Tag: metabrainz

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!

Get ready for MetaBrainz NFTs!

As you all know, making our projects better every time takes a ton of work. For years, we’ve done an amazing job of combining individual users’ donations and commercial data users’ financial support to be a sustainable non-profit which finishes almost every year in the black (see our financial reports), which is quite the achievement when even tons of commercially successful companies lose money every year and only survive through new investment. That said, IT is a very competitive field and we can’t pay the most competitive wages, since we’re still a relatively small non-profit. That means we keep losing some of our talented engineers to large companies who can afford to treat them a lot better. After years of this, we’ve decided we need to find additional sources of income.

During the last couple years we’ve been following with growing interest the talk about Web3 and specifically Music3, and how it has become a great way of giving users something they really want and enjoy while raising significant amounts of money in the process. As such, we’ve taken a historical decision: We’re going to sell NFTs of MusicBrainz artist pages! (and book people, don’t worry; if the reception is as positive as we expect, we will expand this to BookBrainz author pages to help finance and accelerate the development of BookBrainz).

If you purchase an NFT of a MusicBrainz artist page, you’ll not only get the NFT itself, but you will get credited on the artist page so that everyone knows that you supported us by purchasing the NFT (and, of course, so that they know who to contact if they want to make you an offer to buy it for themselves). We will track any resales and update the displayed name accordingly.

A full commitment's what I'm thinking of

We can already announce the system we’re planning to use for determining the starting sale price for the NFTs: we will base it on the ListenBrainz count of listens for that specific artist (see the stats for the top artists). For example, given that Radiohead have (as of now) around 840,000 listens, while Def Leppard have around 84,000, we would set the starting price for the Radiohead NFT around 10 times higher than the Def Leppard one. Of course, that’s just the starting price, and resale prices will likely depend also on the specific buyer’s music tastes! We are still working on deciding what the cost-per-listen will be, but expect a new post with more details about pricing soon. You’ll notice this also means that the more usage ListenBrainz gets, the higher the prices; this is intentional, and we expect that this system where the income grows as ListenBrainz does too will help us scale the development as needed.

How will you be able to purchase our NFTs? We weren’t really satisfied with any of the available options, and we want to be in control of the whole process, so we’ve teamed with a group of blockchain experts to build our own blockchain, which we’re naming Ricast. We are aware of the large environmental impact of the most common proof-of-work blockchains, so since we’re an environmentally conscious organization who was never gonna run around and desertify the planet, the Ricast blockchain will operate on a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which has significantly lower environmental issues. Our PoS NFTs will allow you to support MetaBrainz without feeling bad about it! We will give more details about the Ricast blockchain in a further, more technical post, so for the geekier of you, stay tuned! Together with the Ricast blockchain, we will also be launching its accompanying coin, the rollcoin.

We’re hoping this is a huge success, because it would really help us hire more full time developers to give our users all the new features they’ve asked for for years (and some we know they’re aching for, but have been too shy to say it). We’ve known each other for so long, and we really want to take this relationship to a new level. Trust us, and we’re never gonna let you down!

As a final teaser, here’s the icon for our new coin, the rollcoin:

Inside we both know what's been going on

We understand some of you might be skeptical about this whole idea, whether for technical or ethical reasons. Our founder Robert Kaye goes deeper into our reasons for doing this and why we think it’s the right decision for us at this moment in this video. If you’ve watched it and your doubts are still not assuaged, feel free to start a discussion in the comments below! Don’t worry, we would never tell a lie nor hurt you.

Stepping up on our UX: Welcoming Simon Hartman to the team

Hello!

I am pleased to announce that long time contributor and complainer about our UI/UX, Simon Hartman, AKA aerozol has joined our team as a part time designer!

While we are starting with a very modest 3 hours of his time per week, we feel that this marks a rather important step forward for our team. While we now have two team members who have UX/design skills (Monkey and Akshat), they also carry a significant load of engineering tasks working on their respective projects.

Having Simon as part of our team will allow us to carve out concrete design tasks for him to focus on. Simon and Akshat will also revive our long dormant design system, which lets us create UI components that are intuitive and consistent. Our engineering team will be able to re-use these components across our sites, simplifying the future development of new pages. We hope that this shared design system will improve the user interface across all of our sites, with a strong focus on bringing the MusicBrainz UI into the modern age.

Having concrete help on the design front has been needed badly for a long time, which makes me very excited to welcome Simon to our team. Welcome!

Welcoming Akshat Tiwari to the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that we are continuing our long tradition of hiring our best Google Summer of Code participants — I’d like to warmly welcome Akshat Tiwari to the MetaBrainz team!

Akshat has been working on our Android App, continuing the work from last summer to improve the app and to add new features. He has been doing great work and demonstrating the fact that he understands user interfaces and has an eye for design as well as coding. This is a rare combination of talents and since we’ve been in dire need for improving the UI/UX for the MusicBrainz web site since forever, this was the time to finally get this project moving seriously.

