wikiloops community & engine room update 2026

Hello, friends of wikiloops.com!
In this post, i will cover a quick 2025 roundup & share some insight on the recent wikiloops update.
Let me wish you and yours a great start into the new year, first!

2025 roundup

wikiloops grew by 17.984 tracks and quietly passed the 250k milestone in 2025, which we finished with 261.836 publicly available tracks.
18.588 musicians joined the community, 107 dared to upload a first track - welcome aboard - so, we ended 2025 with 3.700 members who contributed music out of now 110k+ members total.

New Features 2025:

• the wikiloops world map
• frequency analyzer in player interface
• new instrument icon set
• dark mode
• modernized payment handling
• enhanced security features

January 2026 update

... or as hartmut put it:
[quote]We are now in the WL blue buttons decade 🎊🎉[/quote]
I am not all convinced it will last for a decade, as anything code-related is evolving at crazy speed.
The list of visible new features or changes (like the change of the button color hartmut is referring to) is rather short:

• improved side panel display
• visual cleanup on various pages, including newsfeeds & track upload

Once again the meaningful part of this update is "under the hood", where I finally managed to turn over the last pieces of old code into a modern day framework.
In short, this means wikiloops has just finished crossing over from "a hobby project some dude without any clue coded free-handedly in 2010" (that was me, I can say this) to a modern day software applications standards.
The process involved changing no less than 120k lines of code, to the benefit that we are now running on the latest php version, the latest symfony version and the latest database drivers... the list goes on. For the first time in the projects history of soon 15 years, the code-base is not lagging behind technical standards by several years.
Hard to put in words what reaching this point feels like - it is a major relief not to have to worry as much about security, especially since the bots are getting smarter every year, and the AI industry likes to crawl and download whatever they can get their hands on.
It obviously takes a professional level of protection to be able to serve a musical community without getting taken down by random bot raids nowadays, and I am happy that could be achieved, so the fun on wikiloops can continue into its 15th season.

I have to give thanks to karuma here one more time, who was of great help re-organizing the wikiloops code base, and whos ideas and recommendations have come into full effect with this recent update.
And once I am at it, sincere thanks go out to TeeGee and wjl for taking care of the 'loops everyday in-and-out.

Once we are here and talking

This post is written by a human, and yes, we need to let go of the assumption that things we read on screens are that in 2026. Note the odd grammar? AI might not do that (if not prompted to... oh lord).
I work with AI, heavily, every day in my day job, and recently when coding on wikiloops, too. I have noticed the ongoing exchange of opinions on wikiloops about use of AI - mostly in the context of letting it generate music and weather that counts as being creative or not.
I am witnessing a different side of what AI is and does than probably most of you reading this, and I happen to run wikiloops, so, hear me out for a few sentences more if you will:
From what I see, the entire internet landscape as we knew it ten years ago is eroding, and newer "versions" of online activity are either app-bound like TikTok or Insta, or represent some form of AI agent. Google web search is no longer a source of a wild mix of partially weird results, the ways of discovery have changed dramatically.
People who used to earn big time on displaying banner ads on their blogs are looking for work these days, and a lot of folks who ran funky niche sites on some topic are folding up since they are no longer receiving a lot of visitors whilst people flip thru their shorts & reels.
It is what it is, and somehow wikiloops is still swimming in that pond.
Our strength is that we do not rely on advertisement income, thanks to the supporting members of wikiloops and a little help by our long term sponsor thomann.de, and thanks to the fact that (unlike most other platforms this size) we do not have to live up to the exaggerated growth expectations of any investors.
With these two legs to walk on we managed to slow-grow this platform to what you see today, and in difference to some past times, the platform is making ends meet by not requiring as much human coding effort any longer.
The wikiloops project was never aimed at making the maximum financial profit, and struggled to make ends meet for years.
If you dig back in this blog, you will find posts where I was no longer sure we would make it thru another year.
Today, I could not think of a reason why we would not make it to 2030 - if you folks continue to back wikiloops up with your monthly support payments, we can keep wikiloops the way we like it.

Thanks to all who support wikiloops by chipping in with five or ten bucks a month for their upgraded membership -
this entire wikiloops project is a collaboration that would not work without you!