MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes: May 18th, 2017 (and November 21st, 2016)

Here’s the second round of board meeting minutes. We have had board meetings both in November and in May, but the November board meeting only consisted of Robert, Sophie, Rassami, and Matthew meeting up in London approving the minutes of the prior meeting and agreeing to only hold 3 meetings in 2016. So we decided to kind of skip over reporting on that meeting and just include the summary when posting the minutes for the May meeting. Which I now just did. 😉

These minutes have been reviewed by the board but have not been formally approved at a board meeting yet, meaning that it is subject to change if the board feels something is wrong or missing. Also note that discussion related to personnel or confidential topics have been/will be redacted. Furthermore we may also add more text to the notes in order to give context and background, while not altering the meaning of these notes.

Let’s dive in!

MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes 2017-05­-18

Continue reading “MetaBrainz Foundation Board Meeting Minutes: May 18th, 2017 (and November 21st, 2016)”

Expanding our team

As the world comes back to life after the summer break, we’re making some changes and expanding our team. First, Roman Tsukanov has decided to not renew his contract with us. During his tenure with MetaBrainz, Roman adopted and released CritiqueBrainz and also wrote our new MetaBrainz web page, which is helping us bring in new supporters. His contributions have been far from trivial — thank you for your efforts, Roman!

Due in part to the new MetaBrainz web site, we’ve got more financial support than ever, and this allows us to replace Roman with two engineers! I’m please to announce that we’re hiring two of our Summer of Code students who just completed the program:

Sambhav Kothari AKA samj1912: Sambhav started hacking on Picard earlier this year and knocked Picard out of dormancy, working towards a new release and then making Picard his Summer of Code project. He completed his project with flying colors and is working towards a major upgrade of Picard. On the MetaBrainz team he is going to look after the new search infrastructure and the maintenance and bug fixing of our Web Service in addition to hacking on Picard. A full plate, for sure!

Param Singh AKA iliekcomputers: About the same time that samj1912 arrived, Param arrived. He expressed interest in working on ListenBrainz — he too dove right in and started making improvements. ListenBrainz had quite a ways to go before he could aim to make a Summer of Code project out of it. Param and I embarked on a journey to revamp and improve the stability of ListenBrainz, which culminated in us releasing the new ListenBrainz beta a few weeks ago. Since then he’s been focusing on his Summer of Code project, which is also now complete. On the MetaBrainz team Param will be looking after ListenBrainz and also the new MetaBrainz web site.

Both Param and Sambhav will officially start working on the MetaBrainz team starting October 1, but I strongly suspect we’ll see them around and hacking on the projects as has become the norm this year.

Welcome aboard Sambhav and Param!

 

Picard Ubuntu packages updated

Updated Picard packages for Ubuntu are available over the official MusicBrainz Ubuntu PPAs. For most users it is recommended to use the stable PPA to install the latest stable release of Picard (1.4.2 at the time of writing this):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:musicbrainz-developers/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install picard

Up-to-date stable packages are available for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, 15.05 Vivid, 16.04 Xenial, 17.04 Zesty and upcoming 17.10 Artful.

For users wanting to try out the latest development release there is also a daily build PPA available. Please note that the current Picard 2.0 development releases are a major update to the codebase and everything is still work in progress, so it might be more unstable then usually. Also due to updated dependencies the Picard 2 daily builds are only available for Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10.

More details can be found in this post on the MetaBrainz Community.

Server update, 2017-09-04

We’ve been focusing on finishing up some overdue schema change features (alternative tracklists, for one) and doing various refactorings/making some under-the-hood changes, which is why there hasn’t been a release in a while. But here’s a few small fixes that have accumulated.

The git tag is v-2017-09-04.

Bug

  • [MBS-9409] – Error merging mediums with and without pregap tracks

Task

  • [MBS-9416] – wikidata url format redirect addition

Improvement

  • [MBS-9434] – “stream for free” YouTube URL linked to a release should show as “stream on YouTube” instead of “watch on YouTube”

500 Commits of Summer: My story of FOSS and GSoC

This story of summer started in a dull grey winter at home. Bored, I started lingering around IRC channels and much like the Alice of Wonderland, stumbled into the wonderful world of FOSS. Little did I know, it was gonna be one of the best things that happened to me. Below is a story of bugs, PRs , repos, commits, and some more commits. But it is also a story of curiosity, learning, frustrations (a lot of it), resilience (more than you think) and some amazing amazing people of the community. If I have to sum it up for you, I couldn’t think of a way better than this. So here it goes…

Disclaimer: It was a long journey, hence the long blog. Continue reading “500 Commits of Summer: My story of FOSS and GSoC”

GSoC 2017: Rating System in CritiqueBrainz

Hello!

I am Pinank Solanki, an undergrad at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, India. I worked with the MetaBrainz Foundation on one of its projects, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2017 over the last summer. It was one of the best and exciting summers I ever had.

