We’ve hammered out many of the rough edges from the upcoming release and now we need your help to test the release to spot any problems that may have slipped past our new code review process.
New in this release:
– Release groups: This allows us to group same titled releases from one artist that have slightly different track lists into release groups. For instance, here is a Weezer release group that has many separate releases in it. We have converted as many batches of releases to release groups as we automatically could, but there are tons left to do. We’ll need your help!
– ISRC support: We can now track ISRC codes. While this is less useful to end users, our commercial customers have been asking for this for eons.
– WikiDocs: Our WikiDocs system now uses our new Mediawiki to pull documentation from.
– Bug fixes from our last release.
Aside from a good chunk of the bug fixes, all of these things are now live on our test server. Please report bugs to our bug tracker and make sure to select the “Server: ReleaseGroups, ISRCs, Bug Fixes” milestone so we can spot your bugs fast. Also take a look at the bugs we’ve already closed for this release and which ones are still outstanding.
We have one major known issue, where some release groups may be found in the search engine, but will give a “release group not found error” (example). This is a known bug.
Finally, do the release groups as we have them now make sense to you? There are a few things that may not be entirely clear, so we’re looking for feedback how to make things more clear before we release this on May 24th.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Can an album belong to more than one release group?
I’m thinking about two-for-one releases where two old albums are put on teh same CD (or 2CD set).
Looking great, but when looking at the list I miss two things: Why aren’t there numbers telling me how many releases there are in in a group. Like:
“My Life is a Mess Without Musicbrainz (5 releases)”
The other point is the year, it isn’t clear that “Year” is the year of the first release. I think the text should be:
“Year of first release:”
And last: wouldn’t it look very high tech when you hoover over a release and the release pop-up?
How is the automatic grouping done? I’ve seen releases with the same name, and even with the same year, that haven’t been grouped (e.g. for Counting Crows and Coldplay). I know that editors can merge them manually later, but I’m curious at the reason it happens.
(I even tried searching through the source code, but couldn’t find the actual merging script…)
The current logic is at http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:LukasLalinsky/Release_Groups however the list of possible ARs used for merging is likely to be cut down (or have added restrictions) for the final release I think. Too many false positive merges of box sets and the like.
FYI – The above posted instance of ‘Weezer release group’ and the link for bug example return the “Could not load release group” error msg.
Not sure if this is temporary or a new working link should be posted.
tele: Thanks, fixed. I need to remember to fix links after I reload the data.
Any plans of adding a convenient way for editing ISRCs? The only way i figured out is to edit every single track. There seems no ISRC collision detection atm.
Cuesheet uploading possibilities (for adding new and updating existing releases) would be great. This way, you could add TOC, tags and ISRC with a single step (for those ripping their cds that way)
wismann: Yes, see this ticket: http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/5166
Mayhem: I had no problem submitting ISRCs through the web interface (see http://test.musicbrainz.org/track/3b50052b-28e6-460a-9e52-eb19fac553b0.html for example), it was only inconvenient to do so. Additionally, I don’t really get what this ticket’s about and whether this touches my issue or not.