Month: July 2011

Picard 0.15.1 released

This is a minor release to correct some bugs that were present in 0.15. Additionally, the Mac OS X build should now run fine on 10.4 (i386) and 10.5. Here’s the changelog:

Version 0.15.1 – 2011-07-31

  • “Other versions” menu now displays release labels and catalog numbers.
  • Added CD-R, 8cm CD to the format mapping.
  • Picard no longer fails to load releases with new or unknown media formats.
  • Threading issues that could occasionally cause Picard to stop loading files have been fixed.
  • Fixed album metadata processor plugins not working (#5960)
  • Fixed loading of standalone recordings (#5961)
  • Fixed requests stopping at midnight (#5963)
  • Stopped using QDateTime for timing requests (for Qt 4.6 compatibility) (#5967)
  • Fixed display of ampersands in the “other versions” menu. (#5969)
  • Fixed use of numerical functions in advanced scripting.

You can download 0.15.1 here.

NGS Bug fixes, 2011-07-25

Here’s the last release for July:

Bug

  • [MBS-259] – PUIDs being deleted aren’t highlighted as having pending edits
  • [MBS-1142] – Relationship dropdown boxes don’t update docs when scrolled through with arrow keys
  • [MBS-2189] – Editing the locale of an alias doesn’t show the alias
  • [MBS-2537] – Importing CD stub sets the CD stub comment to the release comment
  • [MBS-2545] – Re-add the Cancel button to the contact user form
  • [MBS-2564] – "Add Missing Entities" tab in add release does not search for Artist Aliases when trying to find Artists
  • [MBS-2588] – Edit note text area is too small (one line only)
  • [MBS-2603] – CDStub submission is completely broken since NGS release
  • [MBS-2711] – Merging releases (discs) shouldn’t kill tracklist edits
  • [MBS-2788] – Direct database search does not look for Standalone Recordings until the search indices are updated
  • [MBS-2796] – Create relationship page says edit relationship in the title
  • [MBS-2940] – 500 internal error searching for a discid
  • [MBS-2961] – Internal server error when adding/editing relationship type
  • [MBS-2968] – Can’t change release group for existing release in release editor
  • [MBS-2997] – Age information should not be shown when the birth date is in the future
  • [MBS-2999] – Clicking "Add Disc" on tracklist editor for 4-medium release before loading 4th medium doesn’t work
  • [MBS-3003] – Internal server error when editing a URL
  • [MBS-3023] – Impossible to edit a release that is missing disc 1?
  • [MBS-3039] – Unable to enter URL that misses "http://"
  • [MBS-3047] – Release Editor gives useless error message if you supply an invalid date
  • [MBS-3053] – Internal server error when attempting to approve edit
  • [MBS-3060] – Modbot doesn’t remove empty artist
  • [MBS-3066] – Splitting to multiple artists using Credits fields only recognises first artist
  • [MBS-3085] – Wrong text displayed in the Merge releases dialog
  • [MBS-3089] – Release edit crash (internal server error) when changing release artist credit

Improvement

  • [MBS-2085] – No way to apply Release artist {credit} changes to tracks
  • [MBS-2548] – Discogs URL validation (artist vs. label vs. release vs. master)

Task

  • [MBS-2747] – Remove orphaned recordings

Google uses MusicBrainz data in some of its searches!

Earlier this week I met with Shawn Simister, who works on Google’s Freebase project (former from MetaWeb) to touch base about how MusicBrainz is being utilized inside of Google. MusicBrainz represents a large chunk of the music data in Freebase and in turn the Freebase data is used as one of the sources of data for Google’s search.

Shawn explains this in more detail:

You can actually see a couple areas where we’re using the Freebase music data publicly. First, in the structured refinements in search. If you search for lady gaga albums and scroll to the bottom to see “Album searches for Lady Gaga”. Also you can see videos clustered by topic in YouTube Topics and many of the topics are music-related.

It’s important to keep in mind that Musicbrainz is just part of the solution. It’s a pretty big part of Freebase music data and therefore its likely to be a pretty big component in these results but as you know the search results team at Google is pretty secretive about what all goes into the results page so even I can’t tell for certain when they’re using Freebase/Musicbrainz data for any given result.

