Month: November 2008

Main server updated

We just completed pushing the latest changes out to the main servers! We had a bit of a bumpy ride to roll out the upgrade — we’re noticing quite a few problems with collections right now and the Last Update feature brought our database server to its knees. As a result, we’ve disabled the Dashboard — we’ll re-enable it once we figure out what the problem is.

If you encounter a problem with the server, please file a bug report and select the 2008-11-23 version. Also, please check the open bug list to see if your problem has been reported before.

For a complete list of things that changed for this release, please see the release page on the wiki.

This massive release was brought to you by the tireless efforts of: Luks, Murdos, Djce, Jugdish, Acid2, Niklas and myself. Loads and loads of good testing came from Voiceinsideyou and Nikki. Thanks to everyone who helped with this release!

Also, if you’ve used Jugdish’s enhanced voting GreaseMonkey script, please disable it as it may cause problems since that functionality was included in this server release.

Reminder: Server update is coming this Sunday. And TRM are going away!

I’d like to remind everyone that the next server release is scheduled for this Sunday November 23. We’re still working on scheduling for the release, but it will happen on Sunday. Expect the MusicBrainz to be unavailable for at least 1 hour.

Also, please be aware that with this release the TRM server will be decommissioned — the Classic Tagger will then be officially deprecated, but it should continue to work — even without TRM support.

The BBC has hired a full time MusicBrainz server developer!

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Wood, the BBC has officially hired Jason Emmett to work full time on the MusicBrainz server!

Jason, who will be working in the BBC offices in London will be working with Oliver to finish the port to Template Toolkit branch. After that both of them will tackle the Release Groups that we’ve deemed to be a worthy intermediary step. A few weeks ago the MusicBrainz server had only table scraps of love, moving it along quite slowly. Today we have nearly 1.5 full time people working on the server source code. This gives me tons of hope that we can shoot for doing 3-4 releases in 2009.

Thank you so much for all of your efforts, Matthew Wood. Thank you for all of your support BBC! Welcome on board Jason!

Call for testing: November 23 server release

Murdos, Niklas, Luks, Dave Evans and I have all been working on the upcoming server release and we would like to invite you to help us test this massive release. Most of the features for this release have been debugged, but a few bugs are still outstanding.

The test server has been updated with all of the latest features and is ready for you to log in with your normal user account with the password ‘mb’. The list of features in this release is described in this blog post and this post.

Submit new bug reports to our bug tracker. Also see, the milestone for this release to see which bugs have been fixed and which bugs are still open. Please check the open bug list before reporting a new bug.

Thanks to everyone who helped take part in the development for this release!

One more feature from good measure: CD Stubs

The final feature to be included in the upcoming release are CD Stubs. From the documentation page:

Many times people would like to contribute CD data to MusicBrainz, but would prefer to not learn to be part of MusicBrainz. These people would rather just toss some data into a pile and go on with their lives to listen to their music or rip their CDs. CD Stubs enable users to do just that.

With this release people who come to look up a CD, but MusicBrainz does not know about that CD, will be given a choice to either enter the CD as a CD Stub or to join MusicBrainz and to enter the CD into MusicBrainz proper. (This is the red pill/blue pill decision point). Note that users who are logged in to MusicBrainz when looking up a CD will not be given the option to enter a CD Stub.

To submit a CD Stub to the test server, use any MusicBrainz enabled CD lookup application to submit a CD to MusicBrainz. You must not be logged into the test server, otherwise you will never be given the option to submit a CD Stub. Then follow the instructions for how to submit a CD Stub.

To retrieve the CD Stub you must use the XML Webservice. CD Stubs are not available via the old RDF web service. Use this URL to fetch data for CDs that will also return CD Stubs if no CDs are available in the main DB:

http://%5Btest.%5Dmusicbrainz.org/ws/1/release?type=xml&discid=%5Bdiscid%5D&toc=%5Btoc%5D

This URL is also available via libdiscid and its example program discid.