Server Updates

Better Disc ID support, UTF-8 support for FreeDB, several tweaks to the automoderator election system and the usual miscellaneous bunch of bug fixes and other changes.

Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Users

Revamped Support for Disc IDs

Duplicate disc IDs are now allowed.  As a pleasant
side-effect you can now
search for albums based on FreeDB ID
as well as by disc ID. 
You can also inspect the disc ID details
much more closely than before.

FreeDB

FreeDB Moderations, (the mechanism whereby MusicBrainz automatically
imports data from FreeDB with no human intervention),
has been turned off – no more “FreeDB mods”. 
You can still do a manual FreeDB import
if you like.

Also, MusicBrainz now uses “FreeDB protocol 6”, which means much better
Unicode support when importing albums.

Automoderator Elections

All the e-mails which the system sends to the mb-automods mailing list
(when a candidate is nominated, when voting opens, etc) are now “Cc”d to
the candidate (assuming the candidate has entered an e-mail address). 
Previously it was possible, indeed probable, that the candidate had no idea
they were being nominated, and indeed accepted, right up until they got the
“Welcome to the mb-automods mailing list” e-mail.

At the end of an election, if the nominee was accepted, the system can now
make the successful candidate into an Automod without needing manual
intervention from the server administrators.  It can’t yet subscribe
the new auto-moderator to the “mb-automods” mailing list, however.

While voting is open, the tally of votes cast so far is now hidden to all
apart from the proposer, the seconders and the candidate.

If you are not logged in, the automod voting page now displays a more
helpful message than before.

Special “system” users (ModBot etc) can no longer be nominated for
auto-moderator status.

A small typo was fixed in the e-mails sent by The Returning Officer.

TRM Statistics

Ever since TRMs were introduced to MusicBrainz, we’ve kept a count of
how many times each TRM has been looked up by the Tagger (or similar apps). 
The problem was, we had no idea how often each TRM was then used to tag
each associated track.  So when looking at a TRM joined to several
tracks, working out which was the “most used” track was a matter of guesswork.

This release introduces the ability to count uses of TRMs (i.e.
against a specific track), as well as lookups.  You can see this
on the track detail page,
although all the “use” counts will all start out as blank (i.e. zero). 
In fact we’ll be keeping month-by-month lookup counts and use counts for
each TRM, so in theory you’ll be able to see how the tagging “popularity”
for each song rises and falls over time (although all you can see on the web
is the running total).

Other Changes

A bug was causing the artist search index to become
corrupted.  The bug has been fixed and the index has been rebuilt.

When albums are imported from FreeDB, and the ModBot adds a note
giving the URL of the original FreeDB data, that note is no longer
mailed to the original moderator.

When adding an album, both album attributes now default
to “not known” instead of “Album, Official”.

You can now make a case-change edit on artist aliases
(previously it erroneously complained that there was a conflicting
alias).  The code which adds and renames aliases has been made more
robust.

The edit artist page now includes a “copy” button (copies the name
into the sortname field).

“Guess Case” has been tweaked again: it no longer adds a space
after “.” if the next character is “.” (because we don’t want “…” to
become “. ..”).  It doesn’t check for a sub-title split when
inside parentheses (fixes “Album Title (Disc 1: Disc Name) bug). 
It converts “reprise” to lower case when within parentheses. 
It strips spaces after “(” or “[“, and before “]” or “)”.

The MusicBrainz data dumps now include Amazon cover art URLs.

The tagger search page is no longer fooled by extra whitespace
around your search query.

New and Changed Documentation

Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Server Programmers

The INSTALL file has been further updated,
describing the installation process more fully and more helpfully than ever
before 🙂

InitDb.pl now does a much better job
of creating the replication function.  You can use
--with-pending=FILE to tell it where to find pending.so.

Various scripts (MBImport.pl, ImportReplicationChanges,
LoadReplicationChanges) now check the status of completed sub-processes more
carefully.

FixLength.pl now runs every
night.  It has been made more robust too – it reports any errors it
encounters and keeps running, and it also shows the IDs of any albums it
can’t fix.

Only one instance of LoadReplicationChanges
is now allowed at a time.

ProcessReplicationChanges
now deletes “pending” data as it is processed, which means that if the
script is stopped (or crashes) we can safely restart where we left
off.  Several options have also been added to help with
troubleshooting.

Bugs and RFEs Closed

Dave Evans