Author: ruaok

MusicBrainz Summit 11: October 15/16/17, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Hi!

I had originally planned to have a post-NGS celebration and hack day with the MusiXmatch teams in Bologna this month, but timing and costs proved to be an issue. Instead, we’re going to hold a traditional MusicBrainz summit in Warp’s town of Rotterdam, Netherlands. The general idea for this summit is very rough, but I would like to focus on community discussions on the weekend (Oct 15/16) and then focus on customer discussions on Monday the 17 Oct. Everyone would be welcome to attend all portions of the summit, but we’ll have a different focus for different parts of the summit.

I expect the core MusicBrainz team and representatives from Zvooq, Last.fm and MusiXmatch to be at the summit. We’re going to be soliciting for sponsorships in order to help cover the costs of the summit. If you’re interested in attending and/or sponsoring the summit, please comment on this post. Depending on the level of sponsorships we can drum up, we might be able to pay for lodging/food for community members who wish to attend. We’ve made that possible in the past and I would very much like to be able to do that again.

I’m quite looking forward to meeting some of you in Rotterdam!

The EchoNest releases Echoprints: The open source fingerprint era has begun

Amplifind, the company that operates the MusicDNS/PUID service, recently sold its intellectual property and the PUID service will be going away eventually. It is exactly this reason why we’ve been uncomfortable relying on closed source fingerprinting software to make MusicBrainz tick.

Fortunately, I’m pleased to announce that the open source fingerprint era has begun!

Lukáš Lalinský has been working on acoustid for months now and today the EchoNest, in conjunction with 7Digital and MusicBrainz, has issued a press release that announces Echoprint, their fully open source fingerprinting solution.

The source code has already been released on github: echoprint-server and echoprint-codegen.

We’re pleased to announce preliminary support for Echoprint in MusicBrainz on our echoprint test server. The Echoprint system works similarly to how PUIDs work in MusicBrainz right now. You can use echoprints anywhere you can use PUIDs on the Echoprint test server. The version 2 of our XML web service (on the echoprint test server) now supports submitting and fetching Echoprints. To submit an Echoprint, refer to our web service documentation and example page and use echoprint wherever you’d use puid. For instance, to submit an Echoprint to the test server, POST an XML document like the one below to the /ws/2/recording resource:

<metadata xmlns="http://musicbrainz.org/ns/mmd-2.0#">
    <recording-list>
        <recording id="e97f805a-ab48-4c52-855e-07049142113d">
            <echoprint-list>
                 <echoprint id="TRN5NGX1187AB4F786"/>
            <echoprint-list>
        <recording>
    <recording-list>
<metadata>

Although it remains to be seen when the Echoprint system will be mature enough for inclusion on the live MusicBrainz servers, going forward MusicBrainz will only support fully open source fingerprint solutions, starting with Echoprint and acoustid. We are saying no to more closed source solutions, which have never worked out well for us. MusicDNS/PUID is now officially end of life and should not be used anymore in new development.

We look forward to working with the EchoNest closely to finish up the development of the Echoprint system and to fully integrate it into MusicBrainz when it matures.

Accepted Summer of Code projects

First, many apologies to our Google Summer of Code students for not posting about which projects we had accepted for this summer. The NGS release took an amazing amount of time and I’m finally getting on top of the backlog of things to catch up on.

Now on to introduce the projects for this year:

Eliza Gebow (Batsy) has been accepted to hack on Embeddable Widgets that will allow anyone to embed a MusicBrainz widget into their site/blog/whatever that will dynamically display MusicBrainz information about artists, releases, recordings and possible works if there is enough time. You can follow Eliza’s progress on her blog.

Ian McEwen (ianmcorvidae) has already been madly hacking on improving our timeline and statistics pages. The goal of the project is to provide MusicBrainz users with a comprehensive tool for examining the growth of the MusicBrainz data and to understand how changes in MusicBrainz features and policy affect our database. Follow
Ian’s progress on his blog.

Last, but not least, Michael Wiencek (bitmap) is spending his time this summer hacking on Picard. First Micheal is focusing to make Picard ready for the NGS site — as we were developing NGS we didn’t have the resources to make Picard ready for NGS. Michael is fixing this and adding some new features to Picard as well. Michael has overcome his dislike for blog and you can follow his progress on his blog.

Most amazingly, both Ian and Michael have already shipped working code as part of their GSoC work. Ian’s bare bones timeline is now live on the NGS site and Michael has already released a new beta version of Picard. Amazing stuff — please keep up the good work!

