Month: December 2020

MusicBrainz servers update, December 2020

Let’s end the year 2020 on a brighter note with new releases of both MusicBrainz Server and its companions for advanced indexed search.

The most urgent task was to lower the risk of leaking private data again (see previous incident) by reducing the scope of editor data passed to the renderer.

The most visible improvement of the website is the addition of instrument illustrations by IROM. Thanks to him for these very welcomed drawings. See sistrum for an example; we will keep adding illustrations to other instruments little by little.

The most useful improvements to the API are the addition of their first release date to recordings (both in lookup and search) and release groups (which were missing it in search results), and the addition of MBIDs for artists’ gender and releases’ status.

Advanced indexed search has also been improved to allow searching for releases by type of packaging, for recordings and release groups by first release date, and to simplify searching for releases by type of medium’s format.

Finally, a fair number of smaller bugs have also been fixed, and React conversion is being continued.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to amCap1712 for fixing a pair of bugs in outputting search API results, and jesus2099 for fixing a bug in seeding the release editor. Thanks to avilla, CatQuest, chaban, jgrmstr, jstranger, Lotheric, loujin, nikki, Psychoadept, and serg for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, mfmeulenbelt, and salorock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tags are v-2020-11-12 for MusicBrainz XML Metadata Schema, v-2020-12-14 for MusicBrainz Server, v-2020-12-24 for MusicBrainz Simple Solr Search Server Schema, v2.0.0 for Search Index Rebuilder, and v3.4.1 for MusicBrainz Solr Query/Response Writer.

Bug

  • [MBS-4555] – Seeding the release editor when logged out loses the seeded information
  • [MBS-8438] – The same event is displayed twice on an artist’s “Events” tab if they have multiple roles on it
  • [MBS-10664] – Regression: HTML tags are incorrectly displayed in editor’s bio
  • [MBS-11092] – Some issue with userscripts/plugins and beta site
  • [MBS-11169] – Artist credit doesn’t display properly in release pages when credits are at the bottom of the release instead of inline
  • [MBS-11207] – Error messages from DBI are badly encoded
  • [MBS-11212] – Incorrect quality attribute in “ws/2/release”
  • [MBS-11214] – Relationships with different link order not split on “see at bottom” medium rels display
  • [MBS-11220] – Release editor seeding is displayed in wrong language
  • [MBS-11223] – Releases with “unknown tracklist” on a medium failed to load in the “Edit Relationships” tab
  • [MBS-11227] – Unexpected URL used when removing release groups from merge queue
  • [SEARCH-623] – Gender ID is missing from JSON/XML artist search results
  • [SEARCH-624] – Status ID is missing from release in JSON/XML search results

Improvement

  • [MBS-1424] – Add a “First release date” field to recordings
  • [MBS-11188] – Block smart links: “album.link”
  • [MBS-11224] – Releases with no medium should show a clear message in the relationship editor
  • [MBS-11225] – Make “staticbrainz.org/irombook/” URLs autoselect for image relationship
  • [MBS-11271] – Reduce the scope of editor data passed to the template renderer
  • [SEARCH-319] – Add first release date to the results of indexed search for release groups
  • [SEARCH-574] – Make release’s format search field insensitive to spaces and separators

New Feature

  • [MBS-10590] – Allow displaying IROMBOOK instrument images on MusicBrainz
  • [MBS-11216] – Split report “InstrumentsWithoutWikidata” from “InstrumentsWithoutAnImage”
  • [SEARCH-218] – Add first release date to the fields and results of indexed search for recordings
  • [SEARCH-384] – Add first release date to the fields of indexed search for release-groups
  • [SEARCH-590] – Add packaging to the fields of indexed search for releases

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-11018] – Convert Add Relationship Type edit to React
  • [MBS-11211] – Convert the login page to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-10634] – Rework the “Instruments without an image” report to only look at IROMBOOK images
  • [MBS-11210] – Allow more subpaths for “saisaibatake.ame-zaiku.com”

Playlists and personalised recommendations in ListenBrainz

Just in time for Christmas we are pleased to announce a new feature in our most recent release of ListenBrainz, the ability to create and share your own playlists! We created two playlists for each user who used ListenBrainz containing music that you listened to in 2020. Check out your lists at https://listenbrainz.org/my/recommendations. Read on for more details…

With our continuing work on using data in ListenBrainz to generate recommendations, we realised that we needed a place to store lists of music. That sounded like playlists to us, so we added them to ListenBrainz. As always, we did this work in the public ListenBrainz repository. You can now create your own playlists with the web interface or by using the API. Recordings in playlists map to MusicBrainz identifiers. If you’re trying to add something and can’t find it, make sure that it’s in MusicBrainz first.

Once you have a playlist, you can listen to it using our built-in BrainzPlayer, or export it to Spotify if you have an account there. If you have already linked your Spotify account to ListenBrainz you may have to re-authenticate and give us permission to create playlists on your behalf. Playlists can also be exported in the open JSPF format using the ListenBrainz API.

