MusicBrainz Summit/13

Summary

MusicBrainz Summit 13 occurred on the 21st and 22nd of September, 2013 at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin.

Quote of the summit: "Can you please toss me the broccoli?"

Summit attendees

Special guests:

Lydia Pintscher from Wikimedia / Wikidata
Anders Arpteg from Spotify

MusicBrainz community:

CatCat
fractalizator
Freso
ianmcorvidae
ijabz
JonnyJD
kepstin
LordSputnik
Mineo
navap
nikki
ocharles
reosarevok
ruaok
warp

Agenda

Saturday
11 - 12	Introductions Setting the agenda State of the MB Spotify introduction (Anders Arpteg)
12 - 1pm	Geordi introduction External data matching
1 - 1:30	Break
1:30 - 1:45	Spotify ingestion process
1:45 - 2:15	NES Overview
2:30 - 2:45	Improving UX
2:45 - 3	Guiding new users (edit visibility, voting, subscriptions, etc.)
3 - 3:20	Break
3:20 - 3:30	Artist/label art
3:30 - 4	Scrobbling Acoustic data
4 - 4:20	Voting
4:20 - 4:40	Break
4:40 - 5:30	Genres

Sunday
10:30 - 10:40	Agenda revision
10:40 - 11	i18n
11 - 11:20	Promotion ideas
11:20 - 11:40	DiscIDs
11:40 - 12:10	Break
12:10 - 12:30	Home page redesign
12:30 - 12:50	Series
12:50 - 1:00	Elephant IDs
1 - 2	Lunch
2 - 2:05	Classical
2:05 - 2:15	WavePlot
2:15 - 2:30	MusicBrainz Audio Player
2:30 - 5	NES & UX breakout sessions Socializing

Discussion notes

Saturday

State of the MB

MB is still hosted in California; hosting on autopilot, “when it dies, it dies”. Basic support from hosting folks to keep things running.
Long term plans are to eventually move hosting away from California
Online music monetization
- Zoe Keating is an example of an artist making real money online and she publishes her revenue statements
- Artists/labels are using YouTube as a monetization strategy (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdEJFUnhyNFFkZjVSUWxhWGl1dE9lQXc)
- Would be nice to leverage YouTube to build better label relationships

Geordi

Development led by Ian
Geordi is a third party dataset ingester
Data mappings are created per third party dataset
Data is then made available at https://geordi.musicbrainz.org for users to complete the ingestion

Spotify

Spotify uses data from official label sources as well as third party sources
They would like to explore a (better) relationship with MusicBrainz data
They would like to have the “perfect music for every moment”

MusicBottle / User friendliness

MusicBottle - Freso hasn’t had time to work on it lately, so on hold for now
kepstin has been working on an alternative front end http://mbjs.kepstin.ca/. Source code repository at: https://github.com/kepstin/mbjs

Video

Checkbox to be added to recordings marking them as video as a “stopgap” minimum measure
Intent is to add a relationship from these “video” recordings to a third party video database

NES (New Edit System) Overview

Development led by Ollie
NES introduces a new edit system comprised of a front end that submits to a backend editable web service
NES will allow bundling multiple edits together (but not unbundling, at least initially)
Breakout session on Sunday

Improving UX

The intent is not to dumb the site down, but to add improvements to the existing UX
Proposal: “Fix bits that stick out”
- Locate individual editing features that behave strangely, or don’t “do the right thing” by default, and perform minimal fixes.
Proposal: “Multiple modes”
- An analogy: with scanning software, you often have a “Simple” mode which lets you scan with some common settings, and “Advanced mode”, where you can specify descreening, colour curves, etc.
Proposal: “Better defaults and default-hidden advanced features”
- Instead of full modes, just reorder things so simple/important stuff first and possibly hide features that many users might not need (with a preference to always show them)

Guiding new users

Proposal: Create a music dashboard that lists new users that need help
Proposal: Create multiple subscription lists
- Having multiple lists narrows the scope of each list and makes it easier to digest

Artist/label art

Now that CAA has been a success, intent is to expand and also cover artist and label images
Proposal: Use a whitelist of CC-licensed websites and start displaying the art
- Whitelist: WikiMedia Commons, Flickr, and more
- For Flickr and other API-enabled websites, ModBot will add a comment with the license and where it comes from

Scrobbling

Proposal: Set up a scrobbling server under the MetaBrainz umbrella
The initial API would be last.fm compatible
Over the long term the intent is to improve the API and build support for it directly into third party apps (eg. players) to increase user base

