Month: September 2015

Updated libcoverart-1.0.0.tar.gz

It was brought to my attention that the tarball for the libcoverart 1.0.0 release wasn’t built correctly, and contained files within a confusingly named subdirectory.

I’ve rebuilt the tarball, and made it available via GitHub as usual. Please note that as a result of this, the MD5 checksum of the tarball has changed. The file content of the archive is, however, unchanged.

The new tarball is available here: libcoverart-1.0.0.tar.gz (MD5 checksum: 856d83a4e57a2325c168eb979b9c00d8)

The MusicBrainz documentation page for the library was also updated to reflect this.

Laurent Monin joins the team as a part-time sysadmin

For the first time in a number of years we have a person responsible for system administration! Over the past few years we’ve been trying to spread the duties to maintain our servers among our developers. This only worked so well and the duties are piling up and not being attended to.

With the introduction of our new MetaBrainz site in May, we finally have an increasing revenue stream, which allows us to finally hire a paid sysadmin. Hopefully we can work on our back log of tasks now.

Laurent Monin (aka Zas) is no stranger to our project — he has been hacking on Picard for a number of years and he attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen. I’m quite happy to have found a community member and long-standing contributor to take on this task.

Some of the first tasks that Laurent will take on are from direct feedback from our blog series about community improvements. We’re hoping to consolidate our mailing lists and forums into a Discourse instance and then provide single sign on for Discourse, our Wiki and Jira. Stuff we’ve talked about for years, but never have made any progress on.

I’m quite excited to have Zas on board! Welcome!

Server update, 2015-09-21

We just have a small release today, so I’ll let the changelog speak for itself. I’m currently focused on finishing implementing the hourly sitemaps required by Google (to indicate when our embedded JSON-LD markup last changed), and Roman Tsukanov is continuing to familiarize himself with our huge codebase. So, development in other areas will pick up in time. 🙂

The git tag for today’s release is v-2015-09-21.

Bug

  • [MBS-8370] – « Format: Medium » is shown instead of, for instance, « Format: CD »
  • [MBS-8534] – Label-only release label edits no longer display the catalog number

Improvement

  • [MBS-8523] – For Places, rename “founded” and “defunct” to “opened” and “closed”

IRC channel switcheroo

If you’re like me, you may have noticed a sudden drop in activity in #musicbrainz-devel (if you’re not like me, you may still have noticed it). This is not because we all suddenly dropped off the face of the earth (not all of us anyway), nay, we simply decided to move to #metabrainz!

#musicbrainz-devel was registered on Freenode on February 16th, 2009. That’s almost 6 years and 7 months ago! However, over the last months, it has been as much (if not more!) about AcousticBrainz, CritiqueBrainz, and two brand new members of the Brainz family (stay tuned for more news on these!) as it has been about MusicBrainz. The channel has also been home to a lot of non-MusicBrainz specific MetaBrainz talk, e.g., talk about my hire, Roman’s hire, upcoming hires (stay tuned for news on this as well!), server administration, finances, … – you get the picture. In light of this we decided to rename #musicbrainz-devel to #metabrainz, and also merge the more quiet channels of #bookbrainz and #bookbrainz-devel into this new channel.

So thank you to #musicbrainz-devel for your proud service over the years, and welcome to #metabrainz, I hope you do us just as much credit as your predecessor did! I hope to see a lot of you in #metabrainz over the next few days, to join in the celebrations with a nice virtual cup of tea or other beverage of your choice.

Sincerely,
Freso, your friendly neighbourhood community manager ❤

Server update, 2015-09-07

The 2015-09-07 server update is released today (a day late). Late because I wanted to investigate a fix for cover art uploading, which many people have reported issues with lately. Notwithstanding troubles at the Internet Archive, the server should hopefully give less errors now when uploading.

The other changes deal with edit-system bugs and URL cleanup enhancements.

Thanks to Gentlecat and reosarevok for their work on today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-09-07 and the changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8531] – Delete release label edits with no label fail to display
  • [MBS-8532] – Can’t edit a release label to add a label
  • [MBS-8533] – Catalog number-only release label edits no longer show in a MB Label’s edits
  • [MBS-8543] – Error uploading image: MalformedPOSTRequest

Improvement

  • [MBS-8124] – Recognise and clean up Loudr.fm URLs
  • [MBS-8182] – Improve Deezer URL cleanup

Style update, 2015-09-08

Hi everyone! Here we are with another very, very late style update for the last couple months.

Apart from quite a few smaller changes (full list below), we split the translator relationship so that it’s its own relationship rather than lyricist + attribute (so if any of you were using translator data at all you’ll want to change the way you query for it). Similarly, we got rid of the “transliterated” vs. “translated” difference for alternate tracklists: it often wasn’t clearly one or the other, and the information wasn’t particularly useful in any case without checking the language and script of the release, so now there’s only one relationship type without attributes.

