Month: September 2021

MusicBrainz Server update, 2021-09-20

We’re back to our usual two-week cycle with a relatively small set of changes, of which the most interesting might be that you can use some extra includes in the MusicBrainz API: release-group-level-rels for release lookups, and recording-level-rels and work-level-rels on release browses. Keep in mind that recording level relationships are still restricted to the same 500 recording limit that applies to very large release lookups, to keep the size of the API responses somewhat sensible – anything over 500 recordings and you’ll need to get the relationships entity by entity.

Additionally, we found an issue where the “make my tags private” setting was not being respected when users tried to navigate straight to a tag page, such as https://musicbrainz.org/user/username/tag/tagname, making it possible to see what the user in question had tagged with tagname even if the tags were meant to be private. This was fixed on both the beta and production servers as soon as we were made aware of it by CatQuest, but we cannot guarantee that it was never used by any too-curious editor who failed to report it before. We apologize for any possible breach of your tag privacy.

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 atj, CatQuest, chaban, Cyberskull, jesus2099, MrClon, mr_maxis and outsidecontext for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to mfmeulenbelt and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2021-09-20.

Fixed Bug

  • [MBS-8820] – An artist with only event rels has a fully blank relationships page
  • [MBS-9454] – URL entities do not always get purged when last entity association is removed
  • [MBS-11717] – Pending artist credit edits warning missing in artist credits reports
  • [MBS-11932] – URL-Work license relationships not excluded from “Report for same URL linked to many entities” report
  • [MBS-11940] – /ws/2/tag return 500 code for invalid requests
  • [MBS-11944] – Place merge button on areas says “Add selected labels for merging”
  • [MBS-11976] – User tag page is not private even when meant to be

Improvement

  • [MBS-6140] – Add “recording-level-rels” (and “work-rels”) support to “Release” browse web service
  • [MBS-8098] – Allow release-group-level-rels in release lookup
  • [MBS-11130] – Clarify it’s not possible to subscribe to VA / [no label]
  • [MBS-11794] – Link to edit searches on statistic page
  • [MBS-11799] – Display “credited as” field in sidebar external links
  • [MBS-11907] – Block vyd.co link aggregator

New Feature

  • [MBS-11819] – Show OAuth authorizations for account admins
  • [MBS-11843] – Add report for “Events with annotations”

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-11841] – Convert Set Track Lengths edit to React

MusicBrainz Server update, 2021-09-06

Today we’re happy to release yyoung’s work to improve the external links editor; see his detailed blog post for more information. Thanks for your hard work, yyoung!

This release also contains quite a few bug fixes and improvements, given the amount of time since last release. Several fix guess-case issues, and we’ve refactored the guess-case code to be more maintainable in the future. A visible improvement you may notice is that we now display icons next to entity links in relationships to help distinguish different types of entities. (If you’ve been editing on MusicBrainz for a long time, you may remember something similar from the classic, pre-NGS website.)

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 aerozol, angriestchair, Beckfield, bsammon, chaban, CyberSkull, danBLOO, Dibou, Freso, HDS, jesus2099, KRSCuan, mr_maxis, mtrolley, navap, salo.rock, Shepard, yindesu, and yyoung for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, ffff23, kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt, panos, salo.rock, th1rtyf0ur, V6lur, and yoshi818 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2021-09-06.

Fixed Bug

  • [MBS-11793] – Wikipedia abstract is fetched even though URL is ended
  • [MBS-11795] – Text overflow in external link relationship type description tooltip
  • [MBS-11802] – ISE on “Edit relationship type” edit for removed type
  • [MBS-11806] – Relationships for different tracks are wrongly grouped on release bottom credit display
  • [MBS-11812] – Merge queue: Missing whitespace before “New disc title”
  • [MBS-11832] – artist-credit/id page gives TypeError if the id does not exist
  • [MBS-11854] – Guess Case doesn’t properly capitalize after Unicode hyphen U+2010
  • [MBS-11861] – Weird odd/even classes client-side for tablesorted statistics
  • [MBS-11864] – Some DNB links are wrongly marked as invalid
  • [MBS-11922] – pre-NGS release type not shown for compilation
  • [MBS-11933] – /oauth2/token doesn’t validate the code parameter

