Announcing MusicBrainz Server NGS Beta 3: Now live on test!

I’m sorry to say that we’re running a bit behind in bringing you MusicBrainz NGS Beta 3, but we’ve finally managed it!

I am, however, proud to say that we’ve made incredible progress in the last few weeks. Not only are Warp and Acid2 rounding out our features nicely, but with Nikki and Navap backing us up we’ve found/fixed a ton of problems and made countless improvements to the look of the new site. While at times it seems that we’re working on Duke Nukem NGS that seems to never get finished, it is days like today that make me very happy with what we are going to deliver when NGS ships. We’re making sure that the software we deliver at the end of this massive process is solid and will make our users happy. In that sense I am very happy that our users and customers are giving us the time to finish this project properly.

Enough waxing poetic — now for the meaty details of this release! Take a look at the massive change log that shows all the issues we’ve tackled since beta 2. The beta 3 release is available for your testing pleasure on our test server. If you’ve not logged into the test server before, use your normal password from the MB site — the data on test is a little bit old so if your password doesn’t work, try using one that you’ve used a couple of months ago.

This release is solid enough for people to come in and have a serious play. Please come test your favorite features and if you find bugs, please report them to Jira, our bug tracking system. (click on Create Issue in the upper right hand corner). We’ve fixed a ton of bugs already and we’re not afraid to have you report new ones! Beta 3 adds more features and improves many other features, but it is still not feature complete. Our next release, Release Candidate 1 will be feature complete — I hope to set timeframe for this release within a couple of weeks.

And now for some quick notes on areas of NGS that we’ve been focusing on:

• Edit system: The edit system is now looking stable and fairly complete, though it is still lacking batch operations, which were hoping to get in for beta 3. There is also support for migrating all pre-NGS edit types, though some have display issues. (we’ll be loading new data onto test soon and then we’ll re-run the edit migration script).
• Web services: The backwards compatible web service (/ws/1) is feature complete up to cd stubs, but everything else should just work (please point tagger applications at test and see what happens!). The new web service (/ws/2) is feature complete except submitting CD Stubs, ISRCs and collections — please take a look at the specification for Web Service Version 2 and see if you can break it!
• Release editor: The release editor in beta 3 has two major new features. First is the a recordings tab, which allows you to associate recordings with tracks. Second is a preview of your edits on the final tab.
• CD Stubs: Browsing top CD Stubs and viewing CD Stubs is now working. Submitting/importing CD stubs is not complete yet.
• Lists (formerly collections): Collections have become a more generic concept of Lists, which allows multiple lists of releases per user. (This was one of our GSoc projects).
• RDFa: Artist and release pages now contain embedded RDFa! For more details, please see our wiki page for the RDFa feature.

Thank you to everyone who has worked on this release! Things have been a little stressful the past few days as we tried to push as many things out the door as possible, but the results have been quite worthwhile. Now it is time to relax a little before we start charging towards our Release Candidate 1 release. Thanks everyone!

UPDATE: I added a note about the RDFa support.