MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
Hi everyone, I am Akash Gupta, currently pursuing my undergraduate from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and developed a new feature — Series Entity— for the project BookBrainz.
I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions to the project and the experiences that I had throughout the summer.
Continue reading “GSoC 2021: Series Entity for BookBrainz”I’m pleased to announce that we are continuing our long tradition of hiring our best Google Summer of Code participants — I’d like to warmly welcome Akshat Tiwari to the MetaBrainz team!
Akshat has been working on our Android App, continuing the work from last summer to improve the app and to add new features. He has been doing great work and demonstrating the fact that he understands user interfaces and has an eye for design as well as coding. This is a rare combination of talents and since we’ve been in dire need for improving the UI/UX for the MusicBrainz web site since forever, this was the time to finally get this project moving seriously.
Akshat has joined us on a trial contract through the end of the year with the goal of creating a new home page for MusicBrainz (and more hopefully) — the current home page is still stuck in the early 2000s and hasn’t evolved as our projects have evolved.
Our hope is to have Akshat become a permanent member of the MusicBrainz team and once the home page is completed, that he will continue on the UI/UX revamp that Chhavi started several years ago.
Welcome to the team Akshat!
Greetings, Everyone!
The MusicBrainz Mobile App developers have been working at full capacity, improving the user experience, incorporating more features and functionalities, while making sure the core purpose of the app remains as promised.
Since its inception in 2010, the MusicBrainz Official App has come a long way. The App currently is highly maintained and has been actively open for contributions. A systematic approach is being followed and updates are being made on a regular basis.
The most important revamp which has been worked on for the past few months is the Tagger feature available in the MusicBrainz Android App.
Functionalities like fetching the local album arts, searching through all your local music files at one go, retrieving the cover art from the server, and heading to the recording directly are some of the key highlights of the upcoming Tagger.
Picard has finally made an official entry to the MusicBrainz App where users can now send their releases to the original Picard desktop app with the click of a button. This has been worked on in collaboration with the Picard team and proper documentation on its usage will be shared soon.
The completely new addition of Listen and Critique showcases the functionalities of ListenBrainz and CritiqueBrainz websites natively from the app. Currently, these will be available as advanced features on the app.
A well-prepared Onboarding and About section will take you through every important detail on the app and make sure you are aware of all the functionalities in the best and optimized way possible.
Proper documentation of every feature is being prepared. The App is finally out in Production, do head to the stores and give it a try!
We are really excited to make the MusicBrainz App as user-friendly as possible for you, while we take care of all the wonder behind it!
Play Store: MusicBrainz – Apps on Google Play
F-Droid: MusicBrainz | F-Droid – Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Github: metabrainz/musicbrainz-android
Thank you!
A week late, but here’s another server update! This time we fixed a bunch of bugs both new and old, added a bunch of new reports, and made it possible to find edits based on the content of their edit notes. Additionally, the bottom credits display for releases now hides irrelevant work relationships (they have been hidden in the inline display for a few months already).
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 cam1170, CatQuest, chaban, Cyberskull, jesus2099, ROpdebee and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt, salo.rock, yoshi818 and zas for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2021-07-19.
This time we have a release with a fair amount of small bug fixes and improvements, but the main improvement you might notice is that release pages are now a lot more efficient for releases with a lot of tracks. Any release with more than 100 tracks will be loaded only partially, and more tracks can be loaded if useful. This avoids loading hundreds of tracks (and all relevant relationships) in cases where the user doesn’t actually need them, and it will make it possible to load some releases with over a thousand tracks which would consistently time out before.
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 yyoung for improving errors in URL editor. Thanks to chaban, Cyberskull, jaw111, Jeluang, jesus2099, nikki, salo.rock, Yurim for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2021-06-28.
Starting with today’s update of the ListenBrainz server, we now require new account sign-ups to provide a valid and verified email in order to submit your listens. Existing accounts have until 1 November 2021 to meet this requirement, with users being reminded to add their email addresses when they log in. To avoid losing listens come November, we urge you to add an email address to your account now.
We dislike taking this step, but sadly we’ve seen an uptick of spam listens (why???) being submitted to ListenBrainz. Having a verified email address will deter some people from submitting spam listens, but most importantly it allows us to contact users about their listen histories. Sometimes it can be hard to judge if someone’s listening history is not particularly diverse or if they are a spammer.
Having an email allows us to contact users whom we suspect of spamming, ensuring that we don’t delete valid user profiles.
Thanks!
Our friends over at Kendraio want to integrate the MusicBrainz API into their app and are offering a bounty to a developer to help them do it. Kendraio App is a low-code bi-directional dashboard data browser. The aim is to enable Kendraio App users (including music artists) to search and browse, and also upload information to MusicBrainz. Here’s a ready-made example of how easy it is to create Kendraio Flows that connect to our API.
And within Kendraio App they’ve built Kendraio Player, a proof-of-concept for a multi-service music streaming player using web monetisation technology, funded by Grant for the Web.
The timeframe is about 2 weeks — start any time from now. The bounty is $500 USD (paid out via https://opencollective.com/kendraio – so you need to have an account there to be paid – but that’s easy). Please answer their bounty by replying to their GitHub issue.
See how their first bounty went at Kendraio Player Audiotarky integration. And see Radhy’s writeup of his experience at Afterthought on integrating Audiotarky API into Kendraio App.
This week we spent some time looking through code that had been sitting for a long time waiting for a review while we worked on all sorts of other things. Most of the changes are small – one that might be more noticeable is that on recording lists you can now see the release groups the recording appears on. This should make it easier to figure out what is going on when a list has many recordings with the same name.
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 yyoung for fixing a display bug with external links. Thanks to chaban, HibiscusKazeneko, Ian Tresman, Jeluang, otringal and salo.rock for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ffff23 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2021-06-14.
Picard 2.6.3 is the third maintenance release for the recently release Picard 2.6. It contains a couple of bug fixes, most notably it fixes a bug where changes to some options did not get applied until a restart of Picard. Users of Picard 2.6 are highly recommended to update.
The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.
Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.
We’re back after our schema change with another release fixing mostly small bugs. The most welcome of these changes is probably that unrelated work relationships (such as arrangements, parodies, translated versions and whatnot) will now be hidden from the inline release view, meaning releases with popular songs that have lots of versions should be significantly less annoying to use!
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, fabe56, jesus2099, kellnerd, mr_maxis, mtrolley, psychoadept, ROpdebee and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ffff23, jormangeud, outsidecontext and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2021-05-31.