MetaBrainz Summit 17

While the streets of Barcelona were filling up with the referendum conundrum, a bunch of people were spotted chattering and bantering, sometimes with pillows and colorful socks, searching for gelato.

Yes, that bunch of people would be us. 😀

Our annual MusicBrainz summit was held on September 30th–October 1st in the colorful, lively city of Barcelona. We had people (and chocolates) from nine countries: Spain, India, Germany, UK, USA, France, Estonia, Denmark, and Iceland.

Summit participants with *Brainz pillows
From left→right, top: Wieland (Mineo), Sambhav (samj1912), Sean (Leftmost Cat), Nicolás (reosarevok), Ben (LordSputnik), Jérôme (loujin), Alastair (alastairp); middle: Leo Verto, Freso, Michael (bitmap), Elizabeth (Quesito), Chhavi; bottom: Yvan (yvanzo), Rob (ruaok), Param (iliekcomputers), Suyash (ferbncode). Laurent (zas) behind the camera.


Having a majority of our team in a room with food obviously lead to lots of productive discussions. We talked about translations, recommendations engines, voting, and packaging. We also talked about SpamBrainz, user scripts being included as part of our projects, documentation, single sign-on for all Brainz, and a bunch of other things.

One of the nice things we could do this summit was to go over our user survey results. As you might remember, we had this banner on our site asking us to take part in a survey. The results gave us a good idea of our community in regards to what language they use, what Brainz project they use more, how do they come to know about us, and so on.

Summit session in progress
Summit session in progress.

We got to know what you like, but more importantly what you don’t. We heard all of you, and we are on it. We will publish a detailed report on that soon.

You cannot be in Barcelona with such a good lot of people and not end up exploring the city. The team ended up cycling on the streets of Barcelona (many times on the wrong side), climbing up to the mosaic-y Park Güell, snacking on pinchos and tapas, visiting the Pompeu Fabra University (where our AcousticBrainz project resides) and taking their daily after-lunch strolls through the Arc de Triomf.

Apart from that, some of the record-breaking points from the summit would be:

  • We had nice colorful pillows with all our kids (we mean, Brainz projects) printed on them. And summit t-shirts too.
  • The summit was live streamed on our YouTube channel, for all those who couldn’t make it. That went pretty well, with only minor technical difficulties, and it provided a good overview (literally! 🙂 ). For those who missed it (or want to rewatch it), the archived streams are available on YouTube.
  • We finally decided to improve the user experience of our projects (more on the blog about that later).
  • We worked on a new wonderful Sound Team recording while having a terrace barbeque hosted by Elizabeth.
    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/344725049″ params=”color=#00cc11&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
  • More gelato was eaten than ever before. (That shouldn’t be surprising.)

We’re wrapping up the summit with this blog, but we have all the memories preserved. Find the amazing moments captured by our in-house photographer Zas in his Facebook gallery, and those moments in motion in my own video here:

Until next year,
Cheers 😀

Server update, 2017-10-31

Boo! Release cycle was interrupted during the MetaBrainz Summit 17 and is now back to the usual period of two weeks. This release contains a lot of code refactoring, some admin tooling, and a few fixes. Optimizations were made to parts of the web service, particularly for JSON and browse requests. Anti-spam measures taken in July have been relaxed, as well as the period of time allowed for auto-editing newly added entities. The git tag is v-2017-10-31.

Bug

  • [MBS-9313] – Adding first release event should be an auto-edit
  • [MBS-9513] – User interface locales with country code are not working

Task

  • [MBS-9488] – Rename “limited user” to “new user”
  • [MBS-9519] – Hide biography, homepage, and collections description of limiter users from not-logged-in users

Improvement

  • [MBS-9496] – Modbot “ac being changed because of name change” edit note is confusing
  • [MBS-9505] – Extend time period to edit your own entries to 1 day
  • [MBS-9515] – Block adding Wikipedia relationships to anchors

Classical Clean Up #2: Mahler

It’s time for our second Classical Community Clean Up! Since our first clean up of Debussy was quite successful, we are back for another!

Haven’t heard about our new favorite task at hand? You can read about our first clean up on the forums here. Come join us in paying a little special attention to classical masters!

This time around the community has chosen the late Romantic composer Gustav Mahler (who was quite the conductor as well!). We encourage you during this time to not only help the community clean up Mahler’s metadata, but to learn more about Mahler as well.

The clean up events officially last one month (but can be continued until they’re complete!) and are meant to utilize our community’s power to clean up our classical metadata. If you are new to MusicBrainz, to classical editing, or both, we have a whole tool box and plenty of advice, tips and tricks to share. We advise you bookmark the tool box—it’s quite helpful! Our team of classical music enthusiasts will also provide plenty of support on our forums, so come join us!

