Google Summer of Code 2025: MetaBrainz has been accepted!

We’re are excited to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has been accepted into Google’s Summer of Code program for 2025! Summer of Code has been instrumental (pun intended) in the development of our projects and growth of our team over the years, so we’re pleased to be part of it for another round.

Ready to rock this summer coding with us? Start with carefully reading the terms for contributors. If you are eligible, go ahead and take a look at our Summer of Code landing page where you can find project ideas that we have listed for this year. Our landing page will also tell you what we require of our participants and how to pick up a project.

A very important note: We will not be considering any proposals from contributors who have not reached out to us before March 31.

Good luck to all who are interested in participating!

PS: If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, check out this entirely optional link for some extra motivation.

GSoC 2024: Integrating imports into BookBrainz

It really bugged me that it proved impossible to finish the huge BookBrainz importer project last year. Fortunately MetaBrainz (and Google) gave me the chance to continue working on my 2023 project during this Summer of Code, thank you! Our goal is still to import huge external datasets into the BookBrainz database schema.

Last year I worked on the backend services to transform and insert simple entities into the database. This year’s goal was to support importing multiple related entities and exposing the imported data on the website. We can now import entities (on the backend), which can be reviewed and approved by our users with ease.

If you want to know the full story, I recommend you to start with my previous blog post to learn more details about the existing importer infrastructure and last year’s problems. Or just read on if you are only interested in the advanced stuff which I did this year.

GSoC 2024: MusicBrainz – Internet Archive integration: Saving external links in the Wayback Machine

Introduction

Greetings, Everyone!

I am Ashutosh Aswal (IRC nick yellowhatpro), a Computer Science grad from PEC University, India. This is my second time contributing to MetaBrainz as a GSoC contributor, and unlike the last time, when I contributed to the ListenBrainz Android app, this year, I took a challenge to learn a new language and framework (Rust and Postgres) to create this delightful project, Melba, which stands for MusicBrainz’s External Links wayBack machine Archiver.

As the name suggests, the project saves external webpages linked in the MusicBrainz database to the Internet Archive using Wayback Machine API. Let me walk you through the making of Melba.

Let’s begin!! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧

GSoC 2024: Transferring Playlists Between SoundCloud, Apple Music and ListenBrainz

Introduction

Hello! My name is Rimma Kubanova (AKA rimskii on IRC and rimma-kubanova on GitHub). I’m an undergraduate Computer Science student at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. My inspiration to participate in Google Summer of Code came from seeing my seniors’ experiences. I began contributing to MetaBrainz because I felt their goals and technologies aligned perfectly with my interests and skills.

After making my first contributions, I decided to apply to GSoC, and to my delight, my proposal was accepted!

Proposal

ListenBrainz generates music recommendation playlists based on a user’s listening history and habits. These playlists can be enjoyed directly in ListenBrainz and automatically exported to the user’s Spotify account. However, currently, ListenBrainz only supports exporting to Spotify, which limits the user experience.

My project focused on expanding this functionality by integrating support for exporting these playlists to other external music services like SoundCloud and Apple Music. Additionally, I proposed adding an import feature to allow users to bring their playlists from these services into ListenBrainz.

My proposal can be found here.

GSoC 2024: Picard image processing

Hello, I’m Giorgio Fontanive (aka twodoorcoupe), a computer engineering student from Italy. For the past few months I’ve been working on Picard under the mentorship of zas and outsidecontext.

Objective

Currently, Picard can retrieve releases’ cover art images from multiple providers and embed these into music files’ tags or save them as separate files. While most cover art providers allow some options over things like size, the user still has little control over the final images.

The goal of the project was to fix this by adding more options to filter and to post process images, independent of the provider, while also having different options for images embedded into tags and the ones saved as separate files.

GSoC 2024: Add Syndication Feeds to ListenBrainz

Hi everyone!

I am Eric Deng, known as ericd on MB element server and ericd23 on Github. From May through August, I worked on adding various syndication feeds (Atom feeds) to ListenBrainz, a project that was mentored by Mayhem.

Project Overview

ListenBrainz is a powerful platform that allows users to keep track of their listening history, share music tastes, and discover new music. The primary goal of my project was to extend ListenBrainz’s functionality by adding syndication feeds, specifically Atom feeds. This feature enables users to subscribe to various feeds, allowing them to access their data in a more unified (through a feed reader) and customized (with various options each feed offers) manner. This feature is an addition that builds on ListenBrainz’s existing strengths and open data nature.

The goals of this project includes:

Basic feed generation infrastructure
Various feed endpoints: user latest activity, user listens, user statistics, playlists, recommendations (weekly jam and exploration), fresh releases (user and site-wide) and statistic art creator.
UI for accessing feed URLs

GSoC 2024: New Email Service with Internationalization

This post is also available on Jade’s blog

Personal Introduction

Hello! I’m Jade Ellis, AKA JadedBlueEyes. I’m an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of Kent in England. I was thrilled to be selected as a participant in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 program. My project focused on developing an email service with internationalisation support, MJML-based markup and text fallback to produce emails that are visually appealing and accessible to as many people as possible.

Reason for the Project

The MusicBrainz project sends thousands of emails every day to its diverse contributors. However, the existing email system was limited, having organically grown over the project’s lifetime. It could only send emails in English, and only in plain text. The experience that new contributors got could only be described as unfriendly. The overarching goal of my proposal was to improve this.

GSoC 2024: Artist, Album, User Pages in ListenBrainz Android App for all users

Introduction

Hola everyone!

I am Pranav Konidena (you may know me as pranav on IRC, or pranavkonidena on GitHub.). I am a junior at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IITR) pursuing a degree in engineering with a major in Electronics and Communication. I learnt about Google Summer of Code from my club seniors and was instantly drawn towards it. While I was going through the potential organizations to which I could contribute, I was instantly drawn towards MetaBrainz as it combined my love for music and programming.

I wanted to explore further the field of Mobile Development, I had sound knowledge of Flutter, but I didn’t know Native Android Development and decided to try and contribute to ListenBrainz Android. With that goal in mind, I started learning about Kotlin and JetPack Compose, as they were mentioned as the tech stack for the LB Android app in its General Overview Doc on its GitHub Repository. My first contribution to LB Android was fixing a minor text overflow bug.

Faces of Summer of Code 2024

Look at these glorious faces. Look at them.

A screenshot of a video chat, with 16 lovely participants visible. — *Click here for full resolution image*

Last week there was a short meeting with all GSoC contributors¹ and mentors² present. We used the opportunity to put faces to names, explain how MetaBrainz works, and answer any questions. Motivation is high, and everyone is looking forward to getting started with coding this week!

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!

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