Author: ruaok

The FreeDB gateway has been updated to NGS!

I’m pleased to announce that the FreeDB gateway, which lets you fetch MusicBrainz data via FreeDB enabled applications, has been updated to use the NGS database. As of now, its updating with new data from the main MusicBrainz server and you should be able to look up new CDs.

To use the FreeDB gateway, set the FreeDB server in your application to freedb.musicbrainz.org on port 80. For more information, please take a look at our wiki page for the gateway.

Thanks to Lukas for porting this code to NGS!

Our new wiki warden: Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok)

After too many moons of neglect, we finally have a new wiki warden who is going to put some serious effort into sprucing up our wiki. Nicolás Tamargo (user reosarevok) has been promoted to be our new wiki god. His first task is to clean up dead pages and to get rid of a lot of cruft; then he’ll work on improving some doc pages that have been long out of date. Hopefully soon we can get to a state where the wiki is useful, rather than filling us with a sense of dread. 🙂

If you’re interested in helping reosarevok with the wiki, please let him know by leaving a comment here or contacting him directly.

Thanks for taking on our very messy wiki, Reosarevok!

Record traffic, new server in NGS rotation

We’re currently seeing record levels of traffic right now. Since the beginning of August our traffic has gone from 9M hits per day to 14M hits per day today, which is a significant increase in traffic. Fortunately our servers were able to handle the extra load, but we started getting near capacity.

Yesterday I started working on taking one of the servers from the classic site and moving it into the NGS cluster. We finished this a couple of hours ago and we now have a maximum limit of 227 queries per second (qps).

If you find any spurious troubles with the site in the next day or so, please open a ticket.

MusicBrainz Summit 11: Please come join us in Rotterdam!

I wanted to remind people that we’re finally having a summit in October. We’ve rented an apartment in Rotterdam, Netherlands as our venue from 13 October to 18 October. On the afternoon of October 13 and most of October 14 we’re going to have a two day-ish hackathon for hacking on various MusicBrainz related things. On the evening of the 14th we’re going to have a social meet and greet event at the apartment. The summit itself will be held on the 15th and 16th, following an unconference like format where the attendees get to set the agenda. Most people will depart Rotterdam on the evening of the 16th. On Monday the 17th, our final day in the apartment, we’re going to have a day focused on MusicBrainz’ commercial users to discuss issues from a commercial perspective.

If you’re a MusicBrainz hacker/supporter and would like to attend, we’re going to cover lodgings and food for a limited number of people through the generous sponsorship of last.fm and MusixMatch. Our budget is not vast, so if you’re interested in attending the event, please sign up on our the summit wiki page. You’ll be responsible for your own transportation to Rotterdam.

Warp, Ollie and myself will be at the apartment the entire time and we’ll be bringing some creature comforts like game consoles and other things to keep ourselves entertained when we’re not discussing or hacking on MusicBrainz.

Please come join us in the Netherlands!

NGS Bug fixes, 2011-09-12

Things in MusicBrainz land are finally starting to return to normal, with a succession of holidays all final over and everyone getting back to work. We sadly missed the last release of August entirely, but have combined it with the latest release, which was deployed onto servers yesterday. Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-987] – Database import doesn’t work without editor data
  • [MBS-1543] – Add credits to the images in the release editor
  • [MBS-1670] – UX, Can’t add new artist if an artist is already selected in artist credit
  • [MBS-1977] – ModBot is unable to close some edits
  • [MBS-2030] – Historic "Add release" edits: artist displayed as "[removed]"
  • [MBS-2184] – Indexed inline search find no recording for 夜曲 but there are several
  • [MBS-2498] – Description for failed vote is inaccurate.
  • [MBS-2641] – Release editor doesn’t handle copied artist credits very well
  • [MBS-2710] – merging recordings shouldn’t kill release edits
  • [MBS-2817] – Add Missing Entities not displaying correct search results for many artists
  • [MBS-2823] – Edit closed as failed but was actually accepted
  • [MBS-2829] – Fuzzy CD lookup doesn’t work if you don’t exclude CDStubs
  • [MBS-2902] – When editing release, ".[number]" at end of artist name is parsed as track time.
  • [MBS-2945] – Musicbrainz should report a sensible error when add release fails because of invalid data rather than just ‘Internal Error’
  • [MBS-3066] – Splitting to multiple artists using Credits fields only recognises first artist
  • [MBS-3095] – http://www.musicbrainz.org/ should redirect to http://musicbrainz.org/
  • [MBS-3113] – Invalid URLs shouldn’t be accepted
  • [MBS-3147] – Cover art script not working properly
  • [MBS-3209] – Recordings need an equivalent to the tracklist’s ‘add missing entities’
  • [MBS-3224] – Internal Server Error in the release editor after going back in the browser
  • [MBS-3243] – Unable to have a track named "0" in the track list
  • [MBS-3258] – column width in opera too small
  • [MBS-3272] – InitDB can fail if the locale of the machine isn’t set correctly
  • [MBS-3275] – Internal server error when adding a new release
  • [MBS-3280] – ISE on tracklist tab of release editor (?)
  • [MBS-3287] – Looking up an existing release group when adding a release should disable the type field
  • [MBS-3289] – On the Release Information -> Tracklist and Release Information pages the Join phrase is not shown in the Preview
  • [MBS-3297] – A space in track# field in advanced tracklist causes ISE
  • [MBS-3298] – Rendering the timeline eats all my CPU and takes forever
  • [MBS-3301] – Adding tracks to a release fails with "This edit changes recording IDs, but some of the recordings no longer exist."
  • [MBS-3303] – Columns are the wrong width
  • [MBS-3306] – Adjust flags and delete tabs are shown, but don’t work
  • [MBS-3312] – Edits fail because recordings do supposedly not exist anymore but in fact still exist
  • [MBS-3344] – Stop closing edits as "Error"
  • [MBS-3355] – When match track with unknown duration to an existing recoridng it doesnt set the tracktime
  • [MBS-3365] – Entries listed twice on artists work pages
  • [MBS-3366] – "There are not currently any relationship types available between works and recordings." error when trying to link recordings to works
  • [MBS-3369] – Internal Server error on Edit Types documentation
  • [MBS-3378] – Edit label not showing any information
  • [MBS-3380] – Attempt to add duplicate artist via Release Editor causes Internal Server Error
  • [MBS-3400] – Expired merge releases edit not being applied.
  • [MBS-3404] – Move disc ID edit type: incorrect source release

