A belated congratulations to the 7 contributors that we selected to work with for this year’s Google Summer of Code program!
The competition was fierce this year. MetaBrainz received a huge amount of high quality applications. Narrowing it down gets harder every year – what these contributors did right is getting in early, engaging with our community, presenting specific and detailed proposals, and proving excellent communication skills and the ability to integrate our feedback back into their proposals.
You can find the whole list on the GSOC website but here is a TL;DR breakdown for you:
MusicBrainz proposals
Automate areas management (Prathamesh Ghatole) MusicBrainz refers to external databases like Wikidata & GeoNames to keep its area metadata up-to-date. However, currently this is done with a cumbersome manual process. We aim to tackle this issue by building a new “AreaBot” to automatically maintain and update areas in MusicBrainz using Wikidata.
ListenBrainz proposals
Interactive artist similarity graph (Arshdeep Singh) Provide an intuitive way for users to analyze relationships between artists and discover new artists with a music style similar to their favorites.
Feed Section in Android app (Jasjeet Singh) Similarly to the feed page on the ListenBrainz website, the up and coming ListenBrainz Android app is missing a feed section to keep users up to date with music recommended by their friends, discover new favorite songs and send music to one another.
Dataset Hoster improvements (Vishal Singh AKA Pixelpenguin) The Dataset Hoster is one of those behind-the-scenes projects that enables us to very quickly upload queryable datasets to be used for music recommendations. The goal of this GSOC project is to improve its usability both in terms of the interface as well as the formatting of the resulting data.
Integrating Apple Music for playback (Vardan Saini AKA Vscode) ListenBrainz users will soon be able to link their Apple Music account to play music directly from ListenBrainz, like we currently do for Spotify users.
(And if one day Apple decides to return a time and date in their user history, we’ll be able to save a user’s playback!)
BookBrainz proposals
Import open databases (David Kellner AKA kellnerd) We want to provide a way to import available open-source and public collections of library records into the database while still ensuring that they meet BookBrainz’ high data quality standards with manual user verification.
Administration system (Shivam Awasthi) BookBrainz is direly missing an administration interface and a flexible privilege hierarchy to allow selected users to filter spam entries and take special actions such as adding entity or relationship types without requiring direct database modification.
And thank you to everyone else who submitted a proposal with us !
What about GSOC 2024?
Reading this and feeling inspired for next year’s GSoC? Ongoing connection and communicating is key. To ascend to the next level of GSoC eligibility, join us on the MetaBrainz IRC channel early on and show us your initiative and your skills !
The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt
After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.
We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!
A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
OAuth hack session
With everyone together, the days before the summit proper were used for some productive hack sessions. The largest of which, involving the whole team, was the planning and beginning of a single OAuth location – meaning that everyone will be sent to a single place to login, from all of our projects.
A great warmup for the summit, we also leapt forward on the project, from identifying how exactly it would work, to getting substantial amounts of code and frontend elements in place.
Project recaps
“I broke this many things this year”
To kick off the summit, after a heart-warming introduction by Mayhem, we were treated to the annual recap for each project. For the full experience, feast your eyeballs on the Day 1 summit video – or click the timestamps below. What follows is a eyeball-taster, some simplistic and soothing highlights.
We’re witnessing people getting fed up with streaming and focusing on a more engaged music experience, which is exactly the type of audience we wish to cater to, so this may work out well for us.
In 2023 we want to expand our offerings to grow our supporters (ListenBrainz)
Currently staying lean to prepare for incoming inflation/recession/depression
Continuing discussion and developments re. how MetaBrainz affects LGBTQIA2+ folks
New spammer and sockpuppet countermeasures
Room to improve moderation and reports, particularly cross-project
Again, for delicious technical details, and to hear lots of lovely contributors get thanked, watch the full recording.
Discussions
“How will we fix all the things alastairp broke”
Next (not counting sleep, great meals, and some sneaky sightseeing) we moved to open discussion of various topics. These topics were submitted by the team, topics or questions intended to guide our direction for the next year. Some of these topics were discussed in break-out groups. You can read the complete meeting minutes in the summit minutes doc.
Ratings
Ratings were added years ago, and remain prominent on MusicBrainz. The topic for discussion was: What is their future? Shall we keep them? This was one of the most popular debates at the summit, with input from the whole spectrum of rating lovers and haters. In the end it was decided to gather more input from the community before making any decisions. We invite you to regale us with tales of your useage, suggestions, and thoughts in the resulting forum thread. 5/5 discussion.
