Month: April 2015

Server update, 2015-04-27

Here’s the final server update before our 2015-05-11 schema change. This posting comes late, which I apologize for, since the release coincided with switching over to our new load balancers, and I had trouble deploying things at first.

Included in this update are new “Guess feat. artists” buttons, seen on recording, release, and release group edit pages. Their purpose is to help move featured artists from titles to artist credits. To find them, look for icons with “ft.” next to the older guess-case ones.

We also now have the possibility for ordering relationships other than series ones (say, work parts), though as of this writing, they still need to be enabled as a style matter.

Thanks to chirlu, nikki, Ujjwal Wahi, and the MetaBrainz team for contributing to today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-04-27 and the complete changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8284] – Contact user form should require a verified email address
  • [MBS-8321] – Readding same information in the relationship editor gives unexpected results
  • [MBS-8349] – Unique (medium, position), (track, position) indexes no longer created on slave databases

Improvement

  • [MBS-3375] – Ability to specify sort order for sub-works that are part of an aggregate work.
  • [MBS-3799] – Show more information for releases in the inline search
  • [MBS-8332] – Make removing URLs an auto-edit for auto-editors

New Feature

  • [MBS-3388] – “Guess artist credits” – automation support for RFC-327 and moving feats etc to artist-credits

Task

  • [MBS-8344] – Remove abbreviation expanding from guess case

Congratulations to our Summer of Code Students!

This year’s Summer of Code participants have been announced. For the MetaBrainz Foundation, we will have these four students hacking:

  • Roman Tsukanov (Gentlecat): After having made a name for himself last year, Roman returns to hack on AcousticBrainz for us this year. His project, that he is already a good ways into (surprise!), is to create a data set creator for AcousticBrainz. This project will allow anyone to create a data set that will be used to train the high level descriptors in AcousticBrainz. We’re hoping to crowd source this data set creation task in an effort bust open the walled gardens that normally contain this type of work/research.
  • Shadab Zafar (dufferzafar): Duffer is also a returning student for us. Last year he hacked on the Picard website and this year he will pick up where Roman left off working on CritiqueBrainz. He will work on the moderation interface and if there is time he will add support for reviewing places, events and works.
  • Ruchiranga Wickramasinghe (ruchiranga): Ruchiranga is new to MetaBrainz this year and will be working on a unified browse and search interface for MusicBrainz. Our current search facilities are still quite primitive and we’ve recently turned off our browsing features since they were effectively useless. This project aims to bring MusicBrainz browse and search into modern times.
  • Jeff Weeks (weeksio): Jeff is going to continue Mineo’s work on moving our search infrastructure over to SOLR. This project was started last year, but we knew that it might not be completed in the course of the summer. Unfortunately Mineo was not available to continue the work on the project, but we have high hopes that Jeff will move the project along, in hopes of us pushing it live towards the end of the summer.

I wanted to give a warm welcome and wish our students the best of luck for the summer! Now one final parting observation: This is the first time that we have an equal number of MusicBrainz projects to non-MusicBrainz projects. We’re finally growing the scope of efforts of the MetaBrainz Foundation!

Next round of logos

If you happen to have any comments on these new designs, please leave them!

I may form a small team of people to whittle down these designs into a final set of 1-3 logos. Please leave a comment if you’d be interested in being part of that team and have some time in the next few days. Or perhaps the feedback will be concrete enough for us to proceed; let’s see what the comments bring.

MusicBrainz_logos_23-04-15

UPDATE: Thanks to our friend Nicolas at Monkeydo.digital

Server update, 2015-04-06

Another release out today, this time with a couple new features for editors to take note of:

  • It’s now possible to add releases without any mediums attached. This is useful for cases where the release is known to exist but the tracklist is unknown. Currently this feature is a bit hidden: you have to remove the default blank medium to expose a checkbox that lets you confirm your intention to submit things that way. Based on community feedback, we can possibly make this more visible in the future. Note that it’s not (yet) possible to add mediums without tracks, only releases without mediums.
  • There’s now a minimum voting period length for destructive edits like merges and removals. Even if such edits get three yes votes, they’ll remain open for a minimum of 48 hours.

Thanks to chirlu (especially for the latter feature) and the MetaBrainz team for their work on today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-04-06 and the complete changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8137] – Release editor does not prevent duplicate label/catno pairs
  • [MBS-8162] – “Add work” from artist sidebar includes useless artist parameter
  • [MBS-8163] – Merging labels can produce duplicate label/catno pairs
  • [MBS-8300] – Medium title “0” not displayed
  • [MBS-8313] – Can’t remove last attribute from a relationship via the /relationship-editor endpoint

Improvement

  • [MBS-8234] – Enforce a minimum voting period for destructive edits
  • [MBS-8327] – Show an icon for CDBaby links

New Feature

  • [MBS-3235] – Allow adding release stubs (without tracklist)