Improvement

  • [MBS-2188] – "Comment" is confusing people
  • [MBS-2256] – UX, the current artist credit interface does not discourage changing the credit for various artists
  • [MBS-2839] – Artist work list > Better design: don’t split by "categories" (composer, lyricist, …) and indicates artist role for each artist related to work
  • [MBS-2899] – Release editor’s "Release Duplicates" tab does not suggest any releases if the release title has been translated away from the actual title
  • [MBS-3211] – allmusic and secondhandsongs not auto-detected

New Feature

  • [MBS-3261] – Add support for "deleting" user accounts

The tag for this version is v-2011-09-12-ngs-bug-fixes.

Google donates another $40,000!

I’m pleased to announce that Google has pledged another $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation for our annual support!

The Google Open Source Programs Office and all of its awesome people have been supporting us for five years now. Their generous support has allowed us to keep two full time engineers working on our server software. Without Google, MusicBrainz would not be where it is today.

Thank you again, Google!

MusicBrainz Android app now available in the Android Market

Jamie McDonald has continued his Summer of Code work and has submitted the first version of the MusicBrainz app to the Android Market! If you would like to be able to look up releases by barcode, search for artists and rate/tag data in MusicBrainz, this app is for you:

MusicBrainz App in the Android Market!

I’ve already used this application in a number of social situations where someone wanted to know some music info and I was able to look it up very quickly. Its quite handy! Also, an iPhone version is still in the works.

Thanks very much for your continued work on this project, Jamie!

Google uses MusicBrainz data in some of its searches!

Earlier this week I met with Shawn Simister, who works on Google’s Freebase project (former from MetaWeb) to touch base about how MusicBrainz is being utilized inside of Google. MusicBrainz represents a large chunk of the music data in Freebase and in turn the Freebase data is used as one of the sources of data for Google’s search.

Shawn explains this in more detail:

You can actually see a couple areas where we’re using the Freebase music data publicly. First, in the structured refinements in search. If you search for lady gaga albums and scroll to the bottom to see “Album searches for Lady Gaga”. Also you can see videos clustered by topic in YouTube Topics and many of the topics are music-related.

It’s important to keep in mind that Musicbrainz is just part of the solution. It’s a pretty big part of Freebase music data and therefore its likely to be a pretty big component in these results but as you know the search results team at Google is pretty secretive about what all goes into the results page so even I can’t tell for certain when they’re using Freebase/Musicbrainz data for any given result.

I think it’s important that people don’t mistake this as a one-to-one relationship between Musicbrainz data and Google results because there are quite a few steps in between but there’s definitely a strong connection there and we really appreciate everything that the Musicbrainz community is doing and hope that Musicbrainz community continues to grow.

I find this tremendously exciting to hear, since I proposed a very similar thing to Google many years ago. While this idea was rejected back in the day, I’m excited to see that Google is now using our data for it searches. Every person who has ever contributed to MusicBrainz should be proud!

Thank you to everyone and thank you Shawn for shedding some light on this!

Picard 0.15 released!

The 0.15 stable version was finally released today, with some new features and bug fixes since beta2. There were too many small changes to list, but here’s a partial changelog with the most user-visible ones:

Version 0.15 – 2011-07-17:

  • Added options for using standardized track, release, and artist metadata.
  • Added preferred release format support.
  • Expanded preferred release country support to allow multiple countries.
  • Added support for tagging non-album tracks (standalone recordings).
  • Plugins can now be installed via drag and drop, or a file browser.
  • Added several new tags: %_originaldate%, %_recordingcomment%, and %_releasecomment%
  • Changes to request queuing: added separate high and low priority queues for each host.
  • Tagger scripts now run after metadata plugins finish (#5850)
  • The “compilation” tag can now be $unset or modified via tagger script.
  • Added a shortcut (Ctrl+I) for Edit->Details.
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes.

You can download the new version and report bugs for it 🙂