Let me begin from the beginning. I first came to know about MusicBrainz in January and first contacted the community in February and was immediately hooked. Initially I decided to make a proposal for addition of book reviews for CritiqueBrianz, but it was not possible because the BookBrainz web service was unstable and the CritiqueBrainz’s host didn’t have direct access to BookBrainz database. So I tried to pitch my own ideas. But then, in one of the weekly meetings, I saw great support and enthusiasm among the community members for rating system for reviews —and I personally liked the idea of the project and thought it would be a great addition to CritiqueBrainz. I submitted my proposal, got accepted and a treat to the friends was due!

Overview

The aim of the project was to add support for three types of reviews: text, rating, text+rating (CB supported only-text reviews).

The schema changes and data-access functions are completed and merged. The frontend part is mainly completed including the fundamental functionality along with additional features. It took a lot of time to select and modify the rating input plugin perfectly satisfying the project’s needs. There is still some work to be done, most of which is based on the rating scale conversion in db package. Similarly, most of the web service part is completed and is held up due to the rating scale conversion PR.

Implementation

Schema changes

The schema changes done are quite different than what was mentioned in the proposal. My mentor for the project, Roman Tsukanov (Gentlecat), recommended some changes which would make keeping track of revisions a lot easier. You can see the schema here and the PR here.

Data-access functions

By the time I started working on the project, CB has migrated off the ORM. So, I wrote raw SQL queries and its tests. See the PR here. The rating scale was decided to be 1-5 but for storage a scale of 0-100 is used just like MusicBrainz keeping the possibility of migration of ratings from MB to CB in mind (more info at CB-245). This part is covered in the PR here.

Changes in user-interface

This plugin is used for rendering the rating star icons. The code can be seen in this PR. See the images below to get a good idea about the implementation.

Write review page:

cb-write-review

Review page:

cb-review

Entity page:

cb-entity-page

Revision comparison:

cb-revision-comparison

Web service

All the functionalities added to CritiqueBrainz had to be implemented in the web service (API) as well. All three types of reviews and other features are now supported via the web service. See the PR here.

Documentation

The chief part of the documentation was to update the schema. Other than that, rating parameter and several notes were added to the API documentation. See the PR here.

Other PRs relevant to the project can be found here.

Future work

First of all, I will complete the leftover work. Web service and frontend PRs are dependent on the rating scale PR. Once it gets merged, it’s 2–3 days of work to complete the rest.

Other than that, I look forward to keep contributing to CritiqueBrainz and other MetaBrainz projects. I am sure many interesting ideas will be discussed at the annual MetaBrainz Summit in Barcelona.

Conclusion

It was quite an eventful summer and GSoC was the biggest of them. Thanks to Roman for his constant help and guidance over the entire summer and also to all the other community members. It was so cool to work on an open-source project and I would definitely suggest for any music and data lover to explore the MetaBrainz projects.

GSoC 2017: Hacking on ListenBrainz

Namaste!

I am Param Singh, an undergraduate at the National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, India, and I worked on ListenBrainz over the summer as part of the Google Summer of Code program. I started contributing code to ListenBrainz in January 2017 and have been working on new features and bug fixes since. I’ll be writing about the work I did and my experience working on LB in this blog post.

After a few of my patches had made it in and I was comfortable with the ListenBrainz codebase (which was a really nice example of software architecture for me), I talked with the LB team about what possible contributions I could make over the summer, and we decided that a Google BigQuery based statistics system is something that would be useful to have in ListenBrainz after we release a beta and have listen data that is permanently archived. I made a proposal for adding statistics to ListenBrainz which got accepted! During the community bonding period, we decided to try to get a solid and stable beta of ListenBrainz released before starting with the relatively large code additions that would be required by my project proposal. We tracked issues that we wanted fixed before a release in the MetaBrainz ticket tracker here. This work of fixing release blocking issues went into the coding period and we decided to continue working on a solid beta instead of adding new features for the time being.

I started with fixing bugs and adding new features to get a beta released as soon as possible. Some cool stuff I worked on during this time was dockerizing MessyBrainz (see PR here), migrating the codebases of MessyBrainz and ListenBrainz to Python 3 (PRs here and here) and improving the startup resilience of various parts of ListenBrainz to make sure that the server is able to self-heal (partially) if some part of it like RabbitMQ goes down (ticket here).

Later on, I did a big refactor of the LB code so that adding new modules would be easier in the future (PR here). I also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in our listen deduplication. Relevant pull requests for this are here and here.

Another feature I added to ListenBrainz while working on the beta was incremental imports. Earlier, LB didn’t keep track of previous imports of a user and did a full Last.FM import every time. However, now we keep track of the last time each user imported listens and only import new data since then. The PR adding incremental imports is here.

