ListenBrainz – Page 4 – MetaBrainz Blog

ListenBrainz Year in Music 2022: Coming in 4 January 2023

As you might know, here at MetaBrainz we’re rather picky when it comes to data. And we’re not exactly thrilled when Spotify’s Wrapped reports appear in December and then only contain data from the first 9 months of the year. Shouldn’t that be Spotify Three Quarters Wrapped?

We prefer properly baked solutions, and for that reason we’ve decided that we will wait until 4 January 2023 before we release our ListenBrainz Year in Music (YIM) reports. This way we can have one comprehensive report that includes all of your listens and all of the report data we derive from those listen.

If you are interested in getting your own version of our fetching Year In Music reports, we encourage you to sign-up and import your data before the year is done. Then in the first few days of January we will process this data into your complete report and publish it on 4 January.

In the meantime, have a look at last year’s YIM report. If we generated one for you in 2021, you can find that report from the Explore menu on listenbrainz.org!

This year’s report will be even better based on the feedback we’ve received from you!

We’re looking forward to getting these reports to you and we wish you happy holiday and a pleasant end of the year!

Fresh Releases – My (G)SoC journey with MetaBrainz

For an open source software enthusiast like me who has contributed little pieces of code and documentation to various projects for almost a decade, the idea of applying for Google Summer of Code has always been exciting and intimidating because of its grand nature. After getting some experience in web development over the past year, I decided to not give in to my self-doubts and applied for the GSoC’22 with confidence and zeal. I am Chinmay Kunkikar from India, and I would like to talk about my project with the MetaBrainz Foundation – Fresh Releases, and take you on my journey through the GSoC 2022 program.

Cleaning up the Music Listening Histories Dataset

Hi, this is Prathamesh Ghatole (IRC Nick: “Pratha-Fish”), and I am an aspiring Data Engineer from India, currently pursuing my bachelor’s in AI at GHRCEM Pune, and another bachelor’s in Data Science and Applications at IIT Madras.

I had the pleasure to be mentored by alastairp and the rest of the incredible team at the MetaBrainz Foundation. Throughout this complicated but super fun project as a GSoC ‘22 contributor! This blog is all about my journey over the past 18 weeks.

MetaBrainz Summit 2022

The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt

After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.

We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!

A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

Mobile Apps: Let’s welcome the ListenBrainz App!

Greetings, Everyone!

During the recent summit, we discussed the future of our mobile apps. We believe that the MusicBrainz app serves a particular user base which is highly interested in scrolling through their collections, using the barcode scanner, searching for entities and viewing this data with a native mobile experience. The tagger in the android app is not accurate and doesn’t carry forward the expectations brought in from using Picard on the Desktop. Hence, we have decided to retire the tagger from the MusicBrainz app.

Recently, we have added the BrainzPlayer to the app, Spotify support and functionalities to review and submit listens to ListenBrainz. While the features are really good, they don’t align with the MusicBrainz app and confuse the two separate user bases, that of MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz.

Given that we have limited contributors working on our mobile apps, we have decided to separate the two mobile apps with their respective features. MusicBrainz App will be stripped of these excessive features, while also removing the tagger and continue to be available on the Play store as a minimalistic app.

Our major focus will move to the ListenBrainz app which will continue to have regular updates and features made while existing on the Play store as a separate app.

We are excited and happy with this announcement. Hope you agree with our decision. Thank you!

GSoC’22: Personal Recommendation of a track

Hi Everyone!

I am Shatabarto Bhattacharya (also known as riksucks on IRC and hrik2001 on Github). I am an undergraduate student pursuing Information Technology from UIET, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. This year I participated in Google Summer of Code under MetaBrainz and worked on implementing a feature to send personal recommendation of a track to multiple followers, along with a write up. My mentors for this project were Kartik Ohri (lucifer on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC)

ListenBrainz presents: Your Year in Music

The ListenBrainz team has been wanting to provide a retrospective for its users for a few years now and this year we finally had enough resources to make it happen!

The Year in Music report includes a list of your top 50 releases for 2021, presented with cover art:

It also includes top lists, such as Your 50 most played songs of 2021 and Your top 50 artists of 2021 and spiffy map of your listening activity for 2021:

We also created 4 playlists for you to enjoy a retrospective of 2021. Three of these playlists aim to be playlists that feel comfortable for you, made up of tracks that you listened to this year. The Top Missed Recordings playlist, however, is a discovery playlist made from popular recordings that users similar to you listened to, but you didn’t. We make no guarantees that this playlist won’t give you at least little bit of iPod whiplash, which is why we’re presenting it as a discovery playlist that will require a bit more of your attention. However, don’t be discouraged—we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about this playlist!

And, this is not all yet—there are more things in the report for you to discover!

We invite you to head over to ListenBrainz to see if we were able to generate a Year in Music report for you. If not, please consider signing up for an account and sharing your listening history with us, so we can create a report for you next year! (You could also take a look at the reports generated for our team: akshaaatt, alastairp, amCap1712, mr_monkey, rob)

Happy listening and happy holidays from all of the MetaBrainz team!

GSoC 2021: Pin Recordings and CritiqueBrainz Integration in ListenBrainz

Hi! I am Jason Dao, aka jasondk on IRC. I’m a third year undergrad at University of California, Davis. This past summer, I’ve been working with the MetaBrainz team to add some neat features to the project ListenBrainz.

ListenBrainz will soon require a valid email to submit listens

Starting with today’s update of the ListenBrainz server, we now require new account sign-ups to provide a valid and verified email in order to submit your listens. Existing accounts have until 1 November 2021 to meet this requirement, with users being reminded to add their email addresses when they log in. To avoid losing listens come November, we urge you to add an email address to your account now.

We dislike taking this step, but sadly we’ve seen an uptick of spam listens (why???) being submitted to ListenBrainz. Having a verified email address will deter some people from submitting spam listens, but most importantly it allows us to contact users about their listen histories. Sometimes it can be hard to judge if someone’s listening history is not particularly diverse or if they are a spammer.

Having an email allows us to contact users whom we suspect of spamming, ensuring that we don’t delete valid user profiles.

Thanks!

Kartik Ohri joins the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that Kartik Ohri, AKA Lucifer, a very active contributor since his Code-in days in 2018, has become the latest staff member of the MetaBrainz Foundation!

Kartik has been instrumental in rewriting our Android app and more recently has been helping us with a number of tasks, including new features for ListenBrainz, AcousticBrainz as well as breathing some much needed life into the CritiqueBrainz project.

These three projects (CritiqueBrainz, ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz) will be his main focus while working for MetaBrainz. Each of these projects has not had enough engineering time recently to sufficiently move new features forward. We hope that with Kartik’s efforts we can deliver more features faster.

Welcome to the team, Kartik!