MetaBrainz – Page 2 – MetaBrainz Blog

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!

Downtime today for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7pm CEST)

Today (Monday, May 13) at 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v16.
Performing the MusicBrainz schema change upgrade.

See the previous announcement on this topic for more information.

Expect MusicBrainz and services that depend on its database (MetaBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, CritiqueBrainz, BookBrainz) to be down for the hour, but we’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible.

Afterward, we’ll post instructions here on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server (whether using musicbrainz-docker or otherwise).

P.S. The initially announced upgrades for MusicBrainz search engine are just about to reach our beta website, and thus are postponed for mirrors too.

Welcoming Hazel Savage to our Board of Directors!

I am pleased to announce that Hazel Savage of SoundCloud and Musiio has joined our Board of Directors! Hazel is practically the perfect person for our Board of Directors right now: Knowledgeable in music recommendations and music AI, she brings deep experience in two fields that are quite important to the Foundation at this time. We’ve already been dealing with some tough questions on AI in the past year and her experience will lend us another voice in determining our AI policies going forward.

Hazel replaces outgoing Director Paula LeDieu whose life has recently gotten much more busy, not leaving enough time for her role at MetaBrainz. We’re sad to have Paula leave the team, but are pleased to have Hazel as her replacement.

Thank you to Paula for your time on our Board of Directors — we very much appreciate your time and efforts!

Welcome Hazel Savage!

Supporting upstream open source projects

For many years the MetaBrainz Foundation has wanted to directly support some of the upstream open source projects we use for development. These upstream projects are used behind the scenes by one or more MetaBrainz projects. They often don’t have individual users, and many lack the visibility for getting other funding.

We are starting with a small donation of $1,001, annually. These will be one-time donations to 13 projects, $77 each. The total amount and the list of projects (see below) will be revised every year.

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!

ListenBrainz service incident

Hello!

I’m sad to report that we had an incident on one of the ListenBrainz production database servers, where someone on our team might have accidentally run our test suite on our production server.

MetaBrainz Summit 2023

As always, the silliest photo is the best photo. Left to right: aerozol, zas, outsidecontext, mayhem, yvanzo, bitmap, monkey, kellnerd, akshaaatt, reosarevok, laptop: atj, lucifer

A year has flown by and once again the MetaBrainz team found itself in the MetaBrainz HQ in Barcelona, Spain, for #summit23. And once again we were munching on a mountain of international chocolates, hiking Mt Montserrat, bird-watching, groaning at terrible puns, testing out mayhem’s Bartendro cocktail robot (some of the team committing themselves too thoroughly to this testing), and of course discussing everything and anything MetaBrainz related. This year we had a longer summit, taking place over the week instead of the usual weekend, broken up into three days of presentations, followed by two days of hands-on ‘hacking’.

This means it’s time to strap in for a long post!

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 23

Has it been a year already? MetaBrainz Summit 23 is one week away! Mark it in your calendar – October 2-6 at MetaBrainz HQ in Barcelona, Spain.

We would love for you to join us remotely. All summit information and links are in the Summit 2023 wiki page. You are invited, regardless of how long you have been in the MeB community, or your MeB interests.

Welcome Ansh Goyal to the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve added yet another former Summer of Code student/mentor to our team: Ansh Goyal. Welcome to our team, Ansh!

After Alastair Porter decided to not resume his position with MetaBrainz after his 6-month break, we were lucky to have Ansh ready to jump in to join our team. Thank you for your hard work over the years, Alastair!

Ansh will be focusing on Javascript programming, in particular React, on the BookBrainz and ListenBrainz projects. Both of these projects desperately need a lot of UI/UX work, and Ansh has proven himself that he’ll be able to help us tackle our backlog of UI projects that we need to accomplish in the short term.

Welcome to the team Ansh — we’re looking forward to your contributions!