My mentor, Robert Kaye (ruaok) set up a test instance of the ListenBrainz server that was used by the community and as the community kept throwing their data at us, bugs kept popping up. A particularly weird bug caused LB to lose data for users with special characters in their usernames. The PR to fix this took a lot of time to create.

We kept on fixing bugs for a long time and the biggest thing I took away from this period of GSoC was the Ninety-ninety rule: «The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.» This summer has drilled this into my mind.

As soon as the beta was released, I started with writing code for statistics, making schema changes (PR here) and adding some user stats (PRs here and here). I’ll be continuing on the stats work after Summer of Code. The basic foundation of stats is mostly done and soon I’ll start with showing statistics to the users.

By the end of the official GSoC coding period, I have made 266 commits in the ListenBrainz codebase and have opened a total of 111 pull requests. The current production ListenBrainz running on https://listenbrainz.org has 253 commits by me, most of which were made during the GSoC period.

Over the summer, I have fallen in love with the MetaBrainz community and have learned a lot of stuff. I’m really looking forward to adding more features to ListenBrainz soon, so that the data that the community is contributing becomes useful to everyone. I loved working on a really cool open-source project like ListenBrainz this summer and am very thankful to Google for providing me this opportunity. I would encourage everyone reading this to give the ListenBrainz beta a try and contribute to ListenBrainz if possible.

GSoC 2017: Directly accessing MusicBrainz DB in CritiqueBrainz

Hello, everyone! This summer was fantastic for me!
I’m Suyash Garg, an undergraduate at National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur and I participated in Google Summer of Code 2017 contributing code to CritiqueBrainz. Alastair Porter mentored me during this GSoC programme. This post summarizes my contributions to the project and experiences that I had throughout the summer.

I started contributing to CritiqueBrainz in January, 2017 and before the start of the SoC programme, I mainly worked on writing raw SQL for retrieving data from the CB database and replacing the ORM code (CB-230). Other than that I worked on issues like CB-120, CB-235 and other minor bugs and issues. They were my first proper contributions to the open source world. Thank you MetaBrainz!!

For the Google Summer of Code 2017, my project involved retrieving data related to various entities (release-groups, artists, releases, events and places) directly from the MusicBrainz database instead of querying the MusicBrainz web service (CB-231). This became necessary as some pages on CB required to fetch too much data and thus made many requests to the MB web service. These pages were taking a long time to load. Thus, by connecting directly to the database, we could reduce the load time of these pages.

Here is a summary of my contributions to the project during the summer:

Accessing the MusicBrainz database
New Infrastructure is allowing us to easily read data directly from the MusicBrainz database. For accessing the database in the development environment, another service running the MusicBrainz database was added which uses an existing Docker image which the MusicBrainz project was already using. This allowed us to share resources between projects. I worked on adding an option to download the database dumps and import the data into the database (see PR#523). Also, I added the service in CB docker-compose files and updated the documentation for setting up the development environment (see PR#115 and PR#92).
Fetching data using mbdata.models
After setting up the development environment, my mentor suggested to me to use the mbdata package for writing queries to fetch data from the database instead of writing raw SQL. I worked on retrieving information for the entity: places and added helpers for fetching the relationship information. Following that, I worked on retrieving information for other entities (release-groups, releases, events, and artists). Also, since SQLAlchemy makes lazy queries to the database, a number of queries were being issued to the database. This could slow things down as for each query it was going to require one trip to the SQL server (network trip in production). So, as suggested by my mentor, I also worked on reducing the number of queries made for fetching data related to each entity (see PR#135). For pages that made a number of requests to the web service, I made this PR#121 for fetching information related to multiple entities at the same time.
Testing
For testing, the database queries are mocked using the unittest.mock Python package. The tests added make sure that the code (serializing RowProxy objects to dictionaries, caching, etc.) works properly (see PR#134). Adding up a new service (as a separate Docker container) in the test environment and running tests was taking too much time (in creating the tables and truncating them). So as suggested by my mentors, mocking the database queries was the best option. Throughout my GSoC period, I learned how important it was to write tests (especially when you break things more when you fix something) and make them run fast. I learned that «If tests don’t run fast, they would be a distraction rather than a help» (quoting from the book “The Art of Agile Development” by James Shore).

Other than these, I also worked on some UI/UX issues, namely CB-80 (adding option to filter releases with reviews), CB-84 (ordering release groups according to release year) and CB-261 (authenticating requests to Spotify Web API). CB-130 (reviewing entities with MBID redirects – see PR#145) was also solved while solving a production server issue.

This summer was awesome for me. I learned a lot of new things and techniques for writing better code. Thanks to my mentors, Alastair Porter and Roman Tsukanov. Also, great thanks to the lovely MetaBrainz community and Google for this opportunity. I’m really looking forward to keep contributing to CritiqueBrainz and to dive into other MetaBrainz projects.