MusicBrainz Server update, 2025-04-14

This release brings a relatively short list of changes, but several of them were requested quite often and will hopefully lead to better editing.

Derat has been doing a lot of work in the release editor to help beginners understand the different fields and point them towards the basic guidelines. For example, we can now detect some of the most common English prepositions and point the user towards the English guidelines if they are uppercased.

We are bringing back the option we had many, many years ago to also merge the containing release groups while entering a release merge. This should hopefully help more editors do the right thing and also merge release groups (saving their MusicBrainz IDs) rather than leaving them empty to be autoremoved.

Finally, the API now shows artist countries everywhere (when the artist has an area assigned). This has been requested fairly often for a multitude of purposes, so hopefully it will make a bunch of you quite happy!

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 derat and dvirtz for having contributed to the code. Thanks to chaban, Cyberskull, derat, HibiscusKazeneko, Lotheric, salo.rock, yindesu and yomo12 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, BestSteve, Kori Syusetu, Libra, Marc Riera, ninjum, nzure, salo.rock and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2025-04-14.0.

Fixed Bug

• [MBS-8668] – Adding duplicate entities to a series is still allowed
• [MBS-13453] – Wide character error on ISE blocks real error message
• [MBS-13967] – URL fragments are escaped by doc_link TT macro

Improvement

• [MBS-2349] – Option to merge release groups when merging releases
• [MBS-5944] – Release editor: add documentation bubbles for extra fields
• [MBS-11129] – Make it more clear that medium numbers are just total position
• [MBS-12170] – Add artist country in release webservice calls
• [MBS-13884] – Add ACUM to whitelist for other databases
• [MBS-13969] – Preserve ISRCs and ISWCs when missing from POST request

New Feature

• [MBS-10563] – Add autoselect + sidebar for AWA URLs
• [MBS-13711] – Prompt beginner users about likely track title capitalization mistakes
• [MBS-13957] – Report for duplicates in series