Month: December 2019

Thank you for your continued support, Google!

We’ve recently received our annual $30,000 support from Google. The brings the total amount donated by Google’s Open Source Programs Office to us to over $470,000 — hopefully next year we’ll cross the half million dollar threshold!

I can’t quite express my gratitude for this level of support! Without Google’s help, especially early on, MetaBrainz may never have made it to sustainability. Google has helped us in a number of ways, including Google Code-In and Summer of Code — all of these forms of support have shaped our organization quite heavily over the past 15 or so years.

Thank you to Google and everyone at the Google Open Source Programs Office — we truly appreciate your support over the years!

MusicBrainz Server update, 2019-12-09

More small improvements and bugfixes with today’s release, as well as continued conversion to React and other code refactoring.

Thanks to angriestchair, brianfreud, CatQuest, chaban, danbloo, draconx, dr saunders, dseomn, fmera, psychoadept, and all others who reported issues or helped test or translate today’s release!

The git tag is v-2019-12-10-hotfix.

Bug

  • [MBS-4091] – Annotation trimming breaks initial li’s
  • [MBS-10188] – “Merge releases” edit is stuck
  • [MBS-10228] – Releases with no media not shown as merge source in release merge edits
  • [MBS-10279] – Release merge edits display stale, possibly incorrect recording merge info
  • [MBS-10422] – Recording inline search in release editor doesn’t display ISRCs
  • [MBS-10468] – URL cleanup breaks Bandcamp URLs containing “merch”
  • [MBS-10482] – Patreon post URLs are incorrectly normalized
  • [MBS-10502] – 45cat/45worlds URLs point to the wrong place on MB

Improvement

  • [MBS-4776] – Require confirmation when using Various Artists as a track artist
  • [MBS-10243] – Show “[missing media]” when relevant on release duplicates tab
  • [MBS-10244] – Show “[missing media]” when relevant on merge w recordings release merge
  • [MBS-10248] – Show the type of link from instrument recording page
  • [MBS-10255] – Explain when to use “Copy all track titles to associated recordings” and “Copy all track artist credits to associated recordings” when editing a release
  • [MBS-10304] – Restore the ability to set special codes as editor language
  • [MBS-10479] – Show release group types on recording page
  • [MBS-10489] – Make EnterEditNote help text less redundant
  • [MBS-10491] – Add “add a new instrument” link to instrument search results page
  • [MBS-10493] – Enlarge and allow resizing relationship type multi-select box
  • [MBS-10500] – Support localizing edit notes left by ModBot

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-10439] – Convert user collections list to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-10350] – Remove Google+ links from the sidebar
  • [MBS-10495] – Update Discourse SSO to use header based authentication

Thank you Microsoft!

Microsoft reached out to us back in early 2018 in order to use our data in Bing — we followed the normal sort of on-boarding procedure that we use for our supporters. During one of these on-boarding calls we were asked if there was more that Microsoft could do to help us and support our mission. Soon thereafter I provided them with a list of things that would be useful to us. Sadly, the request to buy a major record label and then to give it to us to manage was turned down for being too expensive. 😦

However, Microsoft did like two items on our list and agreed to support us — they were:

1) Azure hosting credits — we’re always looking for more hosting capacity and these credits will allows us to provide virtual machines to our team and to close collaborators who are doing good work, but might be lacking the computing power to push their projects forward. This contribution is of direct benefit to our community — often times our projects contain quite a lot of data and thus have some heavy processing requirements. We’re currently using our hosting credits to do some large data set crunching and some testing for the Virtual Machine that we provide to users who wish to get up and running with MusicBrainz data quickly.

2) Sponsoring our summit — our annual team meeting and foundation summit happens at the end of each September, normally in Barcelona where we have our main office. Microsoft’s sponsorship allows us to invite more people to the event, since we have the means to cover their expenses. Our summits have traditionally been our annual forum for meeting the other team members and volunteers and to take a breather from the normal course of business. At the event we see a more human side of each other and we’re more easily able to discuss our challenges and the vision for the future.

We really appreciate our supporters who go above and beyond the normal levels of support for us — these contributions really sweeten the deal of hacking on open source software!

Thank you so much to Microsoft and everyone at Microsoft who helped move this contribution forward!