Akshat has joined us on a trial contract through the end of the year with the goal of creating a new home page for MusicBrainz (and more hopefully) — the current home page is still stuck in the early 2000s and hasn’t evolved as our projects have evolved.

Our hope is to have Akshat become a permanent member of the MusicBrainz team and once the home page is completed, that he will continue on the UI/UX revamp that Chhavi started several years ago.

Welcome to the team Akshat!

MusicBrainz App

Greetings, Everyone!

The MusicBrainz Mobile App developers have been working at full capacity, improving the user experience, incorporating more features and functionalities, while making sure the core purpose of the app remains as promised.

Since its inception in 2010, the MusicBrainz Official App has come a long way. The App currently is highly maintained and has been actively open for contributions. A systematic approach is being followed and updates are being made on a regular basis.

The most important revamp which has been worked on for the past few months is the Tagger feature available in the MusicBrainz Android App.

Functionalities like fetching the local album arts, searching through all your local music files at one go, retrieving the cover art from the server, and heading to the recording directly are some of the key highlights of the upcoming Tagger.

Picard has finally made an official entry to the MusicBrainz App where users can now send their releases to the original Picard desktop app with the click of a button. This has been worked on in collaboration with the Picard team and proper documentation on its usage will be shared soon.

The completely new addition of Listen and Critique showcases the functionalities of ListenBrainz and CritiqueBrainz websites natively from the app. Currently, these will be available as advanced features on the app.

A well-prepared Onboarding and About section will take you through every important detail on the app and make sure you are aware of all the functionalities in the best and optimized way possible.

Proper documentation of every feature is being prepared. The App is finally out in Production, do head to the stores and give it a try!

We are really excited to make the MusicBrainz App as user-friendly as possible for you, while we take care of all the wonder behind it!

Play Store: MusicBrainz – Apps on Google Play

F-Droid: MusicBrainz | F-Droid – Free and Open Source Android App Repository

Github: metabrainz/musicbrainz-android

Thank you!

Incident report: January 27th service outage

On January 27th, starting at 4:31UTC we were hit with increasing amounts of traffic from what appeared to be hundreds of different IP addresses mostly belonging to Amazon Web Service IP addresses. At 8:46UTC the inbound traffic overwhelmed our systems and brought nearly all of our services to a standstill.

After investigating the situation and receiving no meaningful assistance from Hetzner (our ISP who advertises DDoS mitigation services as part of their offerings) we blocked three subnets of IP addresses in order to restore our services. At 13:14UTC we put the block in place and our services started recovering.

We reported the issue to Hetzner and to AWS shortly after restoring our service. The next morning we received a friendly email from Andy, who works for one of our supporters at Plex, stating that they received a complaint from AWS. What happened next and how this matter was resolved is told by Andy himself:

Overnight on Wednesday, first thing Thursday morning, we received an abuse report that our servers were flooding an IP that corresponded to musicbrainz.org. We scrambled to investigate, as we are happy MusicBrainz partners, but it was a strange report because we run our MusicBrainz server and hit that instance rather than communicating with musicbrainz.org directly. And the IPs mentioned were specifically related to our metadata servers, not the IPs that would be receiving data updates from upstream. Just as some of our key engineering team members were starting to wake up and scrub in, it started to seem that it was a coincidence and we weren’t the actual source of the traffic and had simply been caught up in an overeager blocking of a large IP range to get the services back up. Never trust a coincidence. We continued to stay in touch with the team at MusicBrainz and within a few hours we had clear evidence that our IPs were the source of the traffic. We got the whole engineering team involved again to do some investigation, and we still couldn’t figure much out since we never make requests to musicbrainz.org and we had already worked to rule out the potential of any rogue access to our servers. By isolating our services and using our monitoring tools, we finally discovered that the issue was actually our traffic to coverartarchive.org, not musicbrainz.org, as they happen to be serviced by the same IP address. And this made much more sense, as we do depend on some API calls to the Cover Art Archive.

The root cause was an update to the Plex Media Server which had been released earlier in the week. There was a bug in that update that caused extra metadata requests to our own infrastructure. We had noticed the spike in our autoscaling to accommodate the extra traffic and already put together another update to fix the bug. That extra traffic on our infrastructure also translated to a more modest increase in requests to some of our metadata partners, including CAA. While the fix was already rolling out to Plex Media Servers, this provided a good opportunity to evaluate the CAA traffic and put our own rate limit in place to protect against future issues. We wrapped up that change in the afternoon on Thursday.

Throughout the ordeal, we appreciated the communication back and forth with our partners at MusicBrainz so that we could work together to investigate and follow leads to find a timely resolution.

Andy from Plex

While this whole situation was very stressful and frustrating to us, in the end it was resolved by a very friendly and technical detective game to identify and resolve the issue. It is always nice when geeks talk to geeks to resolve issues and get services working again. Thank you to Andy and his team — let’s hope we can avoid an issue like this in the future.