CritiqueBrainz
Similar to ratings, CritiqueBrainz has been around for a number of years now and hasn’t gained much traction. Another popular topic, with lots of discussion regarding how we could encourage community submissions, improvements that could be made, how we can integrate it more closely with the other projects. Our most prolific CB contributor, sound.and.vision, gave some invaluable feedback via the stream. Ultimately it was decided that we are happy to sunset CB as a website (without hurry), but retain its API and integrate it into our other projects. Bug fixes and maintenance will continue, but new feature development will take place in other projects.
Integrating Aerozol (design)
Aerozol (the author of this blog post, in the flesh) kicked us off by introducing himself with a little TED talk about his history and his design strengths and weaknesses. He expressed interest in being part of the ‘complete user journey’, and helping to pull MetaBrainz’ amazing work in front of the general public, while being quite polite about MeB’ current attempts in this regard. It was decided that Aerozol should focus on over-arching design roadmaps that can be used to guide project direction, and that it is the responsibility of the developers to make sure new features and updates have been reviewed by a designer (including fellow designer, Monkey).
MusicBrainz Nomenclature
Can MetaBrainz sometimes be overly-fond of technical language? To answer that, ask yourself this: Did we just use the word ’nomenclature’ instead of something simpler, like ‘words’ or ‘terms’, in this section title? Exactly. With ListenBrainz aiming for a more general audience, who expect ‘album’ instead of ‘release group’, and ‘track’ instead of ‘recording’, this was predicted to become even more of an issue. Although it was acknowledged that it’s messy and generally unsatisfying to use different terms for the same things within the same ‘MetaBrainz universe’, we decided that it was fine for ListenBrainz to use more casual language for its user-facing bits, while retaining the technical language behind the scenes/in the API.
A related issue was also discussed, regarding how we title and discuss groupings of MusicBrainz entities, which is currently inconsistent, such as “core entities”, “primary entities”, “basic entities”. No disagreements with yvanzo’s suggestions were raised, the details of which can be found in ticket MBS-12552.
ListenBrainz Roadmap
Another fun discussion (5/5 – who said ratings weren’t useful!), it was decided that for 2023 we should prioritize features that bring in new users. Suggestions revolved around integrating more features into ListenBrainz directly (for instance, integrating MusicBrainz artist and album details, CritiqueBrainz reviews and ratings), how to promote sharing (please, share your thoughts and ideas in the resulting forum thread), making landing pages more inviting for new users, and how to handle notifications.
From Project Dev to Infrastructure Maintenance
MetaBrainz shares a common ‘tech org’ problem, stemming from working in niche areas which require high levels of expertise. We have many tasks that only one or a few people know how to do. It was agreed we should have another doc sprint, which was scheduled for the third week of January (16th-20th).
Security Management / Best Practices
Possible password and identity management solutions were discussed, and how we do, and should, deal with security advisories and alerts. It was agreed that there would be a communal security review the first week of each month. There is a note that “someone” should remember to add this to the meeting agenda at the right time. Let’s see how that pans out.
Search & SOLR
Did you know that running and calibrating search engines is a difficult Artform? Indeed, a capital a Artform. Our search team discussed a future move from SOLR v7 to SOLR v9 (SOLR is MusicBrainz’ search engine). It was discussed how we could use BookBrainz as a guinea pig by moving it from ElasticSearch (the search engine BB currently runs on) to SOLR, and try finally tackle multi-entity search while we are at it. If you really like reading about ‘cores’, ‘instances’, and whatever ‘zookeeper’ is, then these are your kind of meeting minutes.
Weblate
We currently use Transifex to translate MusicBrainz to other languages (Sound interesting? Join the community translation effort!), but are planning to move to Weblate, an open-source alternative that we can self-host. Pros and cons were discussed, and it seems that Weblate can provide a number of advantages, including discussion of translation strings, and ease of implementation across all our projects. Adjusting it to allow for single-sign on will involve some work. Video tutorials and introducing the new tool to the community was put on the to-do list.
Listenbrainz Roadmap and UI/UX
When a new user comes to ListenBrainz, where are they coming from, what do they see, where are we encouraging them to click next? Can users share and invite their friends? Items discussed were specific UI improvements, how we can implement ‘calls to action’, and better sharing tools (please contribute to the community thread if you have ideas). It was acknowledged that we sometimes struggle at implementing sharing tools because the team is (largely) not made up of social media users, and that we should allow for direct sharing as well as downloading and then sharing. Spotify, Apple Music, and Last.FM users were identified as groups that we should or could focus on.
