The MusicBrainz development team has been working hard to reach the RC1 milestone for NGS and we’re proud to announce that we’ve just released RC1 for you to play with! Not only do we have a feature-complete (only small enhancements and bug fixes remain) version of NGS, but we also have a shiny new test server to introduce to the world.
rc1.musicbrainz.org is our new Mac Mini Server based test server. Since our test server doesn’t get used that much, I really wanted to waste less power running a full sized server. And I really wanted to have the test server co-located with the rest of our machines, so we opted to purchase a Mac Mini for this job (a Mini only sucks 10W of power for most of the time, which is great). This new machine will also (and permanently) be reachable as the new test.musicbrainz.org, but the DNS hasn’t propagated yet, so we opted to give the machine a temporary name in honor of its first duties.
Back to RC1: We’ve fixed a ton of bugs and we’ve worked hard to get all the new features in that will be in NGS. From here on out we’re hoping to only fix bugs and do minor enhancements. We do not plan to add new features at this point in time. Our focus is to finish the open bugs and ship NGS as soon as possible. In this release we’ve also included a large batch of usability improvements for the Release Editor, which is getting much closer to being complete.
If you’ve been holding off testing NGS, now is the time for you to jump in. We need a lot more help to test NGS and find all those pesky bugs that still remain. Please play with RC1 and log in with your normal MusicBrainz account credentials. If you find any problems, please report them to our bug tracker. We’re specifically looking at people to test the following:
- Does the data all display correctly?
- Have we preserved the editing history sufficiently? Can you find all the edits you’ve made and do they display correctly?
- Can you make new edits and adjustments to data?
We have a new NGS data dump to go with the RC1 release. Replication has also been turned on for RC1, so if you’re interested in testing the replication, make sure you have the latest code from git, import the data dump and then run admin/LoadReplicationChanges 10 minutes after the hour to get updates for RC1. I hope to release a new virtual machine tomorrow that will allow people to test the replication on their own turf — but I’m not quite ready to promise this yet.
Thanks to everyone who helped work on this release!
MetaBrainz Blog 
You asked for us to look at our edit history, so I did. Couple bugs on the first page:
1) Some recent edits (not my most recent) say “error”. I assume it’s because it’s recent, and an add artist which ended up being empty on the test server.
http://test.musicbrainz.org/edit/13824107
2) Unicode characters -> gibberish
http://test.musicbrainz.org/edit/13791062
There’s a case I’m not sure how to handle: There are a few releases by “Lake of Tears” that have one disc with two different bar codes (one for Europe and one for the US) on the same packaging.
Are we supposed to merge these or leave them together? How much data can they share? (Ideally they should share everything, except that the bar-code/country pairs should be different.)
Does anyone else have trouble logging in to Jira? The login claims my user name and password are incorrect, even after resetting my password.
Never mind that, it works now.
I’m sorry, I don’t know what data to provide on JIRA to report an issue.
when I submit a merge artists edit, it returns a page, with coding and (what I guess are) details of an error, saying “the edit could not be created”
Same problem for me, bug MBS-1287 submit: http://jira.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-1287
For the record, the replication packets for the test server are being uploaded to here:
http://data.test.musicbrainz.org/