In the past month there has been a ton of activity behind the scenes here at MusicBrainz and I can finally give a cohesive update on our plans for the next few months.
The much anticipated Release Groups release has been coded by Lukas in a weekend code sprint based on the old Mason codebase. Even though we had declared the old codebase as end-of-life, we have decided to push release groups out using the older code in order to satisfy the needs of the BBC and other customers. As part of this release, I will also add ISRC support and include a handful of bug fixes. Expect this release in May — I’ll post again when the date is firmly set.
And what is even more exciting is that we’re about to start work on our much anticipated Next Generation Schema (NGS). Discussed and planned over and over again, we’ve finally settled on an approach that appears to make everyone happy. As part of SoC, we’re likely going to accept Oliver and Lukas’ proposals to work on NGS over the summer. The goal is to implement all of the new schema in one release based on the TemplateToolkit/Catalyst work that Oliver has been working on since last summer. We’re going to take a step back and create a new object model/schema and then glue the TT UI onto the new object model.
The schedule puts the TT/Catalyst/NGS release into final beta test on August 31, with a release following in 15-30 days after that date. Please note, however, that there will be no other release based on Oliver’s TT work before NGS is release in September. We had to skip that release in order to pull in the schedule to make the target date of August 31.
I am quite excited by the work that is being done in the server area right now — we’re on our way to get past some significant hurdles. Just yesterday I got a first glimpse at the MusicBrainz site partially translated to Dutch — startling at first, but quite exciting when you think about it.
Many thanks to Matt Wood at the BBC for having the patience and dedication to work with MusicBrainz. Many thanks to Lukas for the coding sprint to get Release Groups off our collective plate. And of course many thanks to Oliver, Nikolai, Brian for your continuing hard work on TT. And thanks to everyone who has been supporting this team over the past few months.
MetaBrainz Blog 
It’s been a long time coming but I’m sure it’ll be well worth the wait!
Can’t wait for August 31!
Great news regarding the implementation of Release Groups and the upcoming work on the NGS. Coincidentally I just spent some time last week wrangling the Web Service response to produce similar functionality.
Will Release Groups be implemented in the API response, and is there anywhere I can find out more on how Release Groups has been implemented? The wiki page appears to be a little outdated – http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Release_Groups.
Release Groups will be exposed as part of the Web Service. We don’t have much in the way of documentation yet, but we’ll have something for when we push this to beta. In the meantime, feel free to read the code:
http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/browser/mb_server/branches/release-groups
Since the others are asking about release groups, I’ll focus on the other part. That is, ISRC.
Will the support be in form of AR that’s added through web site, or will it be something that could be, for example, submitted through Picard? I know the latter would be much simpler for users, which of course means there would be lots of wrong submissions…
Anyway, both new features sound good, and of course the NGS, or Great White Whale, sounds great as well 😉
ssundell: ISRCs will not be ARs. They will be submittable via the web interface and via the web service as part of submitting CD Stubs.