Messages and Notifications
We agreed that we should have a way of notifying users across our sites, for site-user as well as user-user interactions. There should be an ‘inbox-like’ centre for these, and adequate granular control over the notification options (send me emails, digests, no emails, etc.), and the notification UI should show notifications from all MeB projects, on every site. We discussed how a messaging system could hinder or help our anti-spam efforts, giving users a new conduit to message each other, but also giving us possible control (as opposed to the current ‘invisible’ method of letting users direct email each other). It was decided to leave messaging for now (if at all), and focus on notifications.
Year in Music
We discussed what we liked (saveable images, playlists) and what we thought could be improved (lists, design, sharing, streamlining), about last years Year in Music. We decided that this year each component needs to have a link so that it can be embedded, as well as sharing tools. We decided to publish our Year in Music in the new year, with the tentative date of Wednesday January 4th, and let Spotify go to heck with their ’not really a year yet’ December release. We decided to use their December date to put up a blog post and remind people to get their listens added or imported in time for the real YIM!
Mobile Apps
The mobile app has been making great progress, with a number of substantial updates over the last year. However it seems to be suffering an identity crisis, with people expecting it to be a tagger on the level of Picard (or not really knowing what they expect), and then leaving bad reviews. After a lot of discussion (another popular and polarising topic!) it was agreed to make a new slimmed-down ListenBrainz app to cater to the ListenBrainz audience, and leave the troubled MusicBrainz app history behind. An iOS app isn’t out of the question, but something to be left for the future. akshaaatt has beaten me to the punch with his blog post on this topic.
MusicBrainz UI/UX Roadmap
The MusicBrainz dev and design team got together to discuss how they could integrate design and a broader roadmap into the workflow. It was agreed that designers would work in Figma (a online layout/mockup design tool), and developers should decide case-by-case whether an element should be standalone or shared among sites (using the design system). We will use React-Bootstrap for shared components. As the conversion to React continues it may also be useful to pull in designers to look at UI improvements as we go. It was agreed to hold regular team meetings to make sure the roadmap gets and stays on track and to get the redesign (!) rolling.
Thank you
Revealed! Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt
On behalf of everyone who attended, a huge thanks to the wonderful denizens of Barcelona and OfficeBrainz for making us all feel so welcome, and MetaBrainz for making this trip possible. See you next year!
I am Ansh Goyal (ansh on IRC), an undergraduate student from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and introduced a new feature, CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities.
I was mentored by Alastair Porter (alastairp on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions made for this project and my experiences throughout the journey.
Proposal
Book reviews are a glimpse into a world you may or may not choose to enter. Reviews give books greater visibility and a greater chance of getting found by more readers. BookBrainz and CritiqueBrainz should enable users to rate and write reviews directly through the website using the CritiqueBrainz API.
For GSoC ’22, I made a proposal that aimed at adding CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities.
Community Bonding
During the community bonding period, my mentors, Alastair Porter and Nicolas Pelletier, helped me create a streamlined pathway to move along with the project. We also worked on various tickets like CB-433, CB-434, and CB-410 and added multiple features.
So we decided first to complete reviewing BookBrainz edition groups thoroughly from CritiqueBrainz as well as BookBrainz, and then extend the project for all other entities like literary work, author, and Series.
We discussed the various database and structural changes involved in the project, like adding BookBrainz Database in CritiqueBrainz, adding tables in BookBrainz DB, etc., the page designs and overall improvements.
Now that the database was set up and ready for us to work on, it was time to write SQL queries for fetching the edition groups and all the other associated information, like identifiers and relationships. I made the code reusable to prevent duplication while fetching data for different entity types. So I opened a PR for it.
So now it was the time to allow users to review an edition group in CritiqueBrainz. For this, I made a few changes in the database, allowed BB entity types, and then added pages for their reviews in this PR. Then I worked on showing the information fetched from the BookBrainz database to the users on their entity pages.
Then to allow users to search edition groups, I worked on adding an option to search BB entities with the help of the search API already present in BB. This feature was implemented in this PR.
After adding support for Edition Groups, it was time to add support for other entity types. This expansion was very smooth because of the reusable components created by then. So I added support for Literary Works, Authors and Series. Later we discovered that the series items were not being ordered correctly, so this was fixed in #460.
During this process, my mentors and I discovered some improvements and refactoring, which were done in #445, #451 and #456.
After adding support for all the entities, I added support for showing the relationships between the entities on the respective entity pages. These included showing Author-Work, Work-Edition Group, and Work-Work relationships.
CritiqueBrainz Author’s Page
While enabling CritiqueBrainz to review entities, I was also working on BookBrainz to allow users to view reviews and ratings and post them from the entity’s page.
