ListenBrainz – MetaBrainz Blog

Downtime today for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7pm CEST)

Today (Monday, May 13) at 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v16.
Performing the MusicBrainz schema change upgrade.

See the previous announcement on this topic for more information.

Expect MusicBrainz and services that depend on its database (MetaBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, CritiqueBrainz, BookBrainz) to be down for the hour, but we’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible.

Afterward, we’ll post instructions here on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server (whether using musicbrainz-docker or otherwise).

P.S. The initially announced upgrades for MusicBrainz search engine are just about to reach our beta website, and thus are postponed for mirrors too.

Welcome Summer of Code 2024 contributors!

We are thrilled to announce the selection of 8 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!

ListenBrainz: 2023 Recap

Strap in, because we’re going to recap all the ListenBrainz changes in the whirlwind year that was 2023! For the full ListenBrainz changelog you can visit: https://github.com/metabrainz/listenbrainz-server/releases

For those who peeped at the changelog, yes, the ListenBrainz team managed over 60 releases in 2023… let’s check out some of the highlights.

ListenBrainz Music Neighborhood

The ListenBrainz Music Neighbourhood feature is now live!

Use this arcane technology to find your favourite artist and explore their related artists. Watch the pretty colours. Listen to the music. Race your friends from Napalm Death to Britney Spears. Increase the web size and gasp as the artists jiggle into each other. Or simplify your life by exploring a web size of 0.

Don’t wait! No ListenBrainz account required, try it now: https://listenbrainz.org/explore/music-neighborhood/

A cropped screenshot showing colourful detail from the ListenBrainz Music Neighbourhood feature. In the middle is Red Hot Chilli Peppers, connected with lines to a variety of other artists. — Does this say more about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or their listeners? (hint: the listeners)

Explore Your Year in Music 2023

ListenBrainz is back with your #yearinmusic (YIM) reports for 2023! Log in to ListenBrainz (LB) and click here to see your report, or here if you don’t have an account but want to see what we are banging on about.

See your year summed up in a flash new summary collage. Revisit and share your top artists, albums, and tracks from last year. Topped off with new statistics, the new browsable cover collage, links to friends, and playlists created just for you by our hopefully-still–benign machine algorithm.

This year we will also re-run the YIM pages in a few weeks – this means that if you have listens from 2023 stored in last.fm or libre.fm, it’s not too late! Use that LB importer to get your YIM soon.

Fresher Fresh Releases

Have you ever wanted to see all the [genre] albums coming out next week?* Go do it in the new and overhauled ListenBrainz Fresh Releases! Live the dream!

A screenshot of the ListenBrainz Fresh Releases feature, with a sticker on it that says ‘always fresh’, and dew drops over everything — So fresh it hurts

As well as greatly improved UI and UX, it has a number of new filters as well as sorting and display options. Check it out.
And, if you’re logged in, visit your very own ‘For you’ section to see what’s recent from your favorite artists.

ListenBrainz service incident

Hello!

I’m sad to report that we had an incident on one of the ListenBrainz production database servers, where someone on our team might have accidentally run our test suite on our production server.

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!

ListenBrainz App: Feed and UI Revamp (Release 2.3.0)

We are pleased to release the Feed for the ListenBrainz Android app, as well as a new settings page!

Three new feeds now allow app users to keep up with the activity of their ListenBrainz friends, as well as discover new music from listeners with similar music tastes.

My Feed shows the activity of your follows, including what they’ve reviewed, pinned, recommended, and more. Follow Listens displays the listens, chronologically, of all your follows, so you can check on what your friends are jamming right this second. Similar Listens displays, chronologically, the listens of your closest musical ’neighbours’, a great way to discover new music and perhaps even make new friends.

	zag on MusicBrainz Server hotfix,…
	Jaded Lover on SSL.com is evil and deceptive:…
	aerozol on SSL.com is evil and deceptive:…
	reosarevok on GSOC ‘23: Automating Area Mana…
	aerozol on Welcoming Hazel Savage to our…