beets (a 3rd party music file tagger and organiser heavily using MB data).

We have also had to report 3 students for plagiarising leading to their disqualification. 🙁 However, compared to the amount of work and number of students, I think it’s a decently small number.

Overall, I am (still!) really excited about MetaBrainz finally being a part of Google Code-in, and I definitely think the lack of sleep the first week and newbie questions on IRC and on the GCI tasks are worth it. We’re getting some great stuff done, that we may not have gotten around to in any reasonable time ourselves, and we get to help all these students learn about programming, open source, open data, licenses, and a bunch of other things. I’m happy and I’m not looking forward to picking only 5 finalists and only 2 winners. There are definitely more than that I would personally like to see in both categories. 🙂

Have you had any experiences with or thoughts on our Google Code-in participation so far? Please do share them with us in the comments!

Google Code-in announcement! – and call to arms

As many of our loyal blog readers will know, the MetaBrainz Foundation has been part of the Google Summer of Code for several years. This year we’re going to expand into the realm of Google Code‐in!

Google Code‐inGoogle Code‐in, or GCI, is a program aimed at pre-university students aged 13–17. Unlike the Summer of Code (GSoC), the students will have a large number of smaller tasks to work on, instead of working on one large/huge task for the duration of the summer. It is set up as a competition and the students who do the most work will be eligible to win some Google prizes.

But what does this have to do with us? I’ll tell you what! We were accepted in this year’s Code-in! Over the last few weeks, I and a couple of other people (mostly on IRC) have been preparing for the GCI, but that does not mean we’re done yet – we can still very much use more hands. The competition starts on December 7th—that’s Monday next week! This means that we will have a flood of young people come into #musicbrainz and #metabrainz on IRC as well as possibly the forums. Please be courteous and patient; these young people will hopefully stick around Music– and MetaBrainz for long after the GCI and become full‐blown members of the community, but they need some incubation time. (Also, if you only sometimes frequent IRC, next week in particular would be a lovely time to have “all hands on deck”. Doubly so if you’re in the far eastern hemisphere as students will be coming from all different time zones and regions, and we only have a couple of East Asian and Australasian people in the IRC rooms.)

We are also continually looking for task suggestions. They can be for or from pretty much anything related to any MetaBrainz projects (we will have a number of *Brainz related tasks for beets for example), so let your creative juices flow and let us know what (small) things you would like some of these students to work on. The wikipage has some more information about what kind of tasks are acceptable. Keep in mind that they should generally be doable within 3–6 hours, but if you’re in doubt, feel free to poke one of our GCI mentors and ask.

Speaking of mentors, we could really use more mentors who are familiar with our various code bases. If you think that’s you, please, please, please poke me (Freso) on IRC and we can get things sorted. Of course, even if you don’t think you’ll be able to be a dedicated mentor, just hanging around IRC and helping students will also be a huge help and relieve the mentors somewhat to spend time on reviewing submitted work, entering additional tasks, etc.

I’m personally, and I know others are too, really excited about this. It’s a great opportunity to hopefully get a lot of low‐hanging fruit picked off as well as recruiting some new (hopefully) long‐term community members and contributors. However, it is also our first year in this program, so none of us really know what we’ve signed up for. It’s an adventure! And I hope you will be joining us. 😉

PS. If you know any pre-university students aged 13–17, tell them about the program and maybe use this as a way to lure them into the Brainzverse! 😄

August Community Revisit

Ohoi m’hearties, it’s time for the first monthly Community Revisit, where we’ll revisit what happened in MetaBrainzLand during the last month. Ready for the ride? Leggo!

The primary thing happening this month has likely been the changes in the MetaBrainz employee line-up following Ian’s departure in July. In the beginning of the month, Freso (wait, hey, that’s me!) was pulled on board as Community Manager (a brand new position for MetaBrainz too!), and just at the end of the month, GSoC wonder child Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov was hired as the new software engineer. So hi to us two! 🙂

Speaking of GSoC, the Google Summer of Code, this year’s edition is also fast coming to an end, and our four students and their projects are closing up and giving their work the final touches to have them ready to go live. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about these projects soon.

One thing that did go live during August, in no small part thanks to Ben “LordSputnik” Ockmore and Leo_Verto: the new IRC chat logger! Chat logs from IRC are now available at http://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/ – the site still needs some MetaBrainzifying, but Ben has done a great job of importing (pretty much) all the old chat logs to the new system and the bot is running in all the official MetaBrainz channels. If you’re on IRC (or you just like poking at the IRC logs), be sure to say “Thank you!! <3” to LordSputnik and Leo_Verto next time you see them around!

