interview – MetaBrainz Blog

The Strangest Releases in MusicBrainz: Weird and Wonderful

MusicBrainz is a treasure trove. Open the lid and you will find glittering piles of release metadata. Mountains of precious artist information. Gold nuggets of high resolution artwork. Everything you can imagine – provided you mainly imagine music data. And also, at the bottom, tucked into the corners, some really weird shit. And some MusicBrainz editors just having the time of their life, adding to the pile. One of those editors has agreed to have a chat with me.

A photo of a dungbeetle on top of a ball of dung. A lot of strange audio releases are sticking out of the dung ball. — One person’s treasure is another person’s…

Thank you for answering my questions, sound.and.vision! I am really regretting the poop analogy, my deepest apologies. But we are dung-beetle editing buddies, and I know that your additions to the database are a treasure to many. Shall we ‘roll’ with it?

Picard 3.0 Q&A

MusicBrainz Picard is a core piece of MetaBrainz. According to the 2017 user survey, ‘Using a tagger which relies on MB’ was the second most common way that editors found out about the existence of MusicBrainz, with 27.1%. Only narrowly beaten by the ever-popular ‘Don’t know/don’t remember’ option, at 28.8%. If MusicBrainz provides the metadata lifeblood, then MusicBrainz Picard is the conduit that splashes that bloody metadata across the globe, onto billions of music files. Gross! But also awesome!

Now MusicBrainz Picard is entering the next stage, with development moving onto version 3.0. What does this mean? outsidecontext, long-time voluntary MusicBrainz Picard contributor, maintainer and user support-er, has agreed to answer some of our questions.

React Q&A

If you are, like me, an avid follower of MusicBrainz server release notes, you will have been reading about a certain type of update for a number of years – React conversion tasks.

But, unlike me, you may know what React is! For the rest of you – happily drifting on the currents of ignorance with me – I have good news. The MusicBrainz team has sent a Software Engineer tugboat to pull us into the waters of knowledge. A tugboat by the name of yvanzo, who has agreed to answer some questions about React.