Ensembling: Veena MiniVersion or Indian chordophones oh my!

Hello! It’s been a while! Well but good things come to those who wait..

Today we have exciting news about the long awaited Veena mini version!!

(Do you remember the Veenas? We started work on this a whopping 7! years ago, waay back in 2018, when we had Google Code-In students helping us, especially the finalist antara which did a lot of research for us on veena tickets!
As such we did actually resolve several of these already in 2019 and 2020, but it was hard, then stuff happened. Covid happened, genders happened, new computer, the the-whole-world-is-now-a-parody-of-itself timeline happened, lol šŸ˜­)

If you remember from way back in 2020 we also added a Indonesian rebab separate from the rebab we already had – this is because that, similar to the Veena, the Rebab is one heck of a complicated matter! (so complicated, in fact, that it and its brethren have gotten their own mini-version!). We’ll get to this one later.

Now things are as chaotic as ever, but after our summit in India last year, I decided there is no better time to finish up the remaining tickets in this version.

Preface:

“Veena” is actually a collective term for any kind of Indian chordophone (string instrument) spanning several millennia, from the oldest harp-like ones (yazh) to the later box-zithers (rudra-veena) and big calabash lutes (Saraswati-veena) to finally the modern lutes and hybrids (sitar, hansa-veena).
Additionally there are some other Indian instruments that are not actually “Veena” as such, which got added with this version anyway, as researching the various Veenas brought up information about them. This also lead to an overlap with the plucked and bowed world of R*b*b (that’s rabab, rubab, rebab, rabob, rhubab and similar), but those will be their own mini-version as mentioned before, because it’s one hell of an information-iceberg, and that way lies madness sarinda and esraj.

This has been the most extensively researched ensembling mini-version yet!
So, without further ado, here is the long overdue, Veena ensembling!

Mini Version

First let’s cover a few tickets updating or improving already existing things:

Sub-Improvement

  • [INST-244] – Improve vichitra veena
  • [INST-674] – Improve Saraswati veena
  • [INST-679] – Improve rudra veena
  • [INST-680] – Improve chitra veena
  • [INST-687] – Improve Sursingar
  • [INST-913] – Improve the Electric Sitar
  • [INST-977] – Improve ektara/gopichan
  • [INST-978] – Improve tumbi aka ektar
  • [INST-980] – Improve ravanahatha
  • [INST-681] – Saradiya veena alias for Sarod
  • [INST-683] – Add shatatantri vina/veena aliases to santoor
  • [INST-685] – Add “saptatantri veena”/”saptatantri vina” alias to sitar

Then let’s look at a string of tickets that were closed because they where deemed too novelty or lacking enough information:

..and, due to the time it all took šŸ˜… here are a couple that were then reopened again because by now new information was added!

Here are some sarod-related things (and here is where we get dangerously close to the “lute” r*babs, oh no.)

Sub-New Feature

..and the the final bits, old yazh (or yazhoo?) which is kind of an ancient veena (which leads into taus/mayuri) and khamak/gubguba/anandalahari which has some similarities with gopichan/tuntuna bringing us nicely around to the beginning again (puh!)

Instrument Images

In the time since we started this mini-version, many changes have come to the MusicBrainz database! We are well on our way though the React conversion and we also have a new Instrument Image provider!

So. as you may remember we were sued by a copyright troll many years ago; it didn’t even go to court but was dropped outright! However the aftermath of that is that we no longer could use Wikimedia Commons images.

Enter IROM! During my instrument research I noticed these very nice illustrations of instruments, and several sites made by IROM, a Japanese instrument fan! These seemed to be free-use, but to make extra sure we, with help from mb user Nyanko-sensei aka D4RK-PH0ENiX translated and sent a letter to ask. The upshoot is that these are images we can use! (we also talked about that in this blogpost).

Since then we have added lots of instrument images to our repository of organized IROM images to use in MusicBrainz, and you should expect even more in the future!

Now I’m a bit tired of chordophones, so despite digging into both ravanahatta and other fiddles/lutes, we are going to have a little break and work on an easier mini version next …. [chitarra batente!]

