So I started my GSoC project with understanding and retrieval of MusicBrainz Identifiers. That was a slow start, other than that I added mappings for MBIDs in grilo. This is required because,
we’ve tracker properties for MBIDs and we’ve grilo properties for MBIDs, but there’s no linkage between them. So we needed to add mapping from grilo to tracker.
Last week one more thing which I tried was finally retrieving MBIDs in GNOME Music. That was very exciting, because for past one month, I’ve been dealing with extraction of MBIDs through different extractors especially GStreamer extractor. So finally seeing those tags in Music made me really excited. It wasn’t hard retrieving those tags in Music, there’s already tracker plugin launched by Music which retrieves different tags, so I just added MBIDs in query module. Once you get the required MBIDs in Music, all you need to do is launch already existing cover-art grilo plugin with required tags and automatically cover art will be updated!

Now the thing about GStreamer extractor is, it’s very straightforward, all you need to do is just use GST tag and extract that. But the issue is, what we needed, the 5 MBIDs, GST doesn’t have tags for them. So I realised I’ve one more library to build and project 😦
Building GStreamer is not an easy task! Even though somehow I was able to build it and create MR for the tags I need, IT WASN’T EASY. There’s so many steps involved and definitely not recommended for first timers. So anyways I created an MR for MBIDs repair in GStreamer. That MR has been hanging there for past couple of weeks, no update yet. The thing about GStreamer project is, people are always so busy there with their own tasks, so getting this MR approved will be a huge achievement.

Other than these tasks, I also made minor changes like renaming mb album id to mb release id in grilo plugins and renaming grl-musicbrainz to grl-musibrainz-coverart.

Jean suggested that now I think of a plan to retrieve metadata, there’s lot of things involved, so jumping in without proper plan is not a great idea. So I spent few days just going through old patches and picard source code. Finally I wrote a writeup in
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-music/issues/293#note_536671