Month: July 2012

Announcing the musicbrainz-data Java library

Stefan Sperber has just announced the open source release of musicbrainz-data, a Java library that uses Hibernate to interface to the MusicBrainz PostgreSQL database:

We at Last.fm are happy to announce that we are open-sourcing musicbrainz-data, our Java data bindings for the MusicBrainz Database.

The source code for musicbrainz-data and information on how to use it in your projects can be found on our GitHub:

https://github.com/lastfm/musicbrainz-data

Please report any issues at

https://github.com/lastfm/musicbrainz-data/issues

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback please post them in the musicbrainz-devel mailing list. I will also attempt to be available on the #musicbrainz-devel IRC channel on Freenode (nick: stefans).

Thanks Stefan!

Trouble with edits pending notices

We’re debugging some insidious database deadlock issue and we think we have a clue where the problems are coming from. In an effort to get the site stable, we’re going to disable the function that keeps track if a piece of data has edits pending or not.

If you’re editing, please disregard these indicators as they are likely to be wrong. We’re going to work up a permanent solution for this problem, but it is unlikely that we will have this solved before mid-next week.

Sorry for the troubles!

Server Update, 2012-07-23

We’ve just pushed out our second update for July, and as a treat it’s a day earlier than planned! This release resolves 40 issues, and covers both bug fixes and new improvements. Possibly the biggest new feature in this release is the ability to filter editing reports by your subscribed artists and labels.

This release is the result of hard work from Alastair Porter, Andy Hawkins, Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Ian McEwen, Johannes Weißl, Lukáš Lalinský, Nicolás Tamargo, Pavan Chander and the MusicBrainz team. Thanks!

Bug

  • [MBS-4313] – "has cover art" missing from Relationship Type multiple select box on "Search for Edits" page.
  • [MBS-4385] – Invalid date causes internal server error
  • [MBS-4589] – Add missing entities does not remember "Add new artist" selections
  • [MBS-4734] – Release Editor Seeding doc needs updating after 2012-05-15 server release
  • [MBS-4771] – Gravatar visibility preference isn’t always respected
  • [MBS-4793] – Preferences displays wrong date/time format
  • [MBS-4817] – RGs with no type set aren’t displayed in a table
  • [MBS-4833] – repeated "internal system error" when attempting to edit a release
  • [MBS-4903] – Locale list has duplicate Serbians
  • [MBS-4916] – Isolate i18n locale-switching
  • [MBS-4949] – Facebook URLs not properly decoded
  • [MBS-4965] – Wrong track number shown in artist credit edit
  • [MBS-4969] – Labels are repeated in collection page/view
  • [MBS-4970] – Historic CDTOC edits are splitting the list of track times incorrectly (ISE)
  • [MBS-4976] – slave.sh fails to run
  • [MBS-4989] – "Ended" URL relationships are still shown on the artist right pane
  • [MBS-4998] – Regression : Aliases are unique constricted again

Improvement

  • [MBS-939] – Show how many releases are in each collection
  • [MBS-2364] – CD lookup: Should tell me it didn’t find anything
  • [MBS-2662] – Allow filtering reports by subscribed entities
  • [MBS-2685] – Search box should be larger
  • [MBS-3558] – Improve Various Artists warning text
  • [MBS-3842] – Statistics to port from mb.lmfao.org.uk: relationship types
  • [MBS-4274] – Stats by edit type
  • [MBS-4307] – Add statistics for release group type, release status, and release packaging
  • [MBS-4492] – Development server needs to support development of cover art archive things
  • [MBS-4876] – Allow contexts to be used for translations in the mb_server and statistics domains.
  • [MBS-4945] – Indicate special editor types (limited, bot) on edit list
  • [MBS-4966] – Clean up Jamendo track URLs
  • [MBS-4968] – Sort lists of artists in relationships by sort name, not name
  • [MBS-4993] – Improve descriptions of reports

New Feature

  • [MBS-3180] – Packaging option really needs some kind of help or on-screen doc
  • [MBS-3932] – Report: Discogs pages attached to multiple labels
  • [MBS-4983] – Display last commit info along with running branch

Task

  • [MBS-4940] – Add tray to the cover art types
  • [MBS-4959] – Remove watermarked sites (Ozon and Encyclopedisque) from the cover art whitelist
  • [MBS-4963] – Add nginx full restart to fabric
  • [MBS-4986] – Add sticker to the cover art types
  • [MBS-4990] – Activate Veps(ian) language (vep)

Sub-task

The Git SHA for this release is bea9385, with git tag v-2012-07-23.

Introducing our latest acronym: NES — New Edit System

Long after we finally delivered our much anticipated Next Generation Schema, we’re finally ready to dive in and get to work on our New Edit System. You may recall that during the NGS re-write we opted to not tackle the re-write of our edit system. Instead, we decided to do the edit system overhaul once NGS became stable.

We finally reached this point when Ollie, Warp and I met in London last month to discuss this new project. We had a productive meeting reviewing all of the research that Ollie had done over the past months. We improved the terminology here and then, but in general approved for Ollie to continue his work. Part of his work was to write about it so that our users can get familiar with the concepts that will come about in NES.

