Tag: CritiqueBrainz

MetaBrainz Summit 2022

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.

State of MetaBrainz (Mayhem) (4:50)

  • Mayhem reminds the team that they’re kicking ass!
  • 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

State of ListenBrainz (lucifer) (57:10)

  • 18.4 thousand all time users
  • 595 million all time listens
  • 92.3 million new listens submitted this year (so far)
  • Stacks of updates in the last year
  • Spotify metadata cache has been a game changer

State of Infrastructure (Zas) (1:14:40)

  • We are running 47 servers, from 42 in 2019
  • 27 physical (Hetzner), 12 virtual (Hetzner), 8 active instances (Google)
  • 150 Terabytes served this year
  • 99.9% availability of core services
  • And lots of detailed server, Docker, and ansible updates, and all the speed and response time stats you can shake a stick at.

State of MusicBrainz (Bitmap) (1:37:50)

  • React conversion coming along nicely
  • Documentation improved (auto-generated schema diagrams)
  • SIR crashes fixed, schema changes, stacks of updates (genres!)
  • 1,600 active weekly editors (stable from previous years)
  • 3,401,467 releases in the database
  • 391,536 releases added since 2021, ~1,099 per day
  • 29% of releases were added by the top 25 editors
  • 51% of releases were added with some kind of importer
  • 12,607,881 genre tag votes
  • 49% of release groups have at least one genre
  • 300% increase in the ‘finnish tango’ genre (3, was 1 in 2021)

State of AcousticBrainz (alastairp) (21:01:07)

  • R.I.P. (for more on the shut down of AB, see the blog post)
  • 29,460,584 submissions
  • 1.2 million hits per day still (noting that the level of trust/accuracy of this information is very low)
  • Data dumps, with tidying of duplicates, will be released when the site goes away

State of CritiqueBrainz (alastairp) (2:17:05)

  • 10,462 total reviews
  • 443 reviews in 2022
  • Book review support!
  • General bug squashing

State of BookBrainz (Monkey) (2:55:00)

  • A graph with an arrow going up is shown, everyone applauds #business #stonks
  • Twice the amount of monthly new users compared to 2021
  • 1/7th of all editions were added in the last year
  • Small team delivering lots of updates – author credits, book ratings/reviews, unified addition form
  • Import plans for the future (e.g. Library of Congress)

State of Community (Freso) (3:25:00)

  • 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!

GSoC’22: CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities

Greetings, Everyone!

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.

Coding Period

The coding period starts with importing the BB database in CB to fetch the required information and perform tests. 

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!

GSoC 2021: Pin Recordings and CritiqueBrainz Integration in ListenBrainz

Hi! I am Jason Dao, aka jasondk on IRC. I’m a third year undergrad at University of California, Davis. This past summer, I’ve been working with the MetaBrainz team to add some neat features to the project ListenBrainz.

Continue reading “GSoC 2021: Pin Recordings and CritiqueBrainz Integration in ListenBrainz”

Kartik Ohri joins the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that Kartik Ohri, AKA Lucifer, a very active contributor since his Code-in days in 2018, has become the latest staff member of the MetaBrainz Foundation!

Kartik has been instrumental in rewriting our Android app and more recently has been helping us with a number of tasks, including new features for ListenBrainz, AcousticBrainz as well as breathing some much needed life into the CritiqueBrainz project.

These three projects (CritiqueBrainz, ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz) will be his main focus while working for MetaBrainz. Each of these projects has not had enough engineering time recently to sufficiently move new features forward. We hope that with Kartik’s efforts we can deliver more features faster.

Welcome to the team, Kartik!

GSoC 2019: Support for Reviewing and Rating More Entities on CritiqueBrainz

Hello everybody! My name is Shamroy Pellew, and I am a rising sophomore at SUNY Buffalo.

This summer, as part of Google Summer of Code, I collaborated with the MetaBrainz Foundation on CritiqueBrainz, the foundation’s archive of user‐written music reviews. I have accomplished much in these past four months, and it has been a great experience working under the guidance of my mentor, Suyash Garg. Even though there is still some work to be done, most of the code I wrote has either been merged or is in code review, and I believe it is safe to say I achieved the goal of my original proposal.