I think it’s important that people don’t mistake this as a one-to-one relationship between Musicbrainz data and Google results because there are quite a few steps in between but there’s definitely a strong connection there and we really appreciate everything that the Musicbrainz community is doing and hope that Musicbrainz community continues to grow.

I find this tremendously exciting to hear, since I proposed a very similar thing to Google many years ago. While this idea was rejected back in the day, I’m excited to see that Google is now using our data for it searches. Every person who has ever contributed to MusicBrainz should be proud!

Thank you to everyone and thank you Shawn for shedding some light on this!

Picard 0.15 released!

The 0.15 stable version was finally released today, with some new features and bug fixes since beta2. There were too many small changes to list, but here’s a partial changelog with the most user-visible ones:

Version 0.15 – 2011-07-17:

  • Added options for using standardized track, release, and artist metadata.
  • Added preferred release format support.
  • Expanded preferred release country support to allow multiple countries.
  • Added support for tagging non-album tracks (standalone recordings).
  • Plugins can now be installed via drag and drop, or a file browser.
  • Added several new tags: %_originaldate%, %_recordingcomment%, and %_releasecomment%
  • Changes to request queuing: added separate high and low priority queues for each host.
  • Tagger scripts now run after metadata plugins finish (#5850)
  • The “compilation” tag can now be $unset or modified via tagger script.
  • Added a shortcut (Ctrl+I) for Edit->Details.
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes.

You can download the new version and report bugs for it 🙂

NGS bug fixes, 2011-07-18

A slow, but steady week at MusicBrainz land – here’s what we got fixed in the last week.

Bug

  • [MBS-375] – Create redirect web server config files
  • [MBS-1169] – Musicbrainz NGS Server is missing a hell of a lot of HTML sanitization. (HTML/script injections galore…)
  • [MBS-1443] – Make editor search not only look for an exact match
  • [MBS-1973] – "Cancel relate to …" only appears on entity it was started from
  • [MBS-2054] – View of User ‘Accepted’ edits contains All Edits including Auto-edits
  • [MBS-2126] – Release Editor response times are unacceptable
  • [MBS-2132] – Link to "remove release edit-type" is broken
  • [MBS-2321] – Release editor let you enter invalid barcode
  • [MBS-2509] – Clicking the text "Yes/No/Abstain/None" below the first edit on an edit list page changes the votes for all edits on that page.
  • [MBS-2578] – Strange display of combined format when some mediums have no format set
  • [MBS-2596] – Submitting Puids failed with Error 500
  • [MBS-2820] – URLs with pending edits not highlighted
  • [MBS-2827] – /ws/2/collection can’t return more than 25 releases
  • [MBS-2844] – Changing artist Type to Person resets Gender
  • [MBS-2850] – Duplicated ISRC codes displayed on "Merge recordings" edits
  • [MBS-2852] – MusicBrainz events in timeline sometimes appear in the y-axis labels
  • [MBS-2855] – Geometry URLs for timeline graph are somewhat wrong
  • [MBS-2862] – Edit search results are not sorted
  • [MBS-2869] – Subscriptions email doesn’t include anymore your own edits in the "Subscribed editors" section
  • [MBS-2893] – Puid lookup only returning tracklist offset sometimes
  • [MBS-2952] – Add Release edit needs to display release group and artist of release group it’s being added to.
  • [MBS-3000] – Empty <date/> included for releases with no date
  • [MBS-3011] – Editing of Release Event Date labeled as Name
  • [MBS-3029] – Error on test server

Improvement

  • [MBS-2853] – MusicBrainz event lines should be thicker
  • [MBS-2854] – MusicBrainz events should change pointer on hover
  • [MBS-2856] – Statistics pages are not styled like the rest of the site

Schema change release, 2011-07-11

Today we released our first schema change update since NGS. This change is quite a radical one, as it merges both of our databases (“READWRITE” and “RAWDATA”) into a single database. For most users of the database, this probably won’t affect you, but you’re encouraged to run the upgrade process anyway. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
  2. Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
  3. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 13 in lib/DBDefs.pm
  4. Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
  5. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-20110711-schema-change
  6. Run ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
  7. Install the perl modules Algorithm::Merge and Algorithm::Diff
  8. Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
  9. Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.