Another person who has made a mark in the last month was Alex a.k.a. caller#6, starting up the discussion about the current situation of MusicBrainz’ Area entities. Be sure to check out that blog post and let your voice be heard, if you don’t feel like it’s being represented already. The next instalment should be out before long.

We also had two server updates (pretty much all bug fixes) and an updated Virtual Machine image was finally released for the more tech oriented people.

This about rounds off the August Community Revisit. What do you think about the format? Did I miss any important community happenings? Any other comments? This is a brand new venture, so nothing’s set in stone yet!

From Denmark with love,
Freso

Announcing the beta launch of CritiqueBrainz

I’m proud to announce that we’ve launched a beta version of our new project: CritiqueBrainz.

CritiqueBrainz is a music review site, where anyone can write a music review for an artist or a release-group (album, single, etc). Unlike Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy, this site is about passionate reviews about music. If an album is horrible, please write a review about why it is horrible. If it is great, please write one telling us what makes it great.

All of the reviews in CritiqueBrainz will be Creative Commons licensed. The user has a choice to license their review under CC-by-nc-sa (disallowing commercial use) or CC-by-sa (allowing commercial use). To get the site started, the BBC was kind enough to send us their collection of almost 9,000 CC licensed reviews. Go and have a look — there are a lot of reviews for you to read, right now!

CritiqueBrainz is a new web site that was originally written by Maciej Czerwiński for last year’s Summer of Code. All of the goals for the project were met last year, but that didn’t leave us with a site that was ready for deployment. For this year’s Summer of Code, Roman Tsukanov picked up the project and immediately started fixing bugs, making improvements and generally rocking the project into stability and drastically improved the look and feel of the site. On the beginning day of Summer of Code, we’re ready for a beta release!

This past weekend, I attended Music Hack Day San Francisco and worked with Roman to add Spotify integration into the site. If you have a Spotify account, you can listen to the music as you read the reviews. So far, we’ve matched 250,000 release-groups in MusicBrainz to Spotify! Even if an album doesn’t have a review, you can still browse all of MusicBrainz via CritiqueBrainz and if we have a matched Spotify album, you can listen to it by clicking the play button under the cover art.

If an album you find doesn’t have a match in Spotify, we invite you to help us find a match and submit it to Spotify. Click on the “Match this!” link, which will execute a search via Spotify’s API to try and find a matching album. Due to some limitations in the Spotify API, this doesn’t work as well as we want to — we plan to pester Spotify to improve their API to make this a better experience.

We’re hoping to make CritiqueBrainz a user site that uses more cover-art and white space to make a site that is friendlier to browse the amazing pieces of information that MusicBrainz has collected. Unlike the data nerds at MusicBrainz, not everyone loves information overload; this site should hopefully make non-data nerds happy about MusicBrainz data.

If you find a bug, or have a suggestion for improving the site, please file a bug report here and Roman will have a look at it.

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in making this project a reality and thanks to Google’s Open Source programs office for making Summer of Code happen!

Summer of Code: We’ve accepted these projects

I’m pleased to announce the following 5 projects were accepted for this round of Summer of Code:

  • A new website for Picard and its plugins by Shadab Zafar: Give Picard a new website that will be used to host everything Picard related especially its plugins. Also add an interface which can be used to download those plugins right from picard.
  • MBS-6201: Add an “event” entity by reosarevok: Finalising the basic implementation of MBS-799 by adding an event entity to MusicBrainz.
  • Finishing and deploying CritiqueBrainz by Roman Tsukanov: Last year Maciej Czerwiński started work on repository for Creative Commons-licensed reviews – CritiqueBrainz project. He implemented core functionality: storage, API, and web interface. During Google Summer of Code 2014 I’d like to continue his work, finish and deploy the project.
  • MB UI TLC by navap: Spend some major TLC on all the templates and UI of MB.
  • Move MusicBrainz Search to SOLR by Wieland Hoffmann: The goal of this project is to move the MusicBrainz Search server to use SOLR for faster and in-place index updates.

The whole MusicBrainz dev team is very excited to have students take on these projects. We’ve been waiting for events for an eternity and after 9 months of no progress, I’m stoked that soon we will release CritiqueBrainz.

Congratulations to mineo, navap, duffer, gentlecat and reosarevok. And big thanks to Google for having us in Summer of Code again.