Month: December 2005

End of year fundraiser

MusicBrainz’ servers are smoking and generally overloaded these days. Fortunately, we have one more unused server that needs drives and a RAID controller before we can use it. Rich Gibson, a friend of MusicBrainz has even pledged a place for us to stash the server for free!

So, to make that happen I would like to kill two birds with one stone:

  1. Get you a tax deduction before tax year 2005 comes to a close
  2. Get more hardware to bring another server online.

This will allow us to bring one new server online. This new server would be used for Picard tagging, calculating indexes for Picard and the upcoming PimpMyTunes command line tagger. Before too long we would also perform all MusicBrainz searches with this machine. This would give much better search results and lighten the load on the main database server.

From now until the end of the year, if we collect $500, I will purchase:

  • Two Ultra 320 SCSI 36Gb drives for about $150 each
  • One Adaptec Zero Channel RAID controller for about $200

and then boot the server and put it to use as outlined above. If we collect $1000, I will also purchase the following to upgrade zim (the all purpose server) from the current single drive configuration that is too small for our current needs:

  • One SATA RAID Controller for about $250
  • Two SATA150 200Gb Seagate drives for $150 each

If you feel like MusicBrainz needs more capacity and/or you could use a tax break on this year’s taxes, please make a donation today! If you prefer to send us a check, click the donate link for our address — just make sure that you drop the check in the mail before the year is over!

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The impending quasi-death of Style Guideline #5

On January 8th, 2006 we will update the server with the Style Guideline 5 Disaster Relief fix that was discussed at the MusicBrainz Summit 7.

From the wiki page:

The plans are as follows:

Allow albums with various artists on the tracks but which are attributed to one artist to be moved to this artist.

Change the StyleGuideline like this: “If two or more primary artists perform on a track, create a collaboration artist for them and attach the track to it.”

Note, that the use of “feat.” will still be valid for guest performing artists.

For more information on this change, please read the wiki page. These changes are now live on the staging server if you want to give them a try.

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Board of directors change

Due to Larry Lessig’s overwhelming schedule, Larry has moved into the Director Emeritus position on our board of directors. This means that Larry is less involved with day-to-day activities of the foundation, but still remains available to us for consulting on larger issues where we can use his expertise.

Taking his place is Brian Zisk from the Future of Music Coalition. Brian has an extensive tech background in the Silicon Valley, (Green Witch Radio, iCast, Xiph to name a few) as well as extensive contacts in the music industry through his co-founding of the Future of Music Coalition. Brian will be a perfect addition to our board and his presence will open a number of doors in the music industry for the MetaBrainz Foundation.

Welcome to the MetaBrainz Foundation, Brian!

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Record of the 7th MusicBrainz Summit

MusicBrainzSummit7
is over. It was fun, and it was a lot of work. Here is what we’ve worked out:
From the whole range of patchy fix to complete rewrite, we have chosen both
extremes:

  1. FeaturingArtistStyle will be patched very soon.
  2. Then work will start on MusicBrainz 2.0: a complete rewrite of the
    database schema, the moderation system and the user interfaces. This will
    take a long time.
  3. In the meantime small improvements and fixes to old nuisances will be
    made every 1-2 months.

Continue reading “Record of the 7th MusicBrainz Summit”