For those curious, a good article explaining the differences between gopichan, thumbi and tuntuna:

Ektara: a family of one-stringed musical instruments from India

MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-10-13

Do you remember us? Late Summer and then our September summit has meant again a long break between releases – hopefully we’ll get back to a more consistent update schedule soon (releasing at least once a month if not biweekly).

Other than fixing a bunch of bugs, this release includes one significant new feature and a few noticeable improvements.

It’s now possible to use an API browse query to get all sub-events of a specific event. This means you can get all the events that are part of a specific festival: for example, all events from Wacken 2024 (and the same query including artist and event relationships).

When entering edits from the release relationship editor, the edit will include information about the release it was entered from (no more wondering about which release’s cover art that “See cover art” edit note refers to!).

After not running any captchas for a couple years since we turned off Google’s reCAPTCHA in 2023, we are now running MTCaptcha, a GDPR-compliant captcha. Hopefully this will limit the amount of spammers a bit.

Additionally, you can now select the language you want to receive emails in from your user preferences. This only affects emails that are using our new email service; for now, that is just messages sent to you by other editors.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to dvirtz and Piper McCorkle for having contributed to the code. Thanks to angriestchair, chaban, dvirtz, Jade, KenParker_CN, Muxxer, Piper McCorkle, RandomMushroom128, Relaxo5, rinsuki, sanojjonas and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to aboettger, Beteix, djdhsjhshsh, Echelon, erykmichalak, KenParker_CN, Languages add-on, Libra, Ljcbaby, Manuela Silva, matecik, Metafono, mfmeulenbelt, MoeCaa, nitzanakrai, Philipp Wolfer, Poesty Li, Puyol, robertgarrigos, salo.rock, TefWw, tuba56, Vaclovas Intas, vacuousVersifier, vimutti, wileyfoxyx, yyb987 and לוכהן for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag isĀ v-2025-10-13.0.

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The European Open Source Academy: First impressions

Earlier this week we posted a blog post about me joining the European Open Source Academy. While the responses to this blog post have been positive, they have been muted and I fully understand why ā€“ so far, very little is known about this organisation.

Which is why I wanted to follow up that blog post with a more details to let you know more about the history, context and our vision of the future of this new organization. Because in reality the Academy simply does not exist yet ā€“ is this a scam or a bait and switch? No. It’s an amazing opportunity for Europe, for the Open Source community and its numerous developers and also for me personally.

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Europe welcomes mayhem: Robert Kaye inducted into the EU Open Source Academy!

The European Open Source Academy is “The home of European excellence in Open Source” – or it was, until it decided to induct our very own Robert Kaye (aka mayhem/rob). Now it is the home of excellence and total mayhem! Congratulations Rob, this is a very well deserved honour šŸŽ‰

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GSoC 2025: Building Libretto, a Matrix Archiver

This post is also available on Jadeā€™s blog

Hello! Iā€™m Jade Ellis, AKA JadedBlueEyes. You might know me from my project with MetaBrainz last year – if not, Iā€™m happy to have the chance to introduce myself. Iā€™m an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of Kent in England, a music enthusiast and (in my spare time) a climber.

The Setting

In September 2024, MetaBrainz switched from IRC to Matrix as our primary form of communication. Matrix is a more feature-rich alternative to IRC, with capabilities like replies, edits, and reactions, while still being open source and aligning with the principles of our project.

When MetaBrainz primarily used IRC, we had a piece of software called BrainzBot. This was a multi-functional Python app that, most importantly, created a web-accessible archive of all messages in the MetaBrainz channels. Thanks to the bridges between IRC and Matrix, BrainzBot continued to trundle along, but it couldnā€™t understand modern features like edits, replies, or media. The code itself was also becoming decrepitā€”a fork of an abandoned project, showing its age.

This led to my GSoC project: to build a replacement for BrainzBotā€™s archival function – a chat archiver that natively understands and preserves Matrixā€™s rich features.

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GSoC 2025: Onboarding Revamp in ListenBrainz Android

Hi everyone,

Iā€™m Hemang Mishra (hemang-mishra on IRC and hemang-mishra on GitHub). Iā€™m currently a pre-final year student at IIIT Jabalpur, India. This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code with MetaBrainz. My mentor for the program was Jasjeet Singh (jasje on IRC).

