Month: February 2010

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz integration!

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz are two community-powered sites about music which share some of the same passionate users. LyricWiki contains song lyrics and MusicBrainz contains metadata (detailed info) about music.

As of today, the two projects are going to be able to work together better than ever. Now that LyricWiki has obtained licensing, MusicBrainz can now link to song lyrics without worrying about legal issues. LyricWiki has given explicit permission to MusicBrainz to do so and MusicBrainz has added LyricWiki links (as an AR type) to their standard.

Linking from LyricWiki to MusicBrainzLyricWiki to MusicBrainz

To link to an artist, track, or release on MusicBrainz, put “musicbrainz= [UUID]” into the footer (ArtistFooter, AlbumFooter, or SongFooter) template. For [UUID], put in the MusicBrainzIdentifier. This has been available for quite a while, but hopefully there will be many more links now that we’re working more closely.

Linking from MusicBrainz to LyricWikiMusicBrainz to LyricWiki

To link a release or a track to LyricWiki, copy the LyricWiki album or track URL and then navigate to the proper release or track page in MusicBrainz. Be sure to be logged in and then click on “Relate to URL” link. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the LyricWiki URL to MusicBrainz.

This is an exciting opportunity for the two projects to be more closely linked together. We’re looking forward to it!

– Sean Colombo & Robert Kaye

Google ups its sponsorship of MusicBrainz in 2010!

I’m proud to announce that Google has decided to sponsor MusicBrainz once again in 2010! Google has pledged to donate $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation this year! Tons of thanks to Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn and Carol Smith (yes, the Carol Smith who is our treasurer/secretary!) of the Google Open Source Programs Office for your generous donation!

The extra $10k above the donation from last year aims to help us pay for the Kuno (Warp)’s paycheck as we work to finish NGS. However, Google isn’t likely to increase the yearly amount donated to MusicBrainz unless MusicBrainz can come up with some sort of way of giving some value back to Google.

I would like to finally allow Google to crawl the MusicBrainz web pages so that the rich information we have on our site finally gets exposed to Google’s search. But, that doesn’t really provide much value to Google — the value in doing this is ours.

In what ways can we do something that gives value back to Google for their continued support? Please post your ideas in the comments!

mb_server is now hosted on Git

Today we are officially marking the transition of mb_server (that’s the code name for the MusicBrainz Server – the website) from Subversion to Git. This is now hosted at git.musicbrainz.org, and the “musicbrainz-server/core.git” repository contains the stable and unstable development branches (named master and next, respectively).

If you are just interested in setting up MusicBrainz locally, and not interested in development, the same instructions apply as before – use the latest RELEASE branch from Subversion. The git changes should only be of interest to those who were running the “trunk” branch from Subversion, and wish to test or contribute to the upcoming NGS server.

For more information about Git & MusicBrainz, see the Git wiki page