MetaBrainz Foundation Inc.

License: GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)

Web Page: http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Development/Summer_of_Code/2015

Mailing List: http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-devel

The MetaBrainz Foundation has been set up to build community maintained databases and make them available in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Our data is mostly gathered by volunteers, and verified by a voting system to make sure it is consistent and correct. All non-commercial use is free, but commercial users are asked to pay for regular updates of the data in order to help fund the project. We encourage all data users to contribute to the data gathering process so that our data can be as comprehensive as possible.

The MetaBrainz Foundation believes in transparent finances and has several commercial customers who pay for timely and convenient access to data. The MetaBrainz Foundation is also supported by a number of sponsors who provide funds in order for the foundation to accomplish its goals.

MusicBrainz, a community-maintained open source encyclopedia of music information, is currently the MetaBrainz Foundation's sole project. MusicBrainz was created in 2000 and has gathered a significant number of users who curate a large database of information about music.

Projects

• AcousticBrainz Datasets Last year MetaBrainz Foundation and Music Technology Group at the UPF started AcousticBrainz project. Its main goal is to collect acoustic information about recordings from MusicBrainz and make it available to the public. After low-level information about recordings is submitted to the server, high-level descriptors (genre, mood, etc.) are computed based on existing classifier models. What we need is a way to create new datasets that will be used to train these models.
• Create a unified browse and search interface for MusicBrainz Even though MusicBrainz has a huge database of music information, the accessibility of those information to a general user seems low. For retrieving useful information from the database, one must have some understanding on the query syntax that needs to be followed. This proposal contains information on building a graphical user interface for both searching as well as browsing through the data in the database only just from mouse clicks without the user needing to know any of the query syntax.
• Finish Implementation of SOLR Search In order to provide near real-time indexing of the MusicBrainz database, I propose completion of Wieland Hoffmann’s (Mineo’s) 2014 GSoC project, the Implementation of SOLR search.
• Improvements to CritiqueBrainz Last year, Roman Tsukanov worked on finishing the core work on CritiqueBrainz and deploying the site. This year, I'm going to be working on adding new features to CB along with stuff that'll improve the end user experience.