Over the last year we’ve started thinking about how to use data in MetaBrainz projects to generate recommendations of new music for people to listen to. For this reason, we started the Troi recommendation framework. This python package allows developers to build pipelines that take data from different sources and combine it in order to generate recommendations of music to listen to. We have already developed data sources using MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, and AcousticBrainz. If you are a developer interested in working on recommendations in the context of ListenBrainz we encourage you to check it out.

Now that we can store playlists we needed some content to fill them with. Luckily we have some great projects worked on by students over the last few years as part of MetaBrainz’ participation in the Google Summer of Code project, including this year’s work on statistics and summary information by Ishaan. Using Troi and ListenBrainz statistics, we got to work. Every user who has been contributing data to ListenBrainz recently now has two brand new 2020 playlists based on the top recordings that you listened to in 2020 and the recordings that you first listened to in 2020. If you’re interested in the code behind these playlists, you can see the code for each (top tracks, first tracks) in the troi repository.

If you’re a long-time user of ListenBrainz you may be familiar with the problem of matching your listens to content in MusicBrainz to be able to do things with it. We’ve been working hard on a solution to this problem and have built a new tool using typesense to provide a quick and easy way to search for items in the MusicBrainz database. You are using this tool when you create a playlists using the web interface and search for a recording to add. This is still a tech preview, but in our experience it works really well. Thanks to the team at typesense for helping us with our questions over the last few weeks!

This work is still in its early days. We thought that this was such a great feature that we wanted to get it out in front of you now. We’re happy to take your feedback, or hear if you are having any problems. Open a ticket on our bug tracker, come and talk to us on IRC, or @ us. Did we give you a bad jam? Sorry about that! We’d love to have a conversation about what went well and what didn’t in order to improve our systems. In 2021 we will start generating weekly and daily playlists for users based on your recent listens using our collaborative filtering recommendations system.

Merry Christmas from the whole MetaBrainz team!

Picard 2.5.4 hotfix for Windows startup issues

We had many reports of Windows users not being able to launch the just released Picard 2.5.3. This is a hotfix release to address this issue. There are no changes for other platforms.

The updated version is available from the Picard download page.

Thanks a lot to everyone reporting on this issue and helping to get this resolved quickly and sorry for the trouble.

Changes

Picard 2.5.3 released

The Picard team is happy to announce the release of Picard 2.5.3. This release fixes a performance regression introduced in Picard 2.5.2 and brings many more bug fixes and improvements to existing functionality.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

What’s new?

Bugfixes

  • [PICARD-2016] – AcoustID API Key is not stripped
  • [PICARD-2017] – Picard crashes when removing entries on the right side while loading
  • [PICARD-2019] – Saving tracks to SMB share on Windows 10 results in ever more nested folders
  • [PICARD-2020] – Multi-value album or recording ID tags prevent Picard from loading the proper albums
  • [PICARD-2021] – SameFileError when moving files between network path and local path on Windows
  • [PICARD-2022] – Crash accessing network share without access rights on Windows
  • [PICARD-2023] – Appdata file not generated on non-Linux platforms
  • [PICARD-2028] – Deleting albums and saving files is extremely slow
  • [PICARD-2031] – Scripting documentation link 404
  • [PICARD-2036] – MultiMetadataProxy::pop is not flagged as a WRITE_METHOD; this breaks the “keep” plugin
  • [PICARD-2037] – Improve Info/Error tab readability
  • [PICARD-2045] – After fingerprint, unsaved tracks have green tick
  • [PICARD-2050] – File selector pane jumps around horizontally instead of expanding / collapsing the folder
  • [PICARD-2056] – Interface color changes are not saved
  • [PICARD-2058] – Add File dialog does not show files with uppercase extension on case-sensitive file systems
  • [PICARD-2059] – Scripting Documentation shows extra line for each function
  • [PICARD-2062] – Searching for similar tracks can remove current album even if there are unmatched tracks
  • [PICARD-2064] – Cluster shows empty album column

Improvements

  • [PICARD-2034] – Add context menu entry for copy and paste to metadata view
  • [PICARD-2035] – More verbose tooltip for album error icon
  • [PICARD-2038] – Integrate metadata box clipboard with system clipboard
  • [PICARD-2039] – Unify error handling for albums, non-album tracks and files, show errors in info dialog
  • [PICARD-2044] – Add date and originaldate fields to the choice of columns in the list views
  • [PICARD-2046] – AcoustID submission can fail due to body size limit of AcoustID server
  • [PICARD-2047] – Improve contrast for console text in dark mode
  • [PICARD-2057] – Allow showing all files in Add Files dialog
  • [PICARD-2063] – Add an option to disable automatic horizontal scrolling in file browser

The complete list of changes of this and previous releases is available in the changelog. You can also discuss new features or usage on our forums.

Acknowledgements

This release contains code contributions by Sophist, mineo, BSDKaffee, zas, and outsidecontext. Many thanks also to all translators and everybody who suggested features and reported bugs in our community forums or on the issue tracker.