So I started adding support to fetch and display reviews and ratings for edition groups which involved creating a route which would handle getting and pushing reviews to CritiqueBrainz.
After this step, it was time to connect BookBrainz with CritiqueBrainz. This involved authentication using OAuth login. To add this feature, I first added a table ‘external_service_oauth’ in the database and then in the ORM.
Then I added routes to allow user login to CritiqueBrainz, handled the callback, and saved the tokens in the database. After that, the next thing was to allow users to post reviews from the entity page. For that, I create a modal similar to the one in ListenBrainz (to maintain consistency).
BookBrainz
After completing my project, I began working on my stretch goals and starting with unifying reviews for entities common in both BookBrainz and MusicBrainz databases. We decided that if an entity exists in both databases, we show the reviews for all the entities on the entity page (PR).
Overall Experience
I am incredibly grateful to my mentors for their constant guidance and support throughout my project. I learned a lot of technical concepts and improved the quality of my code during this journey. I had a wonderful time interacting with the amazing folks at MetaBrainz and exchanging valuable thoughts during our weekly meetings.
I would love to thank Google and the MetaBrainz Foundation for providing me with this great opportunity!
Hi, I am Shubham gupta (IRC Shubh) pursuing my bachelor’s from the National Institute of Technology, Kurushetra. This year I participated in Google Summer of Code and implemented a new editor in Bookbrainz.
In this project, I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (IRC monkey). The purpose of this blog is to summarize my contribution made for this project and share my experiences along the way.
Before GSoC
I joined metabrainz at the end of November’21, due to my affection for novels I instantly fell in love with BookBrainz project. I initially started working on small bug fixes and typo corrections but later shifted to work on more challenging features.
My first challenging work was to pre-fill the current entity editor with POST requests which was required for user scripts to work and also created some user scripts to help simplify the creation process.
For GSoC’22, I made a proposal to work on implementing a unified form on BookBrainz.
My main motivation behind this project was to make the entity creation process more intuitive and simpler for new users. The purpose of this project is to unify all the workflows of entity creation into a simpler book interface, this abstracts away the BookBrainz specifics for users and provides them an easy interface to work with.
Though a lot has changed since the proposal, from design to implementation details, the main idea behind the project remained unchanged.
Community Bonding
During this period, I worked with my mentor to finalize the design for the editor. This included a lot of back & forth discussion but finally, we ended up picking a base design that was similar to how we choose a book: we first go through the book’s cover and back cover, then its details and inner contents.
I also discussed a new timeline with my mentor which incorporated my university classes and exams. Following this I started implementing the editor from this period itself.
Coding Period
First Phase
By this phase, I completed all the mockups and made relevant changes in design as suggested by community members.
We ended up with the following design, also later we added a summary section as a new tab to make reviewing new entities easier.
unified-form mock
I started working on the new editor routes which can support multiple entity submissions for the creation and later added support for editing as well.
Since a lot of implementation was similar to existing entity routes, the main thing that was missing was to unify them into one api and make it support temporary BBIDs for new entities.
The main idea behind keeping temporary BBIDs was to allow late submission of entities, meaning new entities would only be created when the user submits the whole form. This allowed a user to undo their actions and gave them more granular control over entity creation/modification. But following this approach resulted in a lot of duplicate code which was hard to generalize due to temporary ids; this was later fixed in the second phase.
I completed working on the routes part with suitable tests and started working on the React front-end. I started by setting up a Redux store to handle multiple entity states, after some discussion with my mentor we ended up going with the state design that segregates each entity into their own states.
At the end of this phase, the editor looked something like this
First Phase Screenshot
Second Phase
During this period I continued working on the editor interface since that is the meat of the project it took most of the time of this project.
The challenging part of managing a large store like we had was to minimize the state updates as much as possible, since this was so crucial for performance I spent about a week reading redux articles and profiling editor state. All this paid off and resulted in blazingly fast editors (entity/unified-form) with minimal state update calls, which also benefited the existing editing pages.
The solution was to reduce the scope of a redux state by memoizing the components as much as possible and caching the results of expensive calculations which reduced component load time drastically.
After implementing all entity creation workflows, I moved to linking them, either through relationship or by some other attributes.
This linking process needs to be automatic and users don’t have to know the relationships, they should also be able to opt-out of linking specific entities with respective checkboxes.
An example of linking entities is Series-Work, where selecting a Work already adds it to a Series item.
Unified Form Series Editor
We also introduce a major change in the way we submit the entities: we now submit new entities directly to the server. This reduced the duplicate code by half as compared to before since now we don’t have to manage those temporary ids anymore. This also resulted in reducing the amount of work potentially lost when an error occurs during filling the form.