Ollie had started blogging about that on his own blog:

If you’re interested in the New Edit System, please take a moment to read these posts and consider following Ollie’s blog.

Announcing the first MusicBrainz Hack Weekend

Hi everyone!

It’s with a lot of excitement that I can announce that the first MusicBrainz Worldwide/Remote Hack Weekend has been confirmed! We will spend from 2012-08-17 until 2012-08-19 getting as many people together as we can to hack on some fun new features for MusicBrainz, or use MusicBrainz data in interesting ways.

You can find all the details including proposed ideas at:

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Hack_Weekend

When

The first official MusicBrainz hack weekend will take place between 2012-08-17 and 2012-08-19.

Where

The main event will be taking place in the #musicbrainz-devel IRC channel on irc.freenode.org. We also encourage local people to get together and work on things in person if possible. If you’re interested in that, check the wiki page for information about people who are local to you.

Who

Everyone! The hack weekend is not just for programmers, we’ll be sure to need testers, people to help brainstorm, people to help with documentation and writing, people to help with HTML, and inevitably more on the day.

Ideas

We’ve already got a few ideas on the wiki page, but the more the merrier! Even if you don’t think you can make the hack weekend, put your ideas down and maybe someone will pick them up.

I’m really looking forward to this, and I hope you’ll join us!

Matthew Hawn from Last.fm joins the MetaBrainz board of directors

I’m pleased to announce that Matthew Hawn from Last.fm has joined our board of directors. Matthew is a veteran of the music industry who has worked for big music labels in the past and today fills the role of VP of Product at Last.fm. Matthew joining our board of directors reflects our shared history and the closer collaboration between MusicBrainz and Last.fm

Welcome on board Matthew!

Matthew replaces outgoing director Derek Sivers. Derek, the founder of CD Baby, has been with MetaBrainz since its beginning of the organization and has looked out for us many times. We really appreciate everything you’ve done for us Derek!

UPDATE: Fixed Matthew’s title.

Server Update, 2012-07-09

We’ve just finished pushing out another update to the MusicBrainz web servers. This release is mainly a bug fix release, though it does see some of Alastair’s Google Summer of Code work on collections, and more of Ian’s work on translations. Also, there is finally a top editors once again.

Many thanks to Ian McEwan, Alastair Porter, Nicolás Tamargo, and the rest of the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release, and the beta team for helping us make sure everything is working nicely! Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-2765] – Artist/Label guess case breaks if a different mode is set in the cookie
  • [MBS-2903] – WS/2: Can’t browse artist by work (ws/2/artist?work=MBID)
  • [MBS-3156] – Slaves should use the READONLY database settings from DBDefs.pm
  • [MBS-3904] – It is possible to vote for own edits
  • [MBS-4241] – msgids for translation should not use anything but ASCII
  • [MBS-4595] – Not all relationships are shown translated
  • [MBS-4613] – Language/script dropdowns are not translated in the release editor
  • [MBS-4731] – ISE: Edit Search for My Vote != None && Status = Open
  • [MBS-4738] – script/create_test_db.sh does not create a test database.
  • [MBS-4796] – "Other release groups" have slipped to the very bottom of the page
  • [MBS-4857] – Statistics timeline does not respond to window resizes
  • [MBS-4871] – When making a new collection, UUID in url is all uppercase
  • [MBS-4873] – Can’t go from a collection back to collections list
  • [MBS-4875] – Statistics tabs are untranslatable
  • [MBS-4878] – Dropdown lists on add artist/label/etc not translated
  • [MBS-4905] – Missing "lyrics language" in "work information" section of works tabs
  • [MBS-4926] – musicbrainz.org/release-group/{mbid} template is including an extra th
  • [MBS-4934] – robots.txt is blocking *
  • [MBS-4935] – count.recording.Nreleases statistics are calculated incorrectly and inefficiently
  • [MBS-4938] – Statistics: No. of IPIs is wrong
  • [MBS-4954] – Internal server error when checking donation status.

Improvement

  • [MBS-2387] – Better release label merging
  • [MBS-3208] – Trim leading/trailing whitespace in release editor prior to Add Missing Entities check
  • [MBS-4741] – Bring back voting icons in the edit search/edit view
  • [MBS-4855] – Split translation domains to ease translation and aid reuse of musicbrainz-server translations
  • [MBS-4856] – l() and ln() in templates should be implemented as a TT plugin, not relying on c.gettext
  • [MBS-4933] – Remove extraneous references to READWRITE in Data::Statistics

New Feature

  • [MBS-1715] – No page to view top editors

Task

  • [MBS-4845] – Update the Twitter logo
  • [MBS-4888] – Add "Trove" to "Other Databases" whitelist

Sub-task

  • [MBS-4223] – .po files with country codes don’t seem to work
  • [MBS-4224] – Interface not switching languages properly
  • [MBS-4259] – Make timeline events translatable
  • [MBS-4338] – country, language, script strings should not share identical msgid
  • [MBS-4340] – edit details template is wrongly retrieved from translated edit name

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-07-09.