ListenBrainz – MetaBrainz Blog

Welcome Summer of Code 2025 contributors!

We are thrilled to announce the selection of 6 contributors to work with us for this year’s Google Summer of Code program!

MetaBrainz received many great applications this year. Selecting the final contributors was tough and involved deliberating various factors – 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.

Thank you to all contributors who submitted a proposal with us!

The whole list of selected proposals can be found on the GSOC website but here is a TL;DR breakdown:

MetaBrainz proposals

Matrix Archiver (libretto) (Jade Ellis AKA JadedBlueEyes)

This project proposal replaces BrainzBot with a new archival service that archives messages directly from Matrix to HTML files on disk and a PostgreSQL database. It will support Matrix features like message editing, reactions and media, and provide full text search over all messages. Both historical and new messages as they come in will be archived.

Centralized Notification System for MetaBrainz (Junaid AKA fettuccinae)

MetaBrainz contains multiple sub-projects which sends out standalone notifications. This project aims to centralize those by developing a shared notification system within metabrainz-org, enabling all sub-projects to deliver user notifications through this notification system. Expected Outcome: A functional notifications system with relevant API endpoint.

ListenBrainz proposals

Importing Listening History Files in Listenbrainz (Suvid Singhal)

This project aims to develop a feature that enables users to import their listening history from various services, including ListenBrainz exports, Spotify, Apple Music, and other CSV file formats. The proposed solution involves creating a backend API endpoint to handle file uploads, building normalizers to parse and validate data from different services, and converting the data to the JSONL format required by ListenBrainz. The solution also includes a frontend to handle file uploads and show the progress to the user.

Onboarding Revamp in Listenbrainz-Android (Hemang Mishra)

A smooth and intuitive onboarding experience is essential for any app, ensuring that users understand its features while maintaining trust and engagement. This project focuses on enhancing the ListenBrainz Android onboarding flow by making it more informative, user-friendly, and privacy-conscious. Key improvements include a dedicated Listen Submission screen to give users full control over which apps contribute listens, clear permission rationales, and fallback mechanisms for denied permissions. Additionally, a revamped sign-in screen will provide better navigation, including a bug report option for easy issue submission.

Development of Advanced User Statistics Visualizations (Granth Bagadia AKA holycow23 AKA granth23)

The project aims to design and implement advanced interactive visualizations for ListenBrainz using Nivo for data visualization and integrating with the existing Flask API. Apache Spark will handle efficient data processing and aggregation. These visualizations will offer granular insights into genre trends, artist diversity, and temporal listening patterns, enhancing user experience and engagement. The project will result in the development and integration of the following four interactive charts into ListenBrainz: Artist Listening, Activity Statistics, Listens by Era Statistics, Genre-Based Listening Patterns and Top Listeners.

Integrate music streaming from Funkwhale & Navidrome (Mohammad Amanullah AKA mAmanullah7)

Allow users to play music from their Funkwhale servers as well as Navidrome directly in BrainzPlayer, as both are self hosted music streaming platforms. Funkwhale used a OAuth2 for secure and safe authentication, but currently Navidrome used basic subsonic authentication (username/password + salt), but soon OAuth2 authentication also will be available for Navidrome. Once these are availanble, we can support Subsonic streaming in the ListenBrainz Player.

What if you’re not in GSoC 2025?

Reading this and feeling inspired for contributing to the code still? Volunteer contributors are very welcome all year round even though we might have slightly less time available to help you during the summer. It is also putting you in an ideal situation for applying to next year’s GSoC. You can find some tips for applying to GSoC with us in one of our previous posts. When you are ready, join us on the MetaBrainz Matrix Channel and showcase your initiative and your skills !

MetaBrainz Summit 2024

*MetaBrainz nerds at the Jantar Mantar observatory.* *Left to right: jasje, reosarevok, atj, zas, KasukabeDefenceForce, monkey, yvanzo, lucifer, mayhem, ansh, theflash_, kellnerd, bitmap, akshaaatt, ApeKattQuest, outsidecontext, aerozol*

This year it was New Delhi, India, that was invaded by data nerds from across the globe!

The MetaBrainz team was treated to the glorious chaos, hospitality, sights, noise, sweets, monkeys, traffic, heat, and delicious food of India. We reflected on the last year in MetaBrainz, planned and collaborated for the future, and got a little work done – when we could fit it in between mouthfuls of Indian sweets.

