Month: October 2009

New server image for 2009-05-24 release available

The VMWare image has been updated for the 2009-05-24 server release. The previous image was getting old and updating steps have been reported not easy.

The new image has been upgraded to Debian 5.0, includes a more recent Linux kernel and uses PosgreSQL 8.3 (the required version to work on NGS).

To download and play with the new image, read our VirtualMusicBrainzServer wiki page!

Music Hack Day Boston: Would you like to represent MusicBrainz?

The fabulous Music Hack Day is happening in Boston on November 21-22. Sadly, I will be in London/Hamburg that weekend and can’t make it to Boston. The organizers have requested that we have someone represent MusicBrainz at the hack day. Are there any MusicBrainzers who live in/near Boston who would like to go to the hack day and represent MusicBrainz?

Knowledge of the project, our web interface, MBIDs and our web service would be really useful to have. Please post a comment if you’re interested. And even if you’re not interested in representing MB, it looks to be a great event that you should go to in any case!

UPDATE: Alastair Porter has volunteered! Thanks Alastair!

Picard 0.12

We have released the next version of MusicBrainz Picard. Picard 0.12 includes a lot of bug fixes and new features, including:

  • Support for ratings and folksonomy tags.
  • Live syntax checking for tagger script and naming strings.
  • Embed cover art into WMA and APEv2 tags.
  • New script functions $matchedtracks(), $initials(), $firstalphachar(), $truncate() and $firstwords()
  • New plugin extension point ui_init, allowing plugins to add new UI elements to the main window.
  • A new high quality application icon.
  • Support for originaldate tag. While this is not filled by Picard itself it can be used from within plugins such as the Original Release Date plugin.
  • Write ISRCs from MusicBrainz into tags.
  • CD drive dropdown selection on Linux.
  • Various small improvements to the UI.
  • Updated translations and the option to choose the user interface language.

A complete list of changes be found in NEWS.txt.

Picard 0.12 is available for download for Windows and Linux. The Mac OS X version will be released later, sorry for that. We are still in search for a long term maintainer of Picard on OS X.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release.

Web service users: What do you think of our current URL structure?

I’m about to finish writing the web service (version 1 & 2) for NGS, based on the work that Lukas started a few months ago. The NGS web service currently does not have a compete means of tweaking how much XML is returned for a given resource. Lukas wondered if we should keep our existing approach or start using a new approach that Last.fm (and others) use.

Compare our current approach:

/ws/1/release-group/052c7adb-5e2d-3cf3-b303-6c2a7d3e5b1c/?type=xml&inc=releases (docs)

to the Last.fm approach:

/2.0/?method=album.getinfo&artist=Cher&album=Believe (docs)

Should we keep our current resource focused URL structure or move to a method centric approach in our v2?

If you’re a fan of the old skool structure, please leave a comment and tell us what could be improved. What do you like about the web service? What do you hate?

For some background — as of the NGS release we will be making a lot of changes:

  • the old RDF web service will no longer work.
  • The old v1 XML interface will continue to work, but not optimally since we will be shoe-horning the spiffy new NGS XML into the old skool v1 XML. Concepts like artist-credits and works will not be available in the v1 compatibility interface.
  • The new v2 XML interface will expose all the NGS goodies like artist-credits and works.

OT: Fix for Text::Unaccent on 64 bit systems

[ MusicBrainz readers: Please ignore this post — its only so that others can find the solution to a problem I just solved ]

If you are running the Perl module Text::Unaccent (version 1.07) on a 64 bit system, you’ll find that it fails its test cases. This is due to a mismatched type in the Perl module. Apply this patch to your Text::Unaccent code, recompile and the tests will pass!