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

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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 •́ )✧

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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)

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GSoC’22: CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities

Greetings, Everyone!

I am Ansh Goyal (ansh on IRC), an undergraduate student from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and introduced a new feature, CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities.

I was mentored by Alastair Porter (alastairp on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions made for this project and my experiences throughout the journey.

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GSoC 2022: Unified Form Editor for BookBrainz

Hi, I am Shubham gupta (IRC Shubh) pursuing my bachelor’s from the National Institute of Technology, Kurushetra. This year I participated in Google Summer of Code and implemented a new editor in Bookbrainz.

In this project, I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (IRC monkey). The purpose of this blog is to summarize my contribution made for this project and share my experiences along the way.

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MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-09-06

This release mostly consists of small bug fixes and improvements. One bigger bug fix (MBS-12497) involves an issue where it was impossible to apply any edit which would cause an artist credit with any redirects pointing to it to be removed. Sorry about your stuck edits, people! They should now pass.

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 chaban, HibiscusKazeneko, jesus2099, Mineo and sammyrayy for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ikerm2003 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-09-06.

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MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-08-22

It’s time for more fixed bugs and refactoring/maintenance tasks.

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 CatQuest and otringal for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to hamaryns, ikerm2003 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-08-25-hotfixes.

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Picard 2.8.3 released

Picard 2.8.3 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.8 which fixes a potential crash in the album search dialog and provides updated translations.

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 2.7 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.8 and the changes in Picard 2.8.1 and Picard 2.8.2.

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

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