I’m excited to be working for MusicBrainz this year in Google’s Summer of Code. I have been involved in the MusicBrainz community for a number of years and it’s great to be able to work with them in a more official capacity. In recent years I’ve been an active member of MusicBrainz, adding and editing content in the main database. I’ve also used MusicBrainz as a developer on albumidentify, a personal project to develop a a completely automated tool to rip and rename CDs. In recent times I’ve also been a developer on python-musicbrainz-ngs, a python wrapper around the MusicBrainz webservice.
This summer I will be working on MusicBrainz’s collections support. Collections are a feature that lets signed in users store lists of albums in their account. Basic functionality for collections exists, allowing signed in users to create free-form lists of albums—playlists, favourite music, music to buy, a mirror of a physical collection, etc. Because collection lists are freeform, it’s up to the user to decide the use. While the basic functionality is present, this summer I hope to add many additional features that people have been requesting since collection support went live. The majority of the work I will be doing this summer is based off of bug reports in the MusicBrainz bug system. Here’s a teaser of the features I plan to work on first:
- [MBS-939]—Show how many releases are in each collection
- [MBS-3491]—indicators for collection items
- [MBS-4366]—Display front cover art on user collection page
- [MBS-4294] —Add a “description” field to collections
I am currently finishing my Masters degree in Music Technology at McGill University. I work in the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Lab at the Schulich School of Music. I am currently working on automated systems to understand, store, and search early renaissance sheet music. We hope to work towards a catalogue of all known early sheet music. Who knows, maybe this is an opportunity for MusicBrainz to break out into more than just recorded audio!