NGS bug fixes for 2011-06-08

We’ve just updated the servers with the latest round of bug fixes. After two years of no updates, its feels good to get them so often, doesn’t it? The next release is scheduled for June 13th. The bugs fixed in this release:

Bug

  • [MBS-1851] – Can’t view "Edit artist" or "Edit label" edits: "An error occured while loading this edit"
  • [MBS-1908] – Releases not being sorted by name
  • [MBS-1919] – Guess case is missing for release titles.
  • [MBS-1937] – Subscriptions email is not sorted
  • [MBS-1994] – All tracks of candidate mediums are displayed twice while attaching a CDTOC
  • [MBS-2055] – Add release/add disc: cannot add tracks or edit track lengths; leaving the tracklist tab loses tracklists; other problems
  • [MBS-2067] – CDStub not displayed in the "Matching CDs" section on CDTOC lookup page
  • [MBS-2114] – Recording appears twice in Recordings list
  • [MBS-2122] – In artist credits "dialog" in advanced tracklist editor, the link beside "Preview" to artists is often incorrect
  • [MBS-2123] – In "artist credits" dialog, if you manually click the magnifying glass for the search, impossible to close search dialog
  • [MBS-2181] – Internal Server Error when submitting edit to remove and add disc
  • [MBS-2205] – "Keep me logged in" does not keep me logged in
  • [MBS-2261] – Release group is listed twice on an artist page
  • [MBS-2356] – &quot; code in tracklists
  • [MBS-2384] – Please restore migration scripts in admin/sql/updates
  • [MBS-2398] – Internal server error when trying to load the editing history of a release group
  • [MBS-2400] – ModBot deletes newly created artists that should appear in new artist credits once pending edits are applied
  • [MBS-2402] – Fix FTP link in INSTALL
  • [MBS-2470] – Can’t search for annotations with Unicode symbols in
  • [MBS-2482] – External links and last updated overlap
  • [MBS-2488] – Double escaping of & (&amp;) in tracklist
  • [MBS-2490] – Internal server error when trying to change recordings on multiple discs
  • [MBS-2516] – Changing existing IPI code/gender/country shouldn’t be an autoedit
  • [MBS-2526] – Edit Label: Changing an IPI code is an autoedit and the code is not shown in the edit history
  • [MBS-2563] – Internal Server Error on "relate to recordings" if you don’t select any recordings
  • [MBS-2566] – Relating artist to recordings leads to an internal server error
  • [MBS-2581] – "Rename artist credits" does not appear to be working when merging artists
  • [MBS-2613] – Can’t edit (random "Internal Server Error")
  • [MBS-2616] – Move disc ID edits fail if the target medium no longer exists
  • [MBS-2619] – Change release group edits fail if the target release group no longer exists
  • [MBS-2622] – Modbot doesn’t remove (all?) orphaned artists
  • [MBS-2627] – Subscription mail hasn’t been sent for two days in a row

Improvement

  • [MBS-1767] – "Edit medium" edit type doesn’t highlight what has changed between old and new values
  • [MBS-1944] – URL page should display relationships
  • [MBS-1970] – Set medium titles when merging releases
  • [MBS-2117] – "Relate to…" should end up back at the original entity, not at the entity related to
  • [MBS-2287] – Relationships type editing URLs should use GID rather than internal id, and GID should be displayed on AR tree
  • [MBS-2443] – Timeline graph should show exact values on hover.
  • [MBS-2444] – Data::Statistics needs a mapping of names (as in database) to labels to use for the timeline graph
  • [MBS-2445] – Timeline graph needs better tick placement so data can be skimmed more effectively
  • [MBS-2446] – Timeline graph needs better controls
  • [MBS-2448] – Timeline graph should allow adding/removing lines
  • [MBS-2472] – Fix display for two labels, one cat#
  • [MBS-2508] – Add CD-R to the formats list
  • [MBS-2512] – Add ISWCs to the basic metadata statistics
  • [MBS-2554] – Remove the quotes around work / recording names
  • [MBS-2568] – Statistics for artist type
  • [MBS-2569] – Statistics for artist gender
  • [MBS-2635] – Edit medium should show differences highlighted

Addressing user interface issues in NGS

Now that we’re slowly emerging from the critical bug fix phase in NGS, its time to make a plan of attack for how to address the most pressing issues that we need to clean up. The NGS user interface clearly requires a lot of work still; no one will argue that. The user interface was the hardest part about NGS — when we first started we had no idea how to make these things work. But, we got them to work and the team deserves a round of applause for that!

Now it time to get organized for future releases and we could use a bit of your help here. We’ve been doing daily hot fix releases and are now doing weekly releases. Once we’re done fixing critical issues we’re going to slow the schedule down to roughly monthly releases. In the future our releases will be a mix of bug fixes, UI improvements and new features. Nothing in NGS is in a state where “we have to live with it for a long time”.

If you don’t like some aspects of the NGS user interface, please head over to this UI ticket report in our bug tracker and see if we’ve already have a ticket for your pet issue. If we do have a ticket for your favorite issue, please vote on it to express your interest in having this ticket fixed.

We’re going to start working on the tickets that receive the most number of votes and work our way down. We’re going to engage our UX designer for more help to clean up the NGS user interface and to address all of these pesky problems that are plaguing our users.

But, please cut our developers some slack. If you don’t have anything constructive to say, vote on the tickets and sit tight. We know there are lots of issues and we’ve already fixed a pile of them, but we’re not going to forget about the other issues. Just please give us constructive feedback and some time.

Thanks!