Month: March 2011

MusicBrainz Next Generation Schema: Release Candidate 2!

I’m pleased to announce that the MusicBrainz dev team just completed the Release Candiate 2 release of the MusicBrainz Server Next Generation Schema!

We’ve loaded the latest data (2011-3-19) and converted it to NGS and loaded it onto our test server — please come take a look! Also note: This is going to be the last official release before we push NGS live! Please take a look at NGS and tell us about things that you think will not work. This may be your last chance before it gets real! Any bugs/problems you find, please report them to our bug tracker and mark the bugs for the fix version of NGS Final.

To see the list of issues/bugs that we’ve closed for this release, please take a look at our list of closed bugs for RC2.

We’ve turned on the EditBot on this server and it will send you mail if you give it your email address. We have reset all of the email addresses today, so if you’ve given the test server your email before and confirmed it, you will need to do that again. Sorry!

We had one minor data migration piece that wasn’t completed before the RC2 deadline, so we’re actually going to convert and re-load the data one more time in a couple of days. Once that happens, we will turn on the NGS replication stream again, but for the next 2 days there will be no replication packets coming from the test server.

Also, next week we will load NGS onto our newly purchased hardware so we can do some actual load testing to make sure the new site doesn’t tip over when we switch over. This should be really exciting to see! 🙂

Thanks to everyone who worked on this release! We’re all getting excited about NGS coming soon!

Our hardware fundraiser is complete: We raised $15,527.50

After pestering people for a month, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve successfully closed our fundraiser. We’ve exceeded our goal by raising $15,527.50!

The following companies & individuals contributed:

$5000.00 Google
$3708.50 Individual user donations
$1389.00 SoundCloud
$2000.00 EchoNest
$1000.00 Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
$1000.00 Decibel.net
$500.00 Magic MP3 Tagger
$500.00 Grooveshark
$300.00 Songkick
$130.00 Affinity Chiropractic (the people MetaBrainz rents an office from)
$15,527.50 in total!

I will send out thank you mails to our 83 individual donors later today! Thanks to everyone who contributed! I’ve already ordered the hardware we wanted and will start installing it this week. Hopefully next week we can start loading NGS on this new hardware.

Picard 0.13 binary releases now available for Linux, Mac and Windows

Picard 0.13 was recently released and thanks to the packaging efforts of Michael Wiencek we now have a working Mac DMG for Intel Macs running OS X 10.4+! At this point we do not have any support for older PPC Macs and it doesn’t look like we will ever have support for that. Sorry. There is an older 0.11 Universal Binary that PPC users can use.

Download your Picard version 0.13 binary version now!

Thanks to Lukáš, Philip, Michael and everyone else who worked on this release!

UPDATE: You see a change log for this release here.

MusicBrainz Next Generation Schema Release Candidate 2 will be released on March 21

We’ve finally whittled down our open bugs and various user interface issues that we’re now confident to say that NGS RC2 will be released on March 21st.

We’re finishing on working on the current set of bugs for RC2 right now. Any new bugs should be added under the new NGS – Release Version in Jira.

Shortly after March 21st we will begin testing NGS on our new server hardware that we will be buying as a result of our fundraiser. This will give us some real live testing opportunities compared to testing on our puny test server.

Google now matching donations for NGS hardware fundraiser!

I’m pleased to announce that the Google Open Source Programs Office has pledged to match donations we receive for our NGS fundraiser! Google will match donations up to $5,000!

If you haven’t chipped in to support us purchasing hardware for our NGS roll-out, now is the time! Your donations count twice as much, because of Google’s matching pledge!

Thank you so much to Chris DiBona and the rest of the Open Source Programs Office at Google!

New NGS Virtual Machine available

The promised Virtual Machine for MusicBrainz Next Generation Schema Release Candidate 1+ is now available for download. This virtual machine is setup as a slave and can pull replication data from the test server by running the admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges from the musicbrainz-server codebase about 10 minutes after every hour.

See our wiki page for details on how to use this VM