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.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Congrats on the new release! Looking forward to poking around and playing with all these new features 🙂
congratulations and thank you
I’ve quickly hacked JugDish’s script somewhat to disable the add/del note functionality since the server update still doesn’t include “Approve” boxes for AutoEditor voting and I use that all the time. Seems to be working OK, but would really checking from JD himself! http://userscripts.org/topics/18251
s/really checking/really appreciate checking
How cool, thank you all !
Voice, could you please make it an installable GM script, instead of having to having to copy/paste/save it ?
Congratulations to the great new release!
Regarding the voting script: there was a fix to not send too many requests per second (http://www.numb.org/enhanced_voting_fixed.user.js) which should probably be integrated too (if it is not already in the one from voiceinsideyou, I didn’t check that).
Chad (voiceinsideyou), when to you stop talking code-language ? ;-P
It took me time figuring out what you were meaning by s/…/… (;°_ °)
Thank you guys for this new server release, I ♡ it so much, it is beautiful !
And Oh WOW !! WOW THE TAGS NOW !!
Tag visibility and collection are the most exposed visible new features ! That is so much … wow.
voiceinsideyou: You forgot to terminate your command (ending ‘/’)
The collection feature looks neat, but can’t our collection be automatically added by scanning the collection directory locally?
Aha, I just found out such a tool is being made…
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicCollectionTool
Great!
Spasme
This changes are… 😮 amazing is not enough to say how great it is!!!
jesus2099, Dieter_be: Duly noted on both counts 🙂
mll: I deliberately didn’t put it up there as it was a quick hack and I wanted JugDish to take a look at it and update it on userscripts himself if he had time; and didn’t want people to accidentally have both installed/enabled!
It’s the non-throttled version as I don’t like/use the throttled version. I actually note there are some other differences in the throttled version from the one on his original userscripts page, but not sure what they’re about.
There’s also an issue with approving edits that require a note to be added at the same time, but I guess that’s minor.
voiceinsideyou: Hacked script is working great. Obviously still have the limit of 5 max approves per batch but everything else seems to be working just fine now. Thanks!
What’s up with that artist rating function? Drop that, Musicbrainz is not about charts and popularity!
While it took me about half a second to disable the ratings display, I have to agree with above poster, it really does not belong on the site and should be cut ASAP.
Apart from that, nice work 🙂
Some people love the ratings. Some people hate them — for the latter we gave an option to turn them off. Please stop asking to remove a feature from MusicBrainz that other people really appreciate.
I can see how the ratings would drive people crazy, since it takes a site that had all objective data and suddenly adds subjective data. But I personally think it’s fun.
I also like the My Collections feature. In the Missing Releases feature, it looks like when a person has an album in the release, it doesn’t list all of the different versions of the same album with slightly different track listings. But some of the unlisted versions could have songs you’re missing. I would suggest it compare the track listings in each version and say something like, assuming an album entitled Spirit), “You are missing the following tracks from the album Spirit: ‘The Best You Never Had, Homeless, & Here I Am’.
And maybe there should be some way to more explicitly mark multiple releases as different versions of the same album, so when a person says she has Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, it doesn’t tell her she’s missing the album Good Girl Gone Bad. Or maybe the suggestion from the previous paragraph would be enough to fix that…
I didn’t know it wasn’t showing album variations, but I think it’s nice.
I was thinking the contrary, I feared the system didn’t use the relations (is the earliest release of, is a new version of …).
Maybe you would like an option to activate or deactivate this behaviour, Sharaya.
I’d like to say also that five stars is OK to me.
I’ve read somewhere that it would be cool to have an on-10 rating but to me, the more possibilities, the more hesitation and endless re-ratings of old in comparison with new ratings.
(^_^)
I love options, but only showing the newest version of an album would not suffice. The problem is different tracks are released in different countries. So the newest release could be missing tracks of an older release from another country.
If a system actually gets implemented to show just the missing tracks, the best option I could hope for would be to choose whether it shows (every track from that album that is missing from your collection) or (every track from that artist that is not in your collection). Because that would help to collect every track from the artist, rather than every release, since collecting every release would involve a lot of duplicate tracks.
I realize that’s all more complex than the current options, but this website gives me the impression the people behind it tend to favor design goals that could only be described as masochistic, for the sake of utility. That’s a good thing. Maybe there’s some weird SQL statement that would create the whole list of missing tracks, so all the work gets put off on the database and the only cost is the brain cells of the person who has to figure what that statement is…
Sharaya – I don’t believe it’s intended to only show one version of a release as far as I know- there simply aren’t enough smarts in the current MB DB for it to be able to tell that different releases may actually be different versions of the same album, unless it’s using something crude like the title and earliest release date. Don’t remember seeing that mentioned anywhere though, so perhaps it’s accidental. I can see what you’re saying happening though, so I’ll investigate further.
For what its worth, there is current work going on with “release grouping”, primarily driven by the BBC. Having such a feature would allow multiple versions of the same release to be grouped together semantically, and more easily compared.
Additionally, being able to treat “songs” separately from “tracks” on releases (required for the collection purposes you describe) has been long talked about at MB. We all want this, but it’s pretty complicated and until now, MB probably hasn’t had the developers to make it happen. There is, however, preliminary development work going on in this area alongside other work on the existing database structure.
Regarding the ratings: at the moment it’s early days and I’ve yet to see anything rated other than 5 stars but I can see how it would be off-putting to see your favourite band rated anything else.
I can see how this feature is useful, individuals can store their ratings centrally and access them via multilple desktop clients (iTunes/Banshee/Amarok) and get recommendations based on similar raters.
However, I’m still not convinced that prominantly displaying a global score out of five is useful, compared with your rating plus “fans also like: A, B & C”
I’m also wondering how the ratings will work on songs and albums. Two approaches to consider:
RateYourMusic.com FAQ: How does the average rating of an album work?
http://rateyourmusic.com/faq/#q219516
I was also going to suggest the approach (that I thought was) taken by Martin C Strong in his (many, excellent) Discography books. I was under the impression that he only rated within a band, e.g. 5/5 would mean this album is the best that band had to offer, but makes no comment on whether they are better/worse than the Beatles/Metallica/Whoever.
However, looking for a web reference to this scheme I find only confused commentary, some of which contradicts what I remember, I’ll have to dig it out and see what it says.
Great job you guys. Keep up the good work!
Voiceinsideme, it seems you are saying the key for MusicBrainz to gain even more advanced functionality is “developers, developers, developers”. I think that is a very interesting development.
Dave, given that artists, albums, and songs have separate ratings, perhaps it would be possible for the artist rating to be relative to other artists while album ratings are only relative to other albums by the same artist, and songs are only relative to other songs on the same album. That way, it would be possible to specify what is an artist’s best and worst work while still being able to utterly deride the artist and all who care love him.
I, too, was thinking the rating system would be best used to suggest new artists based on the ratings of others. It would depend on one user’s rating of an artist matching another user’s rating of the same artist, which would suggest they have similar interests. That kind of system could incorporate tags too. Everybody needs a bit of fuzzy logic in their lives. But what I personally would like even more is a relationship type for similar artists, so I could just specify one artist to be similar to another. I think I saw a “similar artist” label somewhere and it’s been driving me crazy ever since.
For what it’s worth, yes, I came back to MusicBrainz to see how you guys were doing, and I got disappointed to find that the second data point listed for my favorite band is a 2/5 star rating. I guess it’s hard for me to get behind what I thought was an objective data-collecting project, if it’s proclaiming “this music that’s been dear to you all your life… sucks! It’s a fact!”