We’d apologize for the trouble caused by our IP address block and for our services being unavailable for several hours.

EDIT: We should also mention that all of our services are served from one single gateway IP address, so coverartarchive.org and musicbrainz.org have the same IP address.

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.

Continue reading “State of the Brainz: 2019 MetaBrainz Summit highlights”

Picard 2.0.1 released! (Windows and macOS users rejoice)

Note – There are no changes for Linux users, so they can safely skip this release if they want.

Given the massive feedback about the shortcomings of the Windows and macOS versions of Picard, we decided to do a minor release addressing some of the issues with our executables.

As usual, you can find the latest downloads on Picard’s Website.

The change-log is as follows –

Bug-fix

  • [PICARD-1283] – Fingerprinting not working on macOS in Picard 2.0
  • [PICARD-1286] – Error creating SSL context on Windows

Improvement

  • [PICARD-1290] – Improve slow start up times by moving to a non single file exe
  • [PICARD-1291] – Use an installer for Picard 2.x windows exe

Basically, the Windows executable is now a proper installer and some missing SSL dependencies are bundled with it.

The macOS builds also include the missing AcoustID fingerprinting binary.

The startup time for both the Windows and macOS version has been improved as well.

Have fun tagging your files!

samj1912 signing off o/

 

GDPR compliance

The General Data Protection Regulation is a complex EU regulation that stipulates many points for protecting private data of users on the Internet. Even though this is an EU regulation, it has a worldwide impact due to the nature of the Internet. This regulation comes into effect today, May 25, 2018 and is the reason why so many companies have sent you mail in the past few weeks about updating their privacy policies.

The MetaBrainz Foundation with its collection of projects is also affected by this regulation. We’ve been learning and adapting our sites to be compliant with the regulation – sadly this regulation isn’t entirely black and white and there is an incredible amount of room left for interpretation of these rules.

The good news is that this regulation is roughly in line with our established practices: We’ve always held private information in a high regard and applied the sort of rules to ourselves as we wish to have our own private data treated. Luckily, this makes our compliance effort considerably easier. We’ve made two significant changes to how we treat your data and also adopted terminology as used in the GDPR in order to use the same languages that many other sites are now adopting. Please keep reading to find out the exact details of what we are doing to comply.

However, we do ask for your compassion and help in our process of complying with the GDPR. As we already mentioned, the GDPR is a complex set of rules that are not fully clarified yet. We’ve taken action on the steps that are clear to us and we’re following ongoing conversations on points that are in gray zones or unclear to us. We’ve made our best initial effort on compliance and promise to keep working on it as the picture becomes more clear. If you believe that we could improve our compliance, please contact us and let us know what we can do to improve. It would also help us if you could provide concrete discussion or examples to help us understand and take action on your suggestion.

Finally, below is the link to our GDPR compliance statement, implementing the regulations as we understand them and how they affect your data in our ecosystem. Where possible, we provide links for deeper understanding, links for you to examine our relevant code and links to tickets to follow the process of improving our compliance.

MetaBrainz’ GDPR Compliance Statement

 

Expanding our team

As the world comes back to life after the summer break, we’re making some changes and expanding our team. First, Roman Tsukanov has decided to not renew his contract with us. During his tenure with MetaBrainz, Roman adopted and released CritiqueBrainz and also wrote our new MetaBrainz web page, which is helping us bring in new supporters. His contributions have been far from trivial — thank you for your efforts, Roman!

Due in part to the new MetaBrainz web site, we’ve got more financial support than ever, and this allows us to replace Roman with two engineers! I’m please to announce that we’re hiring two of our Summer of Code students who just completed the program:

Sambhav Kothari AKA samj1912: Sambhav started hacking on Picard earlier this year and knocked Picard out of dormancy, working towards a new release and then making Picard his Summer of Code project. He completed his project with flying colors and is working towards a major upgrade of Picard. On the MetaBrainz team he is going to look after the new search infrastructure and the maintenance and bug fixing of our Web Service in addition to hacking on Picard. A full plate, for sure!

Param Singh AKA iliekcomputers: About the same time that samj1912 arrived, Param arrived. He expressed interest in working on ListenBrainz — he too dove right in and started making improvements. ListenBrainz had quite a ways to go before he could aim to make a Summer of Code project out of it. Param and I embarked on a journey to revamp and improve the stability of ListenBrainz, which culminated in us releasing the new ListenBrainz beta a few weeks ago. Since then he’s been focusing on his Summer of Code project, which is also now complete. On the MetaBrainz team Param will be looking after ListenBrainz and also the new MetaBrainz web site.

Both Param and Sambhav will officially start working on the MetaBrainz team starting October 1, but I strongly suspect we’ll see them around and hacking on the projects as has become the norm this year.

Welcome aboard Sambhav and Param!