Improvement

  • [MBS-2221] – Description for how to set a relationship as “in” a date
  • [MBS-2418] – Show “Edit URL” edits in entity edit histories
  • [MBS-2421] – Small icon near recording / work / release / artist / … names to distinguish them
  • [MBS-3774] – Add URL relationship with begin and end dates
  • [MBS-7859] – Hide relationships from original recordings to other/derived versions in release view
  • [MBS-10054] – Better editing/viewing of URL relationships from Artist page
  • [MBS-10910] – Display renamed labels on Overview
  • [MBS-11267] – Show label for cover art pieces when reordering cover art
  • [MBS-11391] – Show changes made to external link when editing URL relationship
  • [MBS-11622] – Clean up Apple Music label URLs
  • [MBS-11650] – Add Tag statistics to profile page
  • [MBS-11680] – Group editing URL relationships by external link
  • [MBS-11693] – Give useful message when rejecting Musixmatch /album links
  • [MBS-11722] – Don’t preselect basic as language proficiency
  • [MBS-11732] – Remove LYRICSnMUSIC from lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-11733] – Remove WikiaParoles from lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-11788] – Guess case: Lowercase “official” in ETI
  • [MBS-11796] – Add Internet Archive logo for sidebar
  • [MBS-11797] – Guess case: Lowercase “censored”, “uncensored”, “explicit” in ETI
  • [MBS-11798] – Disallow Instagram /accounts link and other internal links
  • [MBS-11808] – Don’t show entities in tag pages where vote count for tag is lower than 1
  • [MBS-11810] – Merge queue: Rename “disc title” to “medium title”
  • [MBS-11811] – Make Tracklist editing buttons behave consistently on collapsed mediums
  • [MBS-11823] – Don’t insert line breaks inside tag words
  • [MBS-11824] – featured artist reports should look for featured artists without a space
  • [MBS-11825] – Use consistent order for art types when editing vs adding cover art
  • [MBS-11833] – Drop “f.” from the featured artists reports
  • [MBS-11846] – Display release artist on release group view
  • [MBS-11850] – Make footer links more visible
  • [MBS-11862] – Do not show deprecated relationship types with 0 uses in selectors
  • [MBS-11863] – Allow DNB links for works
  • [MBS-11875] – Braille should not be looked for in “Releases with unlikely language/script pairs” in connection to a spoken/written language
  • [MBS-11888] – Automatically set/disable ended when setting an end date in DateRangeFieldset
  • [MBS-11891] – Use HTTPS when linking to Jira
  • [MBS-11912] – Also allow Mainly Norfolk as a lyrics source
  • [MBS-11913] – Auto-select “stream” additionaly to “download” for Jamendo URLs
  • [MBS-11915] – Don’t show area icon if there’s already a flag icon
  • [MBS-11924] – Remove redundant tabs/links/info from deleted editor profiles

New Feature

  • [MBS-9426] – Interface to remove usernames from blocked list
  • [MBS-9902] – Support auto-select/cleanup/validation of more than one relationship type for external links
  • [MBS-11689] – Report: pseudo-releases marked as the original tracklist
  • [MBS-11828] – Add admin interface for checking whether a username is blocked
  • [MBS-11848] – Add report for “Releases with Amazon cover art without any Cover Art Archive images”

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-11834] – Convert Add Release edit to React
  • [MBS-11835] – Convert Change Wikidoc edit to React
  • [MBS-11836] – Convert Edit Barcodes edit to React
  • [MBS-11837] – Convert Edit Release Label edit to React
  • [MBS-11838] – Convert Edit Release edit to React
  • [MBS-11839] – Convert Remove Relationship Attribute edit to React
  • [MBS-11840] – Convert Reorder Mediums edit to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-11805] – Add flow typing to guess case code
  • [MBS-11856] – Remove reports for releases with cover art relationships
  • [MBS-11928] – Drop consul-template for deployment

Acoustic similarity in AcousticBrainz

We’re pleased to announce that we have just released acoustic similarity in AcousticBrainz. Acoustic similarity is a technique to automatically identify which recordings sound similar to other recordings, using only the recordings themselves, and not any additional metadata. This feature is available via the AcousticBrainz API and the AcousticBrainz website, from any recording page. General documentation on acoustic similarity is available at https://acousticbrainz.readthedocs.io/similarity.html.

This feature is based on work started by Philip Tovstogan at the Music Technology Group, the research group that provides the essentia feature extractor that powers AcousticBrainz. The work was continued by Aidan Lawford-Wickham during Summer of Code 2019. Thanks Philip and Aidan for your work!

From the recording view on AcousticBrainz, you can choose to see similar recordings and choose which similarity metric you want to use. Then, a list of recordings similar to the initial recording will be shown.

These metrics are based on different musical features that the AcousticBrainz feature extractor identifies in the audio file. Some of these features are related to timbral characteristics (generally, what something sounds like), Rhythmic (related to tempo or perceived pulses), or AcousticBrainz’s high-level features (hybrid features that use our machine learning system to identify features such as genre, mood, or instrumentation).

One thing that we can immediately see in these results is that the same recording appears many times. This is because AcousticBrainz stores multiple different submissions for the same MBID, and will sometimes get submissions for the same recording with different MBIDs if the data in MusicBrainz is like this. This is actually really interesting! It shows us that we are successfully identifying that two different submissions in AcousticBrainz as being the same using only acoustic information and no metadata. Using the API you can ask to remove these duplicated MBIDs from the results, and we have some future plans to use MusicBrainz metadata to filter more of these results when needed.

What’s next?

We haven’t yet performed a thorough evaluation of the quality of these similarity results. We’d like people to use them and give us feedback on what they think. In the future we may look at performing some user studies in order to see if some specific features tend to give results that people consider “more” similar than others. AcousticBrainz has a number of additional features in our database, and we’d like to experiment with these to see if they can be used as similarity metrics as well.

The fact that we can identify the same recording as being similar even when the MusicBrainz ID is different is interesting. It could be useful to use this similarity to identify when two recordings could be merged in MusicBrainz.

The data files used for this similarity are stand-alone, and can be used without additional data from AcousticBrainz or MusicBrainz. We’re looking at ways that we can make these data files downloadable so that developers can use them without having to query the AcousticBrainz API. If you think that you might be interested in this, let us know!