Server updates: Advanced Relationships, duplicate artists, artist person/group support, artist from/to date and a few minor tweaks.
(This change log includes all changes made to the server since the date
of the last release. Some of these changes are new as of the
above date; some were introduced between the previous release and this one).
Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Users
Advanced Relationships
The much awaited Advanced Relationships feature is finally complete. Advanced Relationships allows
the user to create a relationship between an Artist, Album, Track or URL. Each relationship may
have optional attributes (e.g. instrument performed, guest performance) and/or a date range
for which the links applies.
This feature is best explained with some examples:
- Artist – Artist relationship: The Edge is a member of U2
- Album – Artist relationship: Incendio has acoustic guitar performed by Jim Stubblefield
- Artist – Track relationship: Symphony No. 5 was conduced by Herbert von Karajan
- Artist – URL relationship: Morcheeba has a home page at: http://morcheeba.net/
To see a good example of what is possible with Advanced Relationships, take a look at the album Incendio.
For complete documentation on the AdvancedRelationships feature, please see the Advanced Relationships Documentation on the wiki.
Artist changes
It is now possible to enter multiple artists with the same name. If you are adding an artist with the same
(or very similar) name to an existing artist, you will be prompted to enter an artist comment. This short artist
comment is used to differentiate this artist from other similar artists and will be shown whenever
artists appear in a list and the user needs to chose the correct artist.
Artists can now also be differentiated as a Group or as a Person (via the add or edit artist pages). Artists
can also have formed/born or dissolved/died dates (for groups and persons, respectively).
Moderating and Voting now requires a verified email address
As per discussion on the mb-users mailing list, users must now provide a verified email address
in order to vote or moderate. Hopefully this will increase the communication between moderators
and reduce the number of random voters.
New Preference: “Show ‘Inline’ Moderations”
Due to problems with some new moderators randomly voting NO on moderations, we have
turned off showing random moderations in the inline moderation i-frame. The inline moderation feature
is now only available to moderators who have had their account for more than two weeks
and will be disabled by default.
If you do opt to be shown inline moderations, then they will no longer
include moderations unrelated to the page you’re on. (Previously
the system would select a moderation for the artist you’re looking at,
or otherwise one of your subscribed artists, or otherwise a related artist,
or otherwise any artist. Now that final part has been removed).
Miscellaneous
- JMP3Rename and MP3Tag were added to the related projects page.
- The completely out of date and improbable design for MusicBrainz II has been removed from the DB Structure pages. Please
refer to the more up to date MusicBrainz database structure page.
- The funky “A” graphic that used to indicate an automoderation has been replaced by an (automod) text in a smaller font on the left hand side.
Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Administrators
InitDb.pl has been cleaned up a bit.
You can now use it to create the database (and user, and language, etc)
but with no tables in it: ./admin/InitDb.pl --createdb --empty-database.
If you try to import the wrong tar files (where the schema sequence
of the tar file doesn’t match that of your database), then previously
MBImport.pl would decompress all of the tar files, then find the error
(and then delete all the decompressed files). It now finds the
error much sooner, without wasting all that time decompressing the
tar files first.
The Pending/PendingData tables are now built in to the main SQL scripts;
all MusicBrainz databases (including replication masters, and replication
slaves, and ones that aren’t replicating at all) will always include these
tables.
Bugs and RFEs Closed
Dave Evans and Robert Kaye
MetaBrainz Blog 