Author: ruaok

We’re getting a number of reports from Rhythmbox, Sound Juicer and other applications that their CD lookup is no longer working. We currently have no open bugs that tell us what is wrong, so we can’t fix anything.

We believe that we are outputting correct XML for CD lookups, thus there isn’t anything for us to fix. We are, however, outputting more matches for CDs, since multiple releases for a single CD can be returned. But, this is nothing new — clients should’ve supported this even before NGS.

We need the authors of programs that are broken to tell us what broke their stuff. Then we can determine if we need to fix something, the authors need to fix something or if we can come up with some sort of compromise. We’ve been talking about NGS for two years and these application authors never bothered to test their applications with our new stuff.

End users who are upset at CD Lookups failing: Please go complain to your software authors to resolve these issues or file bug reports with us if the trouble is in MusicBrainz.

NOTE: These applications are not failing because of User-Agent blocking — we haven’t actually started doing that.

As promised, here are some release notes for today’s monumental NGS release.

We’ll post more information on the release, including how to setup slave servers, tomorrow after we’ve had some more sleep.

We’ve made it! NGS is live! Thanks to everyone who worked on this massive project!

Release notes and instructions for updating mirror servers will be coming soon.

We’ve fixed enough bugs, done enough testing and we’re finally happy that we can switch over to NGS:

We’re going live at 18:30 BST! (17:30UTC, 19:30 CEST, 10:30PDT)

As soon as we let people lose on the final test server with live data, people started finding lots more bugs. Which means that the final switchover will be delayed for a while longer.

But, the NGS data is live and replication packets for the NGS data are flowing. I’ll post instructions on how to tap into this feed later today.

UPDATE: Please be careful with your edits — we plan to keep this data!. Unless some data corruption bug is discovered, we’re going to do our best to keep this data. Please keep this in mind as you edit on this server.

We’re currently doing the last round of sanity checking to make sure we’ve not screwed anything up. Come help us test!

NOTE: This is our release candidate data set — please be careful what you edit. We’re strongly hoping to release with this data set!

If all goes well, expect us to go live at 9am BST on Tuesday 17 May!

We’re currently at 7 million edits migrated. We still have a lot of things to take care of, but we’re hoping to let people start playing with the migrated data at about 2:00am BST. We hope to go live at 9:00am BST.

See our updated schedule and maybe follow our updates on twitter.

We’re excited and we hope that you are too!

