MetaBrainz Blog – Page 20 – MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog

MusicBrainz Server hotfix, 2023-01-10

A spam technique has been discovered that consisted in creating an account with a malicious URL in the username and the email of the intended victim, so that the victim would receive a verification email with the malicious URL inside it. It was most often combined with control characters to make the malicious URL even more visible.

Thanks to Devin McGovern from the Cyber Security Operations Department at Hyatt who responsibly disclosed this issue to the team.

To deal with the issue:

Creating new such accounts has been blocked; See MBS-12827.
Existing such accounts, around 40,000, have been removed (since new verification emails could still be requested); See MBBE-68.

It doesn’t affect mirrors so there is no update for MusicBrainz Docker.

The git tag is v-2023-01-10-hotfixes.

Explore Your Year in Music 2022

ListenBrainz is excited to announce the release of your #YEARINMUSIC reports for 2022! Log in to your ListenBrainz (LB) and click here to see your report. Don’t have a LB account? See what you’re missing.

Revisit and share your top artists, albums, tracks and neighbours from last year. Topped off with oodles of interesting statistics, a browsable cover collage, and brand new playlists of songs that you may have missed that our currently-benign algorithm thinks you will love.

You made it through, and you listened to some great tunes along the way.

Picard 2.9 alpha 1 available for testing

Today we have released an alpha version for the upcoming Picard 2.9. The main change coming with this release is limiting Picard to a single instance by default and the ability to run commands inside this running Picard instance from the command line. This work was done by skelly37 as part of last year’s Google Summer of Code.

Keep in mind that we consider this an alpha release and it might contain bugs. As the single-instance mode by default is a significant change on how Picard is being run we want to gather some feedback on the new functionality before we do a final 2.9 release.

Unexpected Picard Setups

This article is showcasing some of the more unusual ways MusicBrainz Picard can be run. Some are useful, some are more technically interesting solutions.

The description in MusicBrainz Picard’s README file says:

MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) audio tagging application.

So yes, Linux, macOS and Windows are our officially supported platforms and the main targets for running Picard. If you are using Picard you likely do this on a laptop or desktop computer running one of these three operating systems. We already offer plenty of options to install and run Picard, including our official downloads for Windows and macOS, Picard in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11 and the popular Linux packages Flatpak and Snap.

But as Picard is free software you can get it running essentially anywhere were Python and PyQt5 are available. Let’s start this year with showcasing some of the more unusual ways Picard can be run. Some are useful, some are more technically interesting solutions.

Preparing for Year In Music Report

The ListenBrainz Year In Music Report is approaching, and in order to make the most out of it, we recommend that users who utilize various import methods complete their listen imports by January 2nd.

To provide the most accurate Year In Music reports it is important that we identify the recordings to which you’ve listened. If we can’t identify your listens correctly, your Year in Music reports will also be incorrect. We aim to automatically identify all the listens that come in, but this challenging task isn’t always carried out with 100% success.

In order to give users more control over the linking of their listens, we have introduced a new feature allowing users to directly link their listens to a MusicBrainz recording from the ListenBrainz website. To correct an incorrectly linked listen, navigate to the listens page and select the Link with MusicBrainz option from the dropdown menu next to a listen.

Picard 2.8.5 released

Picard 2.8.5 is a maintenance release for Picard 2.8, fixing two regressions found in the previous release.

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-2590] – Relative paths for cover art file names no longer work
[PICARD-2593] – Toolbar icon text disappears when saving options
[PICARD-2596] – “Show icons in menus” option is applied without saving options

Get in touch

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

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.