2023 – Page 2 – MetaBrainz Blog

MetaBrainz Summit 2023

As always, the silliest photo is the best photo. Left to right: aerozol, zas, outsidecontext, mayhem, yvanzo, bitmap, monkey, kellnerd, akshaaatt, reosarevok, laptop: atj, lucifer

A year has flown by and once again the MetaBrainz team found itself in the MetaBrainz HQ in Barcelona, Spain, for #summit23. And once again we were munching on a mountain of international chocolates, hiking Mt Montserrat, bird-watching, groaning at terrible puns, testing out mayhem’s Bartendro cocktail robot (some of the team committing themselves too thoroughly to this testing), and of course discussing everything and anything MetaBrainz related. This year we had a longer summit, taking place over the week instead of the usual weekend, broken up into three days of presentations, followed by two days of hands-on ‘hacking’.

This means it’s time to strap in for a long post!

MusicBrainz Server mirror-only fix update, 2023-10-24

If you are running a mirror, you may have seen replication packet #162718 fail to apply with the following error:

Failed query:
'INSERT INTO musicbrainz.tag (id, name, ref_count) VALUES (?, ?, ?)'
(259975 girl group 0)
23505 DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "tag_idx_name"
DETAIL: Key (name)=(girl group) already exists. [for Statement "INSERT INTO musicbrainz.tag (id, name, ref_count) VALUES (?, ?, ?)" with ParamValues: 1='259975', 2='girl group', 3='0']

This occurs because the index tag_idx_name was temporarily corrupted in production after yesterday’s database switchover, due to an ICU collation version mismatch. This allowed people to enter tags with duplicate names.

Since then we’ve fixed the broken packets, and published the fixed versions.

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

The git tag is v-2023-10-24-hotfix.

Notes

If you encountered the error above, you’ll have a “previously aborted load,” and must update your MusicBrainz Server to v-2023-10-24-hotfix. After that, replication should operate smoothly without any further action being needed.
If you haven’t replicated up to packet #162718 yet, then no action is needed.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We’re improving our database upgrade process to always rebuild indexes using ICU collations.

Fixed Bug

[MBS-13333] – Replication is blocked by tag duplicates

Planned downtime for Monday, October 23, 15:00 UTC

We’ll be performing maintenance on our database servers starting at 15:00 UTC tomorrow, October 23. It’ll take about 15 minutes to transfer services from our primary database server to our standby, after which normal service will resume. Thanks for your patience during this time.

Picard 2.10 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that the final version 2.10 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release mitigates a critical security issue when loading WebP images, see below for details. In addition there are a several improvements, but mainly this release provides bugfixes and changes behind the scenes such as Python 3.12 compatibility and improved translations.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-10-02

At the dawn of the Summit 23, here is a comfort release with some improvements, a few bugfixes, and even some small new features.

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 CatQuest, chaban, HibiscusKazeneko, Kurumi, Mark Bakker, Q_FDB, and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to emiguel1960, salo.rock, Vac31, and Yllelder for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-10-02.

Picard 2.10 Release Candidate 1

The Picard team is happy to announce that a release candidate for version 2.10 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release brings compatibility with Python 3.12 and improvements to both the translation process and the translations themselves. While the functional changes are relatively small, a lot of code restructuring took place. Hence we want to give this release wider testing before releasing the final version. More details below.

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 23

Has it been a year already? MetaBrainz Summit 23 is one week away! Mark it in your calendar – October 2-6 at MetaBrainz HQ in Barcelona, Spain.

We would love for you to join us remotely. All summit information and links are in the Summit 2023 wiki page. You are invited, regardless of how long you have been in the MeB community, or your MeB interests.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-09-18

A tiny release this time. The main change if you are hosting your own server is that we’ve upgraded to Node 18 since Node 16 is EOL. For everyone else, now you can see if someone has been blocked from editing or leaving edit notes before you report them (look for “Restrictions” in their profile); this can also help explain why some user is not answering your notes.

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 HibiscusKazeneko, jesus2099 and kakawup for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to claybiockiller, mfmeulenbelt, outsidecontext, salo.rock and Vac31. for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-09-18.

Welcome Ansh Goyal to the MetaBrainz team!

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve added yet another former Summer of Code student/mentor to our team: Ansh Goyal. Welcome to our team, Ansh!

After Alastair Porter decided to not resume his position with MetaBrainz after his 6-month break, we were lucky to have Ansh ready to jump in to join our team. Thank you for your hard work over the years, Alastair!

Ansh will be focusing on Javascript programming, in particular React, on the BookBrainz and ListenBrainz projects. Both of these projects desperately need a lot of UI/UX work, and Ansh has proven himself that he’ll be able to help us tackle our backlog of UI projects that we need to accomplish in the short term.

Welcome to the team Ansh — we’re looking forward to your contributions!