I also wrote mocha/enzyme tests for required React components. This is all for the frontend PR.
I made the follow-up PRs to improve UI and introduced bug fixes: #872, #871, #874
Overall Experience
I enjoyed working together with my mentor on such a large project. I learned a lot during my journey and understood the importance of different phases of software development. I realized the importance of carefully designing the application and discussing the ideas with other team members. I also got to know a lot about testing and why it is so important for large projects like this, overall the best learning experience I could ask for.
Also, the members of the MetaBrainz foundation are very supportive and help each other to resolve issues. Lastly special thanks to my mentor Nicolas Pelletier who helped me a lot during my GSoC journey. He always supported me and encouraged me even when things weren’t looking good. He is truly one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met!
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.
Hi everyone, I am Prabal Singh currently studying in Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. This summer I participated in Google Summer of Code and developed a new feature – User Collections – for the project BookBrainz.
Today we come with a big BookBrainz website update that allows you to merge duplicate entities!
Being able to clean up the database is an essential step towards importing public bibliographic records and catalogs from partner websites. As with MusicBrainz, you can visit an entity page on BookBrainz and click on a button to add an entity to a merge queue. You can merge multiple entities in one go easily.
After clicking the merge button you will be presented with a page that lets you review and select the correct information in case of conflicting data. The revision history of merged entities is preserved, and in the near future you’ll be able undo merges.
This latest website update also adds annotations for any information that does not fit into the existing format, some small design improvements and bug fixes.
We’ve also added the ability to search for users on the search page. This last feature will come in handy soon as we introduce collaborative User Collections; stay tuned!
The 2019 MetaBrainz Summit took place on 27th–29th of September 2019 in Barcelona, Spain at the MetaBrainz HQ. The Summit is a chance for MetaBrainz staff and the community to gather and plan ahead for the next year. This report is a recap of what was discussed and what lies ahead for the community.
For the last several years, one of the things our community has struggled with is a lack of active voters. We’ve tried to implement various measures to decrease the need for voters and load for the wonderful ones that actually do actively look through edits and help vote on them—e.g., making more edits auto‐edits and decreasing amount of time edits stay open. However, the edit queue is still quite unwieldy and as such we’ve kept trying to come up with other ways to decrease the load on our contributors.
Over the past few months since our last summit, we’ve been working on training AIs, both for recommendation engines and data analytics, and for helping out with spam, but it soon appeared that we had another valuable dataset: our history of 15,693,824 votes from 16,336 voters and 56,374,198 edits from 2,007,134 editors. It turns out that this is an unintended side-effects of the editing and voting system in that it creates a paper trail of our habits as a community and our collective mind.
A paper trail that you could, say, train a neural network on. And that’s just what we did.
By feeding data from our top voters, we’ve been able to train our network to replicate with 96.4% accuracy the personality when using the other half as test data. That figure is the average for 300 bots each based on our top 300 voters.
We were really impressed with the results but the story doesn’t stop there…
Meet BrainzVoter
The next logical step was to create our own Frankenstein’s monster. By training on 70% of our entire set of votes, we gave birth to a voting bot that represents the essence of our community. “BrainzVoter”, as we dubbed it, is precise and scores a staggering 98.9% accuracy on test data and comparing with the other 30% of our dataset.
Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.
Edit filters
In view of the recent developments on net neutrality taken by the European Union with articles 11 & 13/17, MusicBrainz is taking measures to protect against copyright infringement: we’re implementing automatic edit filters. BrainzVoter will use the latest in NLP technology to understand what you, the editors, write in your edit notes, and use this understanding to vote on your edit. It will also inspect any URLs included in the edit note to cross-reference the data. The aggregate data will not be available to the public.
Edits with better and clearer notes will become more likely to pass. Consider this a good opportunity to (re‐)read How to Write Edit Notes!
How will this affect me as an editor?
Not much will change, and you can continue doing what you were doing before! We recommend that you take the time to make clear statements in your edit notes.
You will also be able to use a system of tags to express intent, using for example #typo #correction in the content of your edit text. Syntax highlighting and shortcuts will be available in the text editor.
In the end, by removing the need for humans to look over edits, the bot should give you, the editor, more time to add and edit and fix data in MusicBrainz, without having to spend time checking everyone else’s edits or worry about other editors disagreeing with yours!
After a brief trial period on MusicBrainz, this system will be adapted and also rolled out to BookBrainz.
We hope you will share our excitement for the benefits of automation and help us improve our training models over time. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.
CritiqueBrainz Author’s Page
BookBrainz
MetaBrainz Blog 