Proposal

I initially planned to use the mbdata package to query the MusicBrainz database for information regarding artists, labels, recordings, and works, so I can achieve my goal of supporting reviews for these entities on CritiqueBrainz. However, I soon discovered that there exists BrainzUtils, a Python package with “common utilities used throughout MetaBrainz projects.” So it was decided that it would be best to use those utilities, instead of writing my own. Of course, a few changes had to be made. CritiqueBrainz had features that BrainzUtils was missing, so those had to be moved over and merged. The inclusion of BrainzUtils was the only real divergence between my original proposal and my actual course of action. Otherwise, everything went according to plan.

Phase 1

Adapting CritiqueBrainz code to be used in BrainzUtils was a bit of a learning curve, and took up a good majority of the first phase. I had to gain familiarity with both code bases and the difference between Python 2 and 3. I also had to write some new unit tests, to ensure everything was functioning as it should, which I’ve never done in Python before. The existing BrainzUtils code and feedback from my mentor were a great help though.

Here are the merged pull requests for this phase:

Phase 2

After I finished moving features to BrainzUtils, but before I could add support for reviewing new entities, I had to convert the existing CritiqueBrainz functionality to use BrainzUtils for data retrieval. This was a simple change, as the same code was being used, but from a different source. Once that was done, I moved on and began to work on the reviewal of new entities.

Here are the merged pull requests for this phase:

Phase 3

Adding support for reviewing of new entity types required the same simple steps for each new type. First, the new types were each added to the existing SQL script which declares entity types, and for each new type, an ALTER script was made. Then, I retrieved information about each entity through BrainzUtils, including any necessary supplementary data. The searching for the new entity types also had to be implemented, using musicbrainzngs, a Python binding for the MusicBrainz web API. So, I wrapped the musicbrainzngs searching API call in a function and created new HTML templates, using Jinja, for finding the new entities. Finally, I had to enable reviews for the new entity types. I edited the list of reviewable entity types and the existing review templates to include data about the new types.

Naturally, by this point in the project, a few bugs had popped up. There were problems with handling deleted entities, some with data not being displayed, and even cases where data was completely missing. These were solved as they appeared, and were only minor headaches.

Here are the merged pull requests for this phase:

Overall, there was also some human error on my part that slowed things down. I could have communicated more effectively and delivered each task piece by piece, which would have resulted in better feedback from my mentor.

Conclusion

In total, I have opened a total of 17 pull requests across BrainzUtils and CritiqueBrainz. If I had more time, though I would have liked to work on my stretch goal of incorporating entity ratings from MusicBrainz into CritiqueBrainz. Although I did manage to open a BrainzUtils pull request for serializing the MusicBrainz ratings when fetching information, I did not get a chance to do anything with this data.

I’d like to thank the MetaBrainz Foundation for this amazing opportunity. Thanks to the team and thanks to Google, I was able to produce something that people everywhere will be able to use. I learned a lot about open source this summer, and I was able to polish up on my Python skills. I’m looking forward to continuing work on CritiqueBrainz and the continued support from the MetaBrainz team!

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: 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.

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2015

The Google Code-in Google Code‐in is pretty much over for this time, and we’ve had a blast in our first year with the competition in MetaBrainz with a total of 116 students completing tasks. In the end we had to pick five finalists from these, and two of these as our grand prize winners getting a trip to the Googleplex in June. It was a really, really tough decision, as we have had an amazing roster of students for our first year. In the end we picked Ohm Patel (US) and Caroline Gschwend (US) as our grand prize winners, closely followed by Stanisław Szcześniak (Poland), Divya Prakash Mittal (India), and Nurul Ariessa Norramli (Malaysia). Congratulations and thank you to all of you, as well as all our other students! We’ve been very excited to work with you and look forwards to seeing you again before, during, and after coming Google Code-ins as well! 🙂

Rayna Kanapuram MusicBrainz presentation
Indian student Rayne presenting MusicBrainz to her classmates.

In all we had 275 tasks completed during the Google Code-in. These tasks were divided among the various MetaBrainz projects as well as a few for beets. We ended up having 29 tasks done for BookBrainz, 124(!) tasks for CritiqueBrainz, 95 tasks for MusicBrainz, 1 task for Cover Art Archive, 6 tasks for MusicBrainz Picard, 3 tasks for beets, and 17 generic or MetaBrainz related tasks.

Some examples of the tasks that were done include:

Ariessa MetaBrainz infographic
Finalist Nurul Ariessa Norramli’s MetaBrainz infographic.

In all, I’m really darn happy with the outcome of this Google Code-in and how some of our finalists continue to be active on IRC and help out. Stanisław is continuing work on BookBrainz, including having started writing a Python library for BB’s API/web service, and Caroline is currently working on a new icon set for the MusicBrainz.org redesign that can currently be seen at beta.MusicBrainz.org.

