MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
Hi everyone! Sorry if we react slowly this week, that’s because our brains are all slowed down digesting all of the chocolate! Which long term readers will know means we are in Barcelona at our yearly summit all week.
Continue reading “MetaBrainz Summit 2026”MetaBrainz Summit 25 is upon us! September 15-19 in Barcelona, Spain.
We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.
Continue reading “You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 25”
This year it was New Delhi, India, that was invaded by data nerds from across the globe!
The MetaBrainz team was treated to the glorious chaos, hospitality, sights, noise, sweets, monkeys, traffic, heat, and delicious food of India. We reflected on the last year in MetaBrainz, planned and collaborated for the future, and got a little work done – when we could fit it in between mouthfuls of Indian sweets.
Read on for a comprehensive summit recap, including the annual recap for each MetaBrainz project, as well as breakout session notes, photos, and links to the slides and video recordings.
Continue reading “MetaBrainz Summit 2024”MetaBrainz Summit 24 is upon us! September 23-27 in New Delhi, India.
We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.
Continue reading “You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 24”
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!
Continue reading “MetaBrainz Summit 2023”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.
Continue reading “You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 23”
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
Continue reading “MetaBrainz Summit 2022”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!
Microsoft reached out to us back in early 2018 in order to use our data in Bing — we followed the normal sort of on-boarding procedure that we use for our supporters. During one of these on-boarding calls we were asked if there was more that Microsoft could do to help us and support our mission. Soon thereafter I provided them with a list of things that would be useful to us. Sadly, the request to buy a major record label and then to give it to us to manage was turned down for being too expensive. 🙁
However, Microsoft did like two items on our list and agreed to support us — they were:
1) Azure hosting credits — we’re always looking for more hosting capacity and these credits will allows us to provide virtual machines to our team and to close collaborators who are doing good work, but might be lacking the computing power to push their projects forward. This contribution is of direct benefit to our community — often times our projects contain quite a lot of data and thus have some heavy processing requirements. We’re currently using our hosting credits to do some large data set crunching and some testing for the Virtual Machine that we provide to users who wish to get up and running with MusicBrainz data quickly.
2) Sponsoring our summit — our annual team meeting and foundation summit happens at the end of each September, normally in Barcelona where we have our main office. Microsoft’s sponsorship allows us to invite more people to the event, since we have the means to cover their expenses. Our summits have traditionally been our annual forum for meeting the other team members and volunteers and to take a breather from the normal course of business. At the event we see a more human side of each other and we’re more easily able to discuss our challenges and the vision for the future.
We really appreciate our supporters who go above and beyond the normal levels of support for us — these contributions really sweeten the deal of hacking on open source software!
Thank you so much to Microsoft and everyone at Microsoft who helped move this contribution forward!
The 2019 MetaBrainz Summit took place on 27th–29th of September 2019 in Barcelona, Spain at the MetaBrainz HQ. The Summit is a chance for MetaBrainz staff and the community to gather and plan ahead for the next year. This report is a recap of what was discussed and what lies ahead for the community.
Continue reading “State of the Brainz: 2019 MetaBrainz Summit highlights”