This process may take a while, as it has to dump one database into another, and download a few extra changes to ensure slaves aren’t missing any data. The RAWDATA database should no longer be in use and you should be able to drop it, but waiting to see that everything is working well might be a good idea.

This schema change does not introduce any new data. For everyone else, here’s a list of what got fixed since the last release!

Bug

  • [MBS-1977] – ModBot is unable to close some edits
  • [MBS-1979] – Unable to edit a “later translated versions” relationship with change direction
  • [MBS-2026] – Subscribed artists open edits won’t load for editors with large amounts of subscriptions
  • [MBS-2442] – MB postgres unaccent extension overwrites unaccent.so library shipped with postgres-contrib
  • [MBS-2689] – Timeline isn’t working in Opera 10
  • [MBS-2698] – Some tables are not replicated through Live data feed
  • [MBS-2812] – Adding track times has caused a failed dependency for an edit which changed the track titles.
  • [MBS-2826] – Web service returns malformed XML (not escaped properly)
  • [MBS-2831] – “Edit medium” edit display: Artist credits changes are incorrect
  • [MBS-2974] – I don’t receive e-mail when someone votes no to my edit any more
  • [MBS-2981] – Changing the case of recording comments should be auto-edits
  • [MBS-2986] – tracklist_index was not populated during NGS
  • [MBS-2995] – Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::WS::2::ReleaseGroup->release_group_browse “Can’t call method “format”

Improvement

  • [MBS-1500] – Remove tracklist_index.tracks
  • [MBS-1707] – Advanced tracklist in RE: “Title” to “Disc title”
  • [MBS-2242] – Disable editing of Medium title when there’s only one medium
  • [MBS-2434] – Combine READWRITE and RAWDATA
  • [MBS-2462] – Other edit types that don’t highlight what has changed between old and new values
  • [MBS-2583] – “Edit Medium” should show you which medium is being edited with respect to the overall release
  • [MBS-2767] – Release-group XML result should include first release date

MusicBrainz Summit 11: October 15/16/17, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Hi!

I had originally planned to have a post-NGS celebration and hack day with the MusiXmatch teams in Bologna this month, but timing and costs proved to be an issue. Instead, we’re going to hold a traditional MusicBrainz summit in Warp’s town of Rotterdam, Netherlands. The general idea for this summit is very rough, but I would like to focus on community discussions on the weekend (Oct 15/16) and then focus on customer discussions on Monday the 17 Oct. Everyone would be welcome to attend all portions of the summit, but we’ll have a different focus for different parts of the summit.

I expect the core MusicBrainz team and representatives from Zvooq, Last.fm and MusiXmatch to be at the summit. We’re going to be soliciting for sponsorships in order to help cover the costs of the summit. If you’re interested in attending and/or sponsoring the summit, please comment on this post. Depending on the level of sponsorships we can drum up, we might be able to pay for lodging/food for community members who wish to attend. We’ve made that possible in the past and I would very much like to be able to do that again.

I’m quite looking forward to meeting some of you in Rotterdam!

NGS bug fixes, 2011-07-05

The wheels of change are slowly starting back up again, now that we have all our employees back 🙂 Here’s what we’ve got done since the last release:

Bug

  • [MBS-1849] – Alias locales not included in the XML
  • [MBS-2223] – Length not shown in edit when adding a standalone recording
  • [MBS-2586] – Search results do not show standalone recordings
  • [MBS-2807] – Stack trace requesting /ws/2/collection when user has no collections
  • [MBS-2846] – Internal Server Error on lot of editing histories
  • [MBS-2880] – Error viewing release group/URL
  • [MBS-2882] – Merge recording edit display incorrectly once applied
  • [MBS-2898] – Search indices aren’t updating, haven’t updated in over 20 hours

Improvement

  • [MBS-777] – Make cancelling take effect sooner
  • [MBS-1508] – Should release browse request allow inc=recordings
  • [MBS-2767] – Release-group XML result should include first release date