Ensembling: Veena MiniVersion or Indian chordophones oh my!

Hello! It’s been a while! Well but good things come to those who wait..

Today we have exciting news about the long awaited Veena mini version!!

(Do you remember the Veenas? We started work on this a whopping 7! years ago, waay back in 2018, when we had Google Code-In students helping us, especially the finalist antara which did a lot of research for us on veena tickets!
As such we did actually resolve several of these already in 2019 and 2020, but it was hard, then stuff happened. Covid happened, genders happened, new computer, the the-whole-world-is-now-a-parody-of-itself timeline happened, lol 😭)

If you remember from way back in 2020 we also added a Indonesian rebab separate from the rebab we already had – this is because that, similar to the Veena, the Rebab is one heck of a complicated matter! (so complicated, in fact, that it and its brethren have gotten their own mini-version!). We’ll get to this one later.

Now things are as chaotic as ever, but after our summit in India last year, I decided there is no better time to finish up the remaining tickets in this version.

Continue reading “Ensembling: Veena MiniVersion or Indian chordophones oh my!”

GSoC 2025: Onboarding Revamp in ListenBrainz Android

Hi everyone,

I’m Hemang Mishra (hemang-mishra on IRC and hemang-mishra on GitHub). I’m currently a pre-final year student at IIIT Jabalpur, India. This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code with MetaBrainz. My mentor for the program was Jasjeet Singh (jasje on IRC).

I contributed to ListenBrainz Android, where I worked on revamping the onboarding experience, improving login, adding listen submission apps, integrating Listening Now, and setting up app updates. The journey has been both exciting and full of learning, and I’m truly grateful for this opportunity.

Project Overview

ListenBrainz is a powerful platform that helps track listening history, share music tastes, and build a community around music.

The main goals of my project were:

Revamping onboarding – introducing users to the app’s core features and handling permissions with clear rationale.
Improving login –replacing simple web pages with a custom Compose-based UI, and experimenting with the DOM tree of the web page to automate form submissions and token extraction in the background.
Listen submission apps – prompting users during onboarding to select which apps to collect listens from, preventing unwanted submissions.
Listening Now integration – adding “Listening Now” into BrainzPlayer.
App updates – enabling updates for both Play Store and non-Play Store (F-Droid or sideloaded) releases.

Rest in Peace drsaunde!

Hello!

It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news today; we’ve just found out that one of our most prolific editors, David Saunders (AKA drsaunde) has passed away.

We don’t know much about the circumstances of what happened, but a friend of David’s was kind enough to reach out to us to let us know of his passing. The friend said:

“Our dear friend, David Saunders aka drsaunde sadly passed away March 26, 2025 surrounded by friends listening to his favourite music. Dave was a brilliant man with a great sense of humour and obviously an avid fan of music. I knew he wrote for a music site but never learned which one. Quick search for a common username he used landed me on your site.”

To put into context who drsaunde really was, lets look at his impressive statistics:

He made a total of 2,191,225 edits, with only 37 rejected edits, for an astonishing acceptance rate of 99.998%. He was a member of MusicBrainz since 2006-05-06 for a total of 18 years, 10 months and 20 days, which amounts to 317 edits for each day he was a member of MusicBrainz. 🤯🤯🤯

On top of that he was our Areas editor, the person in charge of maintaining our database of cities and regions in the world. Needless to say, drsaunde has left a giant hole in our community and our hearts.

In keeping with his spirit, his friends will hold a celebration of life for drsaunde on May 3rd. We’ve sent some funds to help ensure that celebration really honors his spirit.

Finally, if you would like to take a moment to remember drsaunde, you could head over to ListenBrainz radio and make a playlist from his most listened tracks.

Rest in peace, drsaunde, you will be missed.

Picard 2.13.3 released

Picard 2.13.3 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.13. This primarily fixes a regression with the Windows package, where a system wide installed libssl would cause SSL failures in Picard’s network requests. This release also includes a workaround for libopus not loading embedded cover art files.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.12 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.13.1.

Picard 2.13.2 released

Picard 2.13.2 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.13 which fixes a crash when opening the context menu for multiple selected changed tags.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.12 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.13.1.

Picard 2.13.1 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that the final version 2.13.1 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release brings multiple bugfixes and some new features. More details below.

X-odus: Find our projects on Bluesky and Mastodon

We have now completely moved off X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). It has been a long time coming, with rampant enshittification, uncertainty around platform changes, and content that has been increasingly unpleasant to interact with. Politics aside, we’re sick of going to check notifications and getting blasted with a feed largely consisting of violence, porn, advertising, the owner, and AI grifters*.

Instead, come join MetaBrainz, MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz and BookBrainz on Bluesky and/or Mastodon!

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-10-21

As mentioned in the banner of MusicBrainz website for a week already, images for events and releases are currently unavailable due to the Internet Archive (IA) recovering from a DDoS attack. See the IA’s Mastodon page for follow-up. Both the Cover Art Archive and the Event Art Archive were available from the Internet Archive which is doing its best to restore services safely, that will take as many days as necessary. Meanwhile, today’s server update temporarily disables editing images, until our access to the Internet Archive is fully restored. It also brings some updates behind the scenes. Last but not least, it also features a few improvements and bugfixes, mainly contributed by volunteers without whom this would not have the same significance!

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to derat, Divyansh Gupta, and Serial-ATA for having contributed to the code. Thanks to Dan and HibiscusKazeneko for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Arainuki, Aris_8585, blit, Echelon666, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-10-21.0.

Picard 2.12.3 released

Picard 2.12.3 has been released, fixing an issue with some tooltips and disallowing using a directory separator as replacement character.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.11 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.12.

Picard 2.12.2 released

Picard 2.12.2 has been released, fixing an issue with sorting numbers in list views.

Picard 2.12.1 contained a fix for crashes on macOS which were related to language aware sorting. Unfortunately the solution we chose for this caused sorting of numbers to be broken on Windows. With this release this gets solved by using the previous sorting technique on Windows again (which was not affected by the crashes experienced on macOS).

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.11 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.12.