We also demoted the “Do Not Cluster” guideline – while it’s a good thing to keep in mind when creating relationship types, it’s not really something users should be worrying about (and the cases where they might have to are already covered in the specific relationship documentation).

If anyone has any question about these or any other changes, feel free to ask in the comments! And if you want to propose other changes or additions, remember you can always do it from the STYLE section of our bug tracker.

Improvement

  • [STYLE-315] – Remove the option to add publisher relationships to recordings
  • [STYLE-474] – Introduce the option to add phono rights relationships to recordings

New Feature

  • [STYLE-481] – Add artist-release group “has dedication” relationship
  • [STYLE-505] – Add “written at” relationship between work and place/area
  • [STYLE-538] – “Arranged at” Place relationship
  • [STYLE-542] – Allow soundcloud/mixcloud etc. links on event series (festivals)
  • [STYLE-548] – Event – Release Group rel: Performed

Task

  • [STYLE-392] – Make “Do not cluster” more sensible
  • [STYLE-420] – Drop “transliterated” attribute from the “transliterated/translated tracklist” relationship type
  • [STYLE-435] – Split “Translator” into its own relationship
  • [STYLE-460] – Revisit the [dialogue] guideline for NGS
  • [STYLE-482] – Deprecate the release-URL samples IMDb entry relationship type
  • [STYLE-494] – Add dorian keys to the list of keys for works
  • [STYLE-520] – Clarify the soundtrack guidelines stance on VA usage
  • [STYLE-528] – Add Turkish Makam work attributes
  • [STYLE-539] – Specify that tribute albums are cover albums

Roman Tsukanov joins the MetaBrainz team

I’m pleased to announce that last week we officially hired Roman Tsukanov, AKA Gentlecat to be a part time developer for MusicBrainz!

Gentlecat has already established himself firmly in our community: Last year he rocked the CritiqueBrainz project for Summer of Code and this summer he rocked AcousticBrainz. And he’s written our shiny new MetaBrainz web site! He is now in the process of learning perl and has started to help Bitmap review existing code reviews. And he has even fixed a couple of issues already. In other words he lives up to his name: To Gentlecat something means to rock it!

I’m quite happy to have such a capable developer participating in MusicBrainz. Welcome to the team Gentlecat!

August Community Revisit

Ohoi m’hearties, it’s time for the first monthly Community Revisit, where we’ll revisit what happened in MetaBrainzLand during the last month. Ready for the ride? Leggo!

The primary thing happening this month has likely been the changes in the MetaBrainz employee line-up following Ian’s departure in July. In the beginning of the month, Freso (wait, hey, that’s me!) was pulled on board as Community Manager (a brand new position for MetaBrainz too!), and just at the end of the month, GSoC wonder child Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov was hired as the new software engineer. So hi to us two! 🙂

Speaking of GSoC, the Google Summer of Code, this year’s edition is also fast coming to an end, and our four students and their projects are closing up and giving their work the final touches to have them ready to go live. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about these projects soon.

One thing that did go live during August, in no small part thanks to Ben “LordSputnik” Ockmore and Leo_Verto: the new IRC chat logger! Chat logs from IRC are now available at http://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/ – the site still needs some MetaBrainzifying, but Ben has done a great job of importing (pretty much) all the old chat logs to the new system and the bot is running in all the official MetaBrainz channels. If you’re on IRC (or you just like poking at the IRC logs), be sure to say “Thank you!! <3” to LordSputnik and Leo_Verto next time you see them around!

Another person who has made a mark in the last month was Alex a.k.a. caller#6, starting up the discussion about the current situation of MusicBrainz’ Area entities. Be sure to check out that blog post and let your voice be heard, if you don’t feel like it’s being represented already. The next instalment should be out before long.

We also had two server updates (pretty much all bug fixes) and an updated Virtual Machine image was finally released for the more tech oriented people.

This about rounds off the August Community Revisit. What do you think about the format? Did I miss any important community happenings? Any other comments? This is a brand new venture, so nothing’s set in stone yet!

From Denmark with love,
Freso

There will be no autumn 2015 schema change

Schema changes are always a lot of work for us and we end up spending much time preparing for it and then even more time cleaning up/catching up after it. As a result, some critical non-schema change features keep getting pushed back… to the point that we never get to them.

To try and break this cycle, we’re going to skip the Autumn 2015 schema change. Instead we will focus on other tasks such as hosting and community features.

We will resume our schedule with the next planned schema change around 15 May, 2016. After that release we will determine if we want to go ahead with 1 or 2 schema change releases a year.