Month: May 2008

Come play with a new search engine

Do you have a search bug that really annoys you? If so, please come help me test a new search engine!

I’ve ported our search services to a new text search engine called Xapian. While the indexes are bigger on disk, it is easier to install, much faster to index and probably also faster to search. And, over Lucene it has vastly fewer problems. And you can perform stop word searches!

Come play with it on my dev server! (Never mind the connection being slow and indexes being a few weeks old) Report issues to the usual place please!

Good news for Classic Tagger users

What started out as a joking suggestion has actually extended the life of the Classic Tagger! 🙂

One jokester at the recent summit suggested that we return random TRM values (as opposed to matched acoustic fingerprint ids) and just switch the TRM server off. Turns out, that suggestion was actually brilliant!

Doing this essentially makes every TRM lookup return “I don’t know this one”. But in that case the MusicBrainz server falls back to doing a metadata match (without the acoustic fingerprint). And it turns out that works pretty well all around! And I think some people may prefer this method, since you won’t have to clear up TRM collisions anymore.

So, what does mean for when we switch off the TRM server? The Classic Tagger lives on and may match fewer files than before — life may actually be better once we shut it off! But I think that many people will find it useful still.

Huzzah!

Personal email troubles

The heat wave in California over this past weekend fried the disks in my community mail server and I lost all the email from over the weekend. If you sent me mail over the weekend, (either to rob [fat] eorbit [dork] net or rob [fat] musicbrainz [dork] org) please re-send it so I can respond to it.

Sorry for the hassle and thanks for your understanding.

UK Mirror downtime

The UK mirror will be down from now (8pm BST, Noon PDT, 13 May) until about Noon BST, 4am PDT, 14 May due to scheduled power outage at last.fm where the server is hosted. Sorry for the invconvenience!

The UK mirror will be down from now (8pm BST, Noon PDT, 13 May) until about Noon BST, 4am PDT, 14 May due to scheduled power outage at last.fm where the server is hosted.

Sorry for the invconvenience!