Read on for a comprehensive summit recap, including the annual recap for each MetaBrainz project, as well as breakout session notes, photos, and links to the slides and video recordings.

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 24

MetaBrainz Summit 24 is upon us! September 23-27 in New Delhi, India.

We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.

MetaBrainz Summit 2023

As always, the silliest photo is the best photo. Left to right: aerozol, zas, outsidecontext, mayhem, yvanzo, bitmap, monkey, kellnerd, akshaaatt, reosarevok, laptop: atj, lucifer

A year has flown by and once again the MetaBrainz team found itself in the MetaBrainz HQ in Barcelona, Spain, for #summit23. And once again we were munching on a mountain of international chocolates, hiking Mt Montserrat, bird-watching, groaning at terrible puns, testing out mayhem’s Bartendro cocktail robot (some of the team committing themselves too thoroughly to this testing), and of course discussing everything and anything MetaBrainz related. This year we had a longer summit, taking place over the week instead of the usual weekend, broken up into three days of presentations, followed by two days of hands-on ‘hacking’.

This means it’s time to strap in for a long post!

Welcome Ansh Goyal to the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve added yet another former Summer of Code student/mentor to our team: Ansh Goyal. Welcome to our team, Ansh!

After Alastair Porter decided to not resume his position with MetaBrainz after his 6-month break, we were lucky to have Ansh ready to jump in to join our team. Thank you for your hard work over the years, Alastair!

Ansh will be focusing on Javascript programming, in particular React, on the BookBrainz and ListenBrainz projects. Both of these projects desperately need a lot of UI/UX work, and Ansh has proven himself that he’ll be able to help us tackle our backlog of UI projects that we need to accomplish in the short term.

Welcome to the team Ansh — we’re looking forward to your contributions!

We are ready for Summer of Code 2023 !

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.

ListenBrainz moves to TimescaleDB

The ListenBrainz team has been working hard on moving our primary listen store from InfluxDB to TimescaleDB, and today at UTC 16:00 we’re going to make the switch.

We were asked on Twitter as to why we’re making the switch — and in the interest of giving a real world use case for switching, I’m writing this post. The reasons are numerous:

Openness: InfluxDB seems on a path that will make it less open over time. TimescaleDB and its dependence on Postgres makes us feel much safer in this regard.

Existing use: We’ve been using Postgres for about 18 years now and it has been a reliable workhorse for us. Our team thinks in terms of Postgres and InfluxDB always felt like a round peg in a square hole for us.

Data structure: InfluxDB was clearly designed to store server event info. We’re storing listen information, which has a slightly different usage pattern, but this slight difference is enough for us to hit a brick wall with far fewer users in our DB than we ever anticipated. InfluxDB is simply not flexible enough for our needs.

Query syntax and measurement names: The syntax to query InfluxDB is weird and obfuscated. We made the mistake of trying to have a measurement map to a user, but escaping measurement names correctly nearly drove one of our team members to the loonie bin.

Existing data: If you ever write bad data to a measurement in InfluxDB, there is no way to change it. I realize that this is a common Big Data usage pattern, but for us it represented significant challenges and serious restrictions to put simple features for our users into place. With TimescaleDB we can make the very occasional UPDATE or DELETE and move on.

Scalability: Even though we attempted to read as much as possible in order to design a scalable schema, we still failed and got it wrong. (I don’t even think that the docs to calculate scalability even existed when we first started using InfluxDB.) Unless you are using InfluxDB in exactly the way it was meant to be used, there are chances you’ll hit this problem as well. For us, one day insert speed dropped to a ridiculously low number per second, backing up our systems. Digging into the problem we realized that our schema design had a fatal flaw and that we would have drastically change the schema to something even less intuitive in order to fix it. This was the event that broke the camel’s back and I started searching for alternatives.

In moving to TimescaleDB we were able to delete a ton of complicated code and embrace a DB that we know and love. We know how Postgres scales, we know how to put it into production and we know its caveats. TimescaleDB allows us to be flexible with the data and the amazing queries that can be performed on the data is pure Postgres love. TimescaleDB still requires some careful thinking over using Postgres, it is far less than what is required when using InfluxDB. TimescaleDB also gives us a clear scaling path forward, even when TimescaleDB is still working on their own scaling roadmap. If TimescaleDB evolves anything like Postgres has, I can’t wait to see this evolution.

Big big thanks to the Postgres and TimescaleDB teams!

State of the Brainz: 2019 MetaBrainz Summit highlights

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.