Month: January 2009

After the last release our new spiffy lastupdate feature that was supposed to keep track of when data in the database changed brought our database server to its knees. 😦

The problem was that if we had an artist, we would also go update all of its releases. And if you updated a release, the artist and label had to be updated. We turned off all of the cascading updates and our server went back to normal.

Thus, for the time being updates will not cascade. If you update an artist, none of the releases or associated labels will update. In the future we will see if we can improve on this.

The good news in this is that the Dashboard feature is still useful, so I’ve turned it back on and made it live on the main server.

P.S. We just passed our 10 millionth edit!!

A belated Happy New Year to all MusicBrainzers out there!

If things seem quiet in MusicBrainz land, don’t be fooled! The style mailing list is quite busy with activity as the style process has been rebooted. Development is happening at a frenzied pace as most developers are focusing on the server rewrite that has been in progress since summer last year. In a sense its already fulfilling one of its goals: More developers are taking a look at the improved, easier to understand and easier to install codebase. I don’t think we’ve ever had this many developers tinkering with the server source code!

We’re now in the process of coordinating a growing team of developers and charting the course for future releases. Its still too early to really tell what the next release will include exactly, but once a concrete plan starts shaping up, I’ll post an update here. Also, another team of people is hard at work at creating a new binary install of Picard for OS X. You can follow all the happenings on the developers mailing list.

Finally, the MetaBrainz Foundation, the legal entity that pays the bills for MusicBrainz made it through another year of being self sufficient! In 2008 the non-profit earned $126,442.26 and spent $94,717.79. Now we have $30,000 more in the bank than we did this time last year. This finally gives us money to spend on development to move MusicBrainz along! For all the details on how we earned/spent our money, check out our finances page and our 2008 Profit and Loss statement.

Finally, the BBC continues to tout the virtues of MusicBrainz: BBC Music talking semantics

Onward into an exciting 2009 we go!