Acoustic data

Essentia does cool shit! The proposal is to collect data output from it and make it available to whoever wants to use it for recommendation, etc.
UPF can run it on the research dataset put out by the internet archive as some seed data, and it could potentially be integrated with a tool like Picard/Jaikoz, similar to how AcoustID collection works.
WavePlot already does similar things and might constitute a starting point for a database of such data

Voting

Intent is to increase the voting being performed in the database
Previously (~6 years ago) we had an iframe at the top of the page, this resulted in a lot of ‘no’ votes and was seen as an annoyance
Proposal: Remove ‘Yes’ votes
Proposal: Display relevant edit information to improve voting workflow
Proposal: Add ability to save custom searches

Genres

2012 discussion summary:
1. Multi level list of genres
  - Soundunwound solution: “main”, “quite”, “hints of”
  - 2 levels: “main genre”, “sub genre(s)”
2. Flat list of genres
  - Fixed list to choose from
  - Free form with autocompletion
3. Genre graph
Ben’s “genre entity” proposal
- Genres are entered by users as freeform, auto-completed tags
- After reaching a certain threshold, the tag is converted into a “genre entity”
- Displayed genres are comprised of both the tags and genre entities
- Converting a genre tag into a genre entity allows it to have relationships, and a genre entity would have fields for id3/itunes/(spotify?) genre mappings
- Tags can be manually promoted to entities with a vote
- Genre entities can be merged. The title of the merge source becomes a search hint for the merge target
- This would allow things like “Pop-Rock” and “poprock” to be merged and typing either of these as tags would result in the same genre entity being applied to the entity.
No conclusion here. It might be good to do some genres meetings, because this is a feature we should have and it would be good to have a better plan/timeframe for implementing it.

Sunday

Internationalization

Discussion point: whether to enable translation support on the main site
- Proposal: Enable all languages that are on beta on main
- Proposal: Enable just one language to start
Discussion held on whether to enable other languages even though all the documentation is all in English
Consensus reached that waiting for the all the documentation to be translated into other language(s) is not going to work
Consensus reached that we enable just German (most Germans speak English) and then go from there
Can we look into translating the wiki? Wikimedia DE has had good experience with Extension:Translate. The documentation team would also like this.

Promotion ideas

First impression for new users is lacking (home page needs work)
Developer awareness can be raised by promoting MB-aware apps such as those created as a part of Music Hack Day
Build a promotion-oriented community of users to coordinate promotional releases (reddit posts, social media, etc.), collaborate via a new mailing list
A possible Summer of Code project is to create a visually pleasing statistics page similar to VGMdb

DiscIDs

Different ideas discussed:
- DiscIDs prevent a few useful edge cases like pre-gap tracks and correct tracklists for certain VideoCDs.
- But they’re also used a lot by rippers/taggers, so we cannot just get rid of them.
Decision reached that we look at our DiscID usage statistics and then revisit this topic
There is a follow-up in User:JonnyJD/DiscID with details.

Home page redesign ideas

short desc/tagline
- "an open music encyclopedia"?
divide people into categories in as few words as possible.
- general users / people who want to tag
- artists / labels
- devs
show coverart
show “recent activity” in an activity steam
very basic stats
highlight search bar?

Series

Consensus that everyone wants series support
- New entity should be created with
  - Title
  - Sub entities (see proposals below)
  - Relationships to labels, artists
  - Dates derived from contents
  - Ordering of sub entities is optional
Consensus split on what can be put into a series
- Proposal: Just release groups
- Proposal: Either release groups or releases, but not both at the same time
- Proposal: One of the above AND recordings (podcasts being captured via stand alone recordings)
Motion carried to prototype and test the workability of a series entity that contains just release groups

Elephant IDs

aka adding track IDs into music files
Motion carried to add the MusicBrainz Track ID into a tag called "musicbrainz_releasetrackid"

Classical

Consensus reached that classical discussion requires a separate summit
Further discussion tabled

WavePlot

Development on WavePlot led by Ben
WavePlot is a system for making images of audio files and extracting data from then.
Future work will be improving integration with existing tools and adding features.

MusicBrainz Audio Player

Consensus reached that the optimal audio player is the MusicBrainz website itself
Proposal is to further develop keptsin’s MBJS and then integrate either a third party streaming service, a web based player, or a desktop player
Consensus reached that an optimal player also needs to be accessible/usable entirely offline.