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”