MetaBrainz Blog – Page 5 – MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog

Robert Kaye

It is with profound sadness that the MetaBrainz Board of Directors announces the unexpected passing of our Founder and Executive Director, Robert Kaye.

Robert’s vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.

The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.

C4GT 2025: Integrate Internet Archive Into BrainzPlayer

Hey Everyone 👋!

I am Rayyan Seliya (AKA rayyan_seliya123 on IRC and RayyanSeliya on GitHub), a prefinal year student at Indian Institute of Information Technology Agartala, India, studying Computer Science. I was thrilled to be selected as a contributor in the C4GT (Code For Govt Tech) 2025 program under the MetaBrainz Foundation. My project focused on integrating music streaming from Internet Archive into BrainzPlayer. It was mentored by Kartik Ohri (lucifer on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC).

Project Overview

ListenBrainz has a number of music discovery features that use BrainzPlayer to facilitate track playback. BrainzPlayer (BP) is a custom React component in ListenBrainz that uses multiple data sources to search and play a track. As of now, it supports Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and Funkwhale as music services. It would be useful for BrainzPlayer to support the Internet Archive, which hosts a vast collection of digitized recordings from physical releases of the early 20th century, including 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings. Each recording comes with audio streaming and metadata web services that can be used to retrieve metadata automatically and embed a player in ListenBrainz using BrainzPlayer.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-02-12

We have a small release coming mid-week for once since we wanted to deploy some behind-the-scenes updates to remove potential vulnerabilities. Other than that, this release includes a few small URL and interface improvements, and converts a few more pages to use React.

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 SuperSaltyGamer for having contributed to the code. Thanks to chaban, Griomo, iamdrowning, Raman Sinclair, salo.rock and SuperSaltyGamer for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to BestSteve, EmO686, Lise Andersen, djtusa, karpuzikov, m67186636, mfmeulenbelt, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-02-12.0.

Picard 3 alpha 2 released

A second alpha version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3 is now available. This focuses on fixing issues that were found in the previous alpha 1 as well as some minor improvements and updated translations.

Download links and a list of changes since Picard 3 alpha 1 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

As before this is still an early pre-release. While we have all the major features implemented and we are rather confident in the current code, it is still a development release and it is expected there will be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the alpha version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

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

Picard 3 Alpha Release

Today the Picard team is releasing an early alpha version of the long awaited major update to MusicBrainz Picard. Picard 3 has a lot of changes over the previous versions, and this is the first time we make it available for a larger audience to test.

Please be clear that this is an early alpha release. While we have all the major features implemented and we are rather confident in the current code, it is still a development release and it is expected there will be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

Below is an overview about the most significant changes and new features.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-01-19

Another year starts, and another MusicBrainz update that brings with it small improvements and fixes a bunch of bugs! In addition to a good amount of URL handling improvements, we have found the tables of contents for our documentation which had decided to play hide and seek over the holidays.

Additionally, we have blocked submitting tags that include commas via the API. Tags with commas were never supposed to be supported (commas are generally our tag separator character), and their existence broke in-site tag handling, but the API would until now accept them without complaints. From now on they will be rejected and you will be asked to try again without the commas.

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 helpimnotdrowning, kellnerd, Shreeshanth Shetty and SuperSaltyGamer for having contributed to the code. Thanks to chaban, helpimnotdrowning, HibiscusKazeneko, ivoireshi, jesus2099, kellnerd, SuperSaltyGamer, wileyfoxyx and yomo12 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to -alex., Besnik, KenParker_CN, NorwayFun, Philipp Wolfer, dumbbird, gaahmua, imgradeone, liilliil, salo.rock, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-01-19.0.

Year in Music 2025 – new and improved!

#YearinMusic 2025 is out now!

A bit like Spotify’s Wrapped (but way super better, in my extremely biased opinion) your ListenBrainz Year in Music report summarizes your listening habits from throughout the year 2025… and now, back through time!

Read more after the jump, or just check it for real real by clicking here to see your report or here if you don’t have an account.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-12-16

We are back with one last small release before the holidays, which mostly improves URL handling, fixing some broken cleanups and allowing linking to a few new databases. We are also including one small new feature, allowing to browse events by series in the API (to get, for example, all the concerts in a tour in one go). And finally, recording and release group edits entered while editing a release will now also indicate the release they were entered from, mirroring the feature that we recently added for the relationship editor.

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 Jim DeLaHunt and owlpharoah for having contributed to the code. Thanks to Anesidora, Aszazin, dvirtz, fabi123, finalsummer, Griomo, Raman Sinclair, Relaxo5, sanojjonas, yindesu and xodus for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Avava_Ava, Besnik, Echelon, GABG, LeoVallejo, Pioneers, kKZvtcqX, karpuzikov, mfmeulenbelt, miausalvaje, salo.rock, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2025-12-16.0.

We can’t have nice things… because of AI scrapers

In the past few months the MetaBrainz team has been fighting a battle against unscrupulous AI companies ignoring common courtesies (such as robots.txt) and scraping the Internet in order to build up their AI models. Rather than downloading our dataset in one complete download, they insist on loading all of MusicBrainz one page at a time. This of course would take hundreds of years to complete and is utterly pointless. In doing so, they are overloading our servers and preventing legitimate users from accessing our site.

Now the AI scrapers have found ListenBrainz and are hitting a number of our API endpoints for their nefarious data gathering purposes. In order to protect our services from becoming overloaded, we’ve made the following changes:

The /metadata/lookup API endpoints (GET and POST versions) now require the caller to send an Authorization token in order for this endpoint to work.
The ListenBrainz Labs API endpoints for mbid-mapping, mbid-mapping-release and mbid-mapping-explain have been removed. Those were always intended for debugging purposes and will also soon be replaced with a new endpoints for our upcoming improved mapper.
LB Radio will now require users to be logged in to use it (and API endpoint users will need to send the Authorization header). The error message for logged in users is a bit clunky at the moment; we’ll fix this once we’ve finished the work for this year’s Year in Music.

Sorry for these hassles and no-notice changes, but they were required in order to keep our services functioning at an acceptable level.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-11-03

For this release we have a bunch of URL improvements, a couple of bug fixes (including one which was causing broken cover art reorder edits), and some progress in the React conversion. Additionally, address verification emails will be sent with the new email service now, and look substantially nicer!

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 dvirtz, Jade Ellis, jesus2099 and owlpharoah for having contributed to the code. Thanks to dvirtz, Freso, Jade Ellis, jesus2099, nope, practik, Time Dilation and zabey for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, craftersmine, Dino RTX, Echelon, hamaryns, KenParker_CN, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, vacuousVersifier, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2025-11-03.0.