I contributed to ListenBrainz Android, where I worked on revamping the onboarding experience, improving login, adding listen submission apps, integrating Listening Now, and setting up app updates. The journey has been both exciting and full of learning, and Iā€™m truly grateful for this opportunity.

Project Overview

ListenBrainz is a powerful platform that helps track listening history, share music tastes, and build a community around music.

The main goals of my project were:

  • Revamping onboarding ā€“ introducing users to the appā€™s core features and handling permissions with clear rationale.
  • Improving login ā€“replacing simple web pages with a custom Compose-based UI, and experimenting with the DOM tree of the web page to automate form submissions and token extraction in the background.
  • Listen submission apps ā€“ prompting users during onboarding to select which apps to collect listens from, preventing unwanted submissions.
  • Listening Now integration ā€“ adding ā€œListening Nowā€ into BrainzPlayer.
  • App updates ā€“ enabling updates for both Play Store and non-Play Store (F-Droid or sideloaded) releases.
Continue reading “GSoC 2025: Onboarding Revamp in ListenBrainz Android”

GSoC 2025: MetaBrainz Notification System

Hello, my name is Shaik Junaid (IRC nick fettuccinae and fettuccinae on GitHub). I’m an undergrad computer science student from MGIT, Hyderabad, India. My project focused on adding a central notification system for MetaBrainz.

Project Overview

This project’s idea was suggested to me by mentor @ruaok (AKA mayhem on IRC). I submitted my proposal on the MetaBrainz Forum and got it reviewed by @kartikohri13 (AKA lucifer on IRC), and finally got selected for GSoC 2025 .

A centralized notification management system will various MetaBrainz projects send notifications to users without rewriting boilerplate code. It will also keep users informed about the latest events and new features across projects. This is a goal bigger than the scope of a single GSoC project. To keep it reasonable, my project focused on implementing REST APIs, hosted on metabrainz.org, to manage notifications and user preferences for notifications. Additionally, I integrated the system with ListenBrainz to demonstrate its functionality.

The project spec sheet can be found here.

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GSoC 2025: Advanced User Statistics Visualizations

Greetings, Everyone!

I am Granth Bagadia (holycow23 on IRC), an undergraduate Computer Science student at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code 2025 with MetaBrainz, where I worked on introducing advanced user statistics visualizations for ListenBrainz.

I was mentored by Ansh Goyal (ansh on IRC), Kartik Ohri (lucifer on IRC), and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC). This post summarizes my project, its outcomes, and my experience over the course of the program.

Project Overview

ListenBrainz already provided some listening statistics, but these were limited in scope and depth. My project set out to design and implement advanced statistics that could offer users more meaningful insights into their listening habits. Since ListenBrainz is a user-centric platform, the idea was to create features that would let listeners explore their behavior from multiple perspectives. My original proposal focused on introducing a few key statistics.

The core statistics included:

  • Genre Trends ā€“ showing what genres a user listens to at different hours of the day.
  • Era Statistics ā€“ highlighting which musical eras dominate a userā€™s listening history.
  • Artist Evolution ā€“ tracking how much a user listens to specific artists over time.
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GSoC 2025: Importing Listening History Files in Listenbrainz

Hi Everyone!

I am Suvid Singhal (suvid on matrix), an undergraduate Computer Science student at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. I took part in the Google Summer of Code 2025 and have been contributing to Metabrainz Foundation since December 2024. My GSoC project was to develop a file-based listening history importer for ListenBrainz. The project was mentored by Lucifer and Monkey.

Project Overview

Listenbrainz is a platform to track your music habits, discover new music and share your music taste with the community. A feature I missed after creating my ListenBrainz account and connecting Spotify was the ability to see my complete Spotify listening history. My project addresses this gap by allowing users to export their extended streaming history from Spotify and import it into ListenBrainz. Additionally, users can import backups from their old ListenBrainz accounts. With the foundation ready, it will be simpler to add support for more file importers in future. This makes transitioning to Listenbrainz easier.

The importer can be accessed here.

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