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!

End-of-life for external access to MusicBrainz search server

For MusicBrainz mirrors, MusicBrainz server development, and custom applications, there used to be a direct access to search.musicbrainz.org which was actually inherited from the previous search infrastructure until 2018.

Keeping it available in the current infrastructure uses a compatibility layer which has been unintentionally broken last year. This issue has been reported only once. The alternative and much more sensible solution which is to install a local search server has improved in reliability and simplicity in the meantime. Polling the community shown that only one person would be interested which isn’t enough to justify the maintenance overhead for this replaceable service.

Therefore it has been decided to close this access for good.

Thanks to everyone who made this transitioning service to work and handle about 40k requests a day on average!

Picard 2.8.4 released

Picard 2.8.4 is a maintenance release for Picard 2.8. This release contains multiple bug fixes, please see the list of changes below.

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

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.

What’s new?

Bugfixes

  • PICARD-2520 – Null bytes in tag values can cause crashes when sorting
  • PICARD-2539 – Picard crashes on huge releases if no cover art provider is active
  • PICARD-2548 – Loaded album does not update cover art display
  • PICARD-2549 – Moving tracks between albums shows tracks differ even when they do not
  • PICARD-2554 – Submit AcoustIDs submits even IDs that are in center pane
  • PICARD-2556 – Player popovers for volume and playback speed crash on Wayland and open on wrong position
  • PICARD-2557 – Add New Tag autocomplete list contains value typed so far
  • PICARD-2558 – Floatable toolbars unusable under Wayland
  • PICARD-2564 – Options for “Windows compatibility” and “Replace non-ASCII” get incorrectly set to inactive
  • PICARD-2565 – Rules for file name compatibility and max. path shortening are not applied when saving cover art
  • PICARD-2568 – $cleanmulti() has no effect for hidden variables
  • PICARD-2570 – Unable to drag tracks from right hand pane to Clusters
  • PICARD-2582 – distutils.errors.DistutilsClassError when building with setup.py
  • PICARD-2588 – QObject::startTimer: Timers can only be used with threads started with QThread

Improvements

  • PICARD-2589 – Support media types “DualDisc (DVD side)” and “Betacam SP”

Get in touch

Please use the MetaBrainz community forums and the ticket system to give feedback, suggest new features or report bugs.

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.

Continue reading “Fresh Releases – My (G)SoC journey with MetaBrainz”

Ensembling: Endelig Belg MiniVersion

Yes! It’s been quite some time since you last heard from me, hasn’t it! But despite the lack of blog posts, I haven’t been faffing around the *entire* corona time! Instead we have been updating quite a lot of instruments with IROM images and also doing a few tickets here and there, as well as updating A LOT of aliases.

But thankfully now we’ve stepped up a gear again and can release a proper (albeit small) release! I present to you Endelig Belg!

MiniVersion Endelig Belg!

Closed as not applicable / Reopen if more information can be discerned

Finally we also looked into some other instruments, including checking the aliases and disambiguations for harmonium/reed organ as well as adding and sorting out various other related instruments and their aliases and IROM images. These don’t all have tickets, but see the list of things that have been closed in the meantime for some of it.

Do not despair Fellow Instrument Afficionadoes! The broad strokes of another MiniVersion have already been done as well!

Watch this space!

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.

Continue reading “Cleaning up the Music Listening Histories Dataset”

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

Continue reading “MetaBrainz Summit 2022”

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!

MusicBrainz Android App: Adding BrainzPlayer in Android App

Greetings, Everyone!

I am Ashutosh Aswal (IRC nick yellowhatpro), pursuing my bachelor’s from Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh, India. As a Google Summer of Code’22 contributor, I worked for MetaBrainz, on the MusicBrainz Android app and added a music playback feature to the app, which we call BrainzPlayer.

During the GSoC period, I was mentored by Akshat Tiwari (akshaaatt). Through this post, I will be summarizing my journey throughout the summer with MetaBrainz.

Let’s begin!! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧

Continue reading “MusicBrainz Android App: Adding BrainzPlayer in Android App”

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)

Continue reading “GSoC’22: Personal Recommendation of a track”