Author: ruaok

Announcing the Cover Art Archive

In a server update last April we quietly said that “we’ve also improved cover art support slightly.” What we actually did was release the first version of the Cover Art Archive, a cooperation between MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive. First, a little background:

Cover art (the images associated with music products) adds a great amount of value to the digital music experience. Many projects and apps on the net use these images to add color and depth to their music tools. However, there isn’t a cleanly organized, publicly available resource where everyone can access these images. You can use Amazon product images, but your project needs to be able to abide by their Terms of Service, which doesn’t work for everyone. Many projects use Google Images to source their cover art, but that is an inexact science since they may not always find the right image.

The Cover Art Archive aims to solve these problems by making these images available to the public. But since we are not lawyers, we can not say what can and can not be done with these. So use them at your own risk! That said, everyone on the internet is using these images anyway and the common understanding is that if you’re selling music you’re pretty safe. We suggest that when you try to figure out what to do, make sure that you respect the artists and their labels and make the music world a better place.

All images in the Cover Art Archive are indexed by the release’s MBID, and all metadata can be parsed by a JSON document. For instance, to fetch the front cover for any given release, construct this URL:

http://coverartarchive.org/release/76df3287-6cda-33eb-8e9a-044b5e15ffdd/front

Once you GET this resource, you will be redirected to the proper Internet Archive URL that yields either an image file or a 404 error if we do not have this image. For lots more details on how to use the Cover Art Archive, please take a look at our API documentation. So far, there are Java, C and Perl bindings to the API.

For some stunning examples of what people have already done with the Cover Art Archive, please take a look at these links:

So far, we’ve collected nearly 100,000 images that are attached to 54,000 releases for a 5% coverage in MusicBrainz. The largest file we have clocks in at 23MB and the largest image is 16,000 x 7842 (125 megapixels!). For all of the juicy stats on this project, check out our cover art statistics page.

We’ve just gotten started and we need your help! Won’t you please consider uploading some images to this archive? To get started, log in with your MusicBrainz account (or create a new one) find your favorite release and then click on the cover art tab to view the existing pieces of art and/or upload new ones. For more details, see our How to add cover art guide.

Thank you to everyone who has worked hard to make this project a reality! And thank you to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive for fostering this project!

Splunk supports MusicBrainz!

As part of Google’s Summer of Code program we accepted Dániel Bali to work on analyzing our web server logs to mine them for interesting information about MusicBrainz and people who are using MusicBrainz. (see a preview of this project)

To make that project a reality we had help from Splunk, the company that creates the fantastic data analysis tool by the same name. Splunk provided us with enterprise trial licenses during the summer and now going forward has accepted us into their Splunk for Good program. This program provides a free 10GB/day (it allows us to import 10GB of data into our Splunk server per day) license on a yearly basis.

We now count Splunk among our sponsors and we’re looking forward to rolling out Dániel’s work in October. Thank you Splunk and thank you to Joyce Morrell and Christy Wilson from Splunk for working with us to make this happen!

Search server release: 2012-09-18

We’ve just updated our search servers with a new release. This release adds support for a new improved json format for the search server and will be publicly available after the next mbserver release. We also now output the date (in the XML/json) the index was last updated so you know how old the results received are. This will be exposed to the end-user in the web search results in an upcoming release of musicbrainz-server.

Thanks to Paul Taylor and Aurélien Mino for making this release happen!

Improvement

  • [SEARCH-232] – Search server should return information about when the indexes were last updated

New Feature

  • [SEARCH-226] – Add Support for Json format as described in http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:kuno/Web_Service/JSON
  • [SEARCH-227] – Add prettyprint option for Json (and XML)

Possible date change for our summit: 9-11 November 2012

I’ve just found out that the Music Hack Day London conflicts with our summit in Barcelona. 🙁 Given that a few people from MusicBrainz wanted to attend that Hack Day, we’re considering the possibility of changing our summit date to 9-11 November.

I’ve already contacted all of the people who signed up as potential attendees, but I wanted to throw this suggestion out to all of you who might consider going.

If you have a problem with the new date, please post a comment. If we dont get any significant conflicts, we may change the date.

Thanks!

Schema change release: Oct 15th

On October 15th, we’re going to update our schema once again. This time we’re only making minor changes and some cleanup from the last schema change. To find out exactly what will be changing, please take a look at our milestone for this release.

At this point we’ve frozen the list of tickets we’re going to adress for October 15th. We’re not going to accept any more schema change tickets for this release.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

Release editor service interruption: Thursday 20:00UTC

We have a minor hosting change to make (change how an instance of memcached is managed) that will lose all of the current release editor sessions. We will make this change tomorrow, Thursday at 20:00 UTC. During this time, any release editor session that is active will break and you will lose your changes in the release editor. To prevent this from impacting you, make sure to submit any changes before 20:00 UTC and wait for us to post another entry saying that the change is complete.

The rest of the site will be unaffected by this change.

MusicBrainz Summit 12: Barcelona Spain, 16-18 November, 2012

We’ve just finalized the dates and location for the 12th MusicBrainz summit. This year we’re going to meet in Barcelona, Spain on the weekend of 16-18 November. Our friends at the Comp Music project at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra will be hosting us during the day and we will likely rent an apartment for most of us to sleep at. It is still a bit early to make travel plans (plane tickets will get cheaper in late september), but in the meantime, please add yourself to our summit page if you’re interested in attending.

UPDATE: The summit is the previous weekend, November 9 to 11.