What we will work on:

  • Reviewing the existing works to make sure there are no duplicates and the information looks correct, and add any missing works (keep in mind while it is perfectly ok to add lost works, it’d be good to specify they’re lost so that people don’t accidentally use them on recordings).
  • Check the release list for anything that doesn’t follow the classical guidelines. Not only that should be fixed, but that’s a good sign of the recording and relationship info being incomplete too.
  • Check the recording list. The only recordings that should be here by the end of the cleanup are of Mahler himself as a performer (probably mostly this piano roll album). Anything else being here should have performer relationships added to it if missing, then the artist credits for the recording should be changed to list the main performers (you can use the relevant script for that). Try to fix the whole release the recording is on, even if it’s not all by Mahler! But in the case of a very large compilation, it’s always acceptable to fix only the Mahler content on it.
  • Add missing Mahler recordings! If you have enough info to add a Mahler release we’re missing, that’s always useful. Just make sure to try to add as much info as possible from the get go, so we don’t have to clean that addition up as well 🙂

Don’t know where to begin? Join us and ask, let us help you find a jumping in point! Here to another great month of Classical Clean Up with Mahler!

Live streaming MB Summit 17

The MetaBrainz Summit 17 is slowly starting up, with everyone having arrived in Barcelona now, and people have already started discussing a bit in the corners of the MetaBrainz office. (As well as devouring a lot of chocolate!)

The summit officially starts tomorrow however (we’re aiming to begin at around 11 AM Barcelona time (CEST)), and while we’re having probably the most people at a summit ever, we recognise that a lot of people from the community are not able to be here for one reason or another, so we’re going to try something new tomorrow: live streaming the summit!

We’ll be live streaming on our YouTube account at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClC89t81khDKLCVs45prLqg/live – there will be a live chat as well, which I will try to monitor as best as I can. Keep in mind that this is a first for us, so sorry in advance for the technical difficulties we will almost certainly encounter. 🙂

Server update, 2017-09-18

This release enables relationship credits for areas and places, contains more URL cleanup & auto-select fixes, and changes the behavior of the artist-merge option to rename credits to only rename those that match the original artist names.

The git tag is v-2017-09-18.

Bug

  • [MBS-9380] – ReverbNation URLs are not correctly cleaned up
  • [MBS-9394] – Upper case CD Baby URLs are blocked as “not allowed or incorrectly formatted”
  • [MBS-9446] – PartialDate is missing a TO_JSON method
  • [MBS-9455] – “Performance of” attributes not showing if rel is orderable
  • [MBS-9471] – Relationship editor breaks if two link attribute types have the same name

New Feature

  • [MBS-9469] – Add autoselect for VIAF for places

Task

  • [MBS-9316] – Add Operabase to the otherDBs whitelist
  • [MBS-9353] – Do not show collections or user profiles to people not logged in

Improvement

  • [MBS-9019] – Extend relationship credits to places
  • [MBS-9303] – Add support for Facebook’s fb.com domain
  • [MBS-9334] – Enable URL cleanup for Recochoku artist URLs
  • [MBS-9435] – Update Rock.com.ar URL format
  • [MBS-9444] – Update the YouTube logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9457] – Update the Patreon logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9458] – “Rename artist and relationship credits” should only rename matching credits
  • [MBS-9459] – Enable relationship credits for Areas
  • [MBS-9467] – Add support for fallback Patreon user URLs with numeric ID

 

New MusicBrainz virtual machine released

I have recently released a new MusicBrainz virtual machine. This virtual machine includes all the important bits of MusicBrainz so you can run your own copy! I’d been hoping for feedback if people have encountered any problems with this VM, but I’ve not received any feedback. Here is to hoping that no news is good news!

For information on how to download, install and access this new virtual machine, take a look at our MusicBrainz Server setup page. The new VM can be downloaded from here via direct download or a torrent download.

Most of the outstanding bugs should be fixed in this release — if not, please open a new ticket.

ListenBrainz Alpha disappearing in 30 days

Since we released the beta of ListenBrainz six weeks ago, people have moved over and imported their listen histories onto the beta site, which is great. While we think that everyone who needs to migrate listens off the old server has already done so, we’re going to give people another 30 days in case anyone hasn’t gotten around to it yet.

If you’ve never submitted original listens to the alpha server, this does not concern you! In fact, if this blog post is confusing to you, it probably means that you’re not affected by us turning off the alpha server on 18 October, 2017.

Thanks!

P.S. We’ve collected 50M listens on the beta site!

 

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

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