Month: April 2016

GSoC 2016 students and projects

Google announced the final list of Google Summer of Code 2016 students and their projects yesterday. The list of MetaBrainz’ projects can be seen at our page on the GSoC site, but just for good measure, here’s the rundown:

MusicBrainz
Jeff Weeks (weeksio) returns to finish up the SOLR search server. We’re really hoping that this will be the end of our current search server woes. He will be mentored by the German duo of Ulrich Klauer (chirlu) and Rob Kaye (ruaok).
MusicBrainz Picard
Rahul Raturi (rahulr) will be working on improving searching MusicBrainz from within Picard, mentored by MusicBrainz’ senior developer Michael Wiencek (bitmap).
BookBrainz
Max Prettyjohns (QuoraUK) is going to try and take on adding gamification to our fledgling book/literature database. He will be supervised by the BookBrainz project leads and lead developers Ben Ockmore (LordSputnik) and Sean Burke (Leftmost).
ListenBrainz
Pinkesh Badjatiya (armalcolite) has pledged to tackle adding a much requested feature for our youngest project: implementing a Last.FM compatible submission API. Robert Kaye (ruaok) will be the one guiding him along.
AcousticBrainz
Daniele Scarano (hellska) will be spending the summer writing a toolkit for creating datasets, which should help researchers using AcousticBrainz. He will be mentored by MetaBrainz software engineer Roman Tsukanov (Gentlecat).
Kartik Gupta (kartikgupta0909) has set out to create an offline client for computing AcousticBrainz dataset evaluations. Alastair Porter (alastairp), the AcousticBrainz project lead, will be their mentor.
Goran Cetusic (cetko), our final student of this year, will be exploring how AcousticBrainz data can be utilised within Google’s BigQuery storage under the guidance of Alastair Porter.

Congratulations and good luck to all our students! We’re looking forwards to following your progress over the summer and see what you end up with. 🙂

For all the students that applied but did not get accepted: we appreciate your applications, and even if you did not make the cut this year, we hope that you will stick around and apply with us again next year when we know you better – and you know us better.

For now, let the community bonding
 begin! 🙌

Announcing python-musicbrainzngs, release 0.6

From the better late than never department…

After more than 2 years we’ve finally released version 0.6 of python-musicbrainzngs, a library for accessing the Musicbrainz webservice from python.

After such a long time we have perhaps too many new changes to describe. Some major changes include:

  • Better handling of authentication private user collections
  • Support for loading all types of user collections (artist, event, place, recording, release, work)
  • Work attributes
  • Support for the Cover Art Archive
  • Support for Events, Instruments, Places, and Series

And numerous other bug fixes and small changes. See the CHANGES file  for more information.

This release contains contributions by Alastair Porter, Corey Farwell, Ian McEwen, JĂ©rĂ©mie Detrey, Johannes Dewender, Pavan Chander, Rui Gonçalves, Ryan Helinski, Shadab Zafar, and Wieland Hoffmann. Thank you everyone!

 

The new version can be downloaded from github, pypi, or installed with pip

Server update, 2016-04-04

This is a small bug-fix release while we work on finishing the May schema change update. Thanks go to reosarevok and ethus3h for their patches this time around. The git tag is v-2016-04-04 and you can find the complete changelog below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8850] – No events tab for tags
  • [MBS-8861] – Vertical spacing off on editor profile if “last login” is missing (account admins only)
  • [MBS-8874] – Editing an entity sometimes shows it as a possible duplicate of itself
  • [MBS-8886] – Header menus should work without JavaScript

Improvement

  • [MBS-8591] – Increase pagination item count

Deprecating MBIDs

This post is an April Fools joke. Rest assured, we have no intention of changing the MBID system that MusicBrainz currently uses.

But, like all good parody news items, there is an element of truth behind this post. The announcement of the Echo Nest API shutdown is real, and with this change you will no longer be able to use the Echo Nest IDs to look up information. This particularly hurts users of the Million Song Dataset, which maps each track to the Echo Nest ID. The new Spotify API isn’t even providing any compatibility api or ID mapping, leaving users to look up 1 million Spotify IDs in the remaining months that the the old Echo Nest api will remain available.

At MusicBrainz, we understand the importance of a stable identifier system. That’s why, 16 years ago, we picked these unwieldy-looking UUID identifiers – that have since proven to have stood the test of time, with room to continue growing. You can look up an MBID made 16 years ago, today – and it will still work another 16 years in the future.

Hello all,

Following Echo Nest’s bold announcement that Echo Nest ids are being replaced by Spotify IDs, we figured it was time to make our own ID change public as well – MBIDs were a fantastic idea 16 years ago, but let’s face it, they’re not the most beautiful thing around, so our MBIDs will now also be replaced by Spotify IDs to help with a proper mapping across tools. Anything without a Spotify mapping will simply get purged. This should greatly simplify the data we have and remove any doubt for some releases whether they exist or not – if they’re on Spotify, they clearly exist!

We would like to commend Echo Nest on their brave leadership in this, giving us the courage to move on from our ancient heritage and try new things. With the speed technologies evolve in this digital age, it can be hard to keep up with things and keep things fresh, but Echo Nest is showing the way forward, and we’re delighted to be able to follow so quickly in their path.

I hope you all will welcome this bold move by our team. We hope to have it ready by next schema change. We know we’re excited! 😀

PS. No, we will not provide a mapping between MBIDs and the new Spotify IDs. We trust our data users to be capable to set things up on their own. Happy hacking! 🙂