Again, congratulations to our winners and finalists, and THANK YOU! to all of the students having worked on tasks for MetaBrainz. It’s really been an amazing ride and we’re definitely looking forward to our next foray into Google Code-in!

Polish student Stanisław Szcześniak presenting about MusicBrainz.
Romanian student Borza Alex presenting MusicBrainz to his classmates.
Indian student Rayne presenting MusicBrainz to her classmates.
Ariessa’s MetaBrainz infographic
Caroline Gschwend’s MetaBrainz infographic
Divya Prakash Mittal’s MetaBrainz infographic

Announcing the beta launch of CritiqueBrainz

I’m proud to announce that we’ve launched a beta version of our new project: CritiqueBrainz.

CritiqueBrainz is a music review site, where anyone can write a music review for an artist or a release-group (album, single, etc). Unlike Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy, this site is about passionate reviews about music. If an album is horrible, please write a review about why it is horrible. If it is great, please write one telling us what makes it great.

All of the reviews in CritiqueBrainz will be Creative Commons licensed. The user has a choice to license their review under CC-by-nc-sa (disallowing commercial use) or CC-by-sa (allowing commercial use). To get the site started, the BBC was kind enough to send us their collection of almost 9,000 CC licensed reviews. Go and have a look — there are a lot of reviews for you to read, right now!

CritiqueBrainz is a new web site that was originally written by Maciej Czerwiński for last year’s Summer of Code. All of the goals for the project were met last year, but that didn’t leave us with a site that was ready for deployment. For this year’s Summer of Code, Roman Tsukanov picked up the project and immediately started fixing bugs, making improvements and generally rocking the project into stability and drastically improved the look and feel of the site. On the beginning day of Summer of Code, we’re ready for a beta release!

This past weekend, I attended Music Hack Day San Francisco and worked with Roman to add Spotify integration into the site. If you have a Spotify account, you can listen to the music as you read the reviews. So far, we’ve matched 250,000 release-groups in MusicBrainz to Spotify! Even if an album doesn’t have a review, you can still browse all of MusicBrainz via CritiqueBrainz and if we have a matched Spotify album, you can listen to it by clicking the play button under the cover art.

If an album you find doesn’t have a match in Spotify, we invite you to help us find a match and submit it to Spotify. Click on the “Match this!” link, which will execute a search via Spotify’s API to try and find a matching album. Due to some limitations in the Spotify API, this doesn’t work as well as we want to — we plan to pester Spotify to improve their API to make this a better experience.

We’re hoping to make CritiqueBrainz a user site that uses more cover-art and white space to make a site that is friendlier to browse the amazing pieces of information that MusicBrainz has collected. Unlike the data nerds at MusicBrainz, not everyone loves information overload; this site should hopefully make non-data nerds happy about MusicBrainz data.

If you find a bug, or have a suggestion for improving the site, please file a bug report here and Roman will have a look at it.

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in making this project a reality and thanks to Google’s Open Source programs office for making Summer of Code happen!

Summer of Code: We’ve accepted these projects

I’m pleased to announce the following 5 projects were accepted for this round of Summer of Code:

  • A new website for Picard and its plugins by Shadab Zafar: Give Picard a new website that will be used to host everything Picard related especially its plugins. Also add an interface which can be used to download those plugins right from picard.
  • MBS-6201: Add an “event” entity by reosarevok: Finalising the basic implementation of MBS-799 by adding an event entity to MusicBrainz.
  • Finishing and deploying CritiqueBrainz by Roman Tsukanov: Last year Maciej Czerwiński started work on repository for Creative Commons-licensed reviews – CritiqueBrainz project. He implemented core functionality: storage, API, and web interface. During Google Summer of Code 2014 I’d like to continue his work, finish and deploy the project.
  • MB UI TLC by navap: Spend some major TLC on all the templates and UI of MB.
  • Move MusicBrainz Search to SOLR by Wieland Hoffmann: The goal of this project is to move the MusicBrainz Search server to use SOLR for faster and in-place index updates.

The whole MusicBrainz dev team is very excited to have students take on these projects. We’ve been waiting for events for an eternity and after 9 months of no progress, I’m stoked that soon we will release CritiqueBrainz.

Congratulations to mineo, navap, duffer, gentlecat and reosarevok. And big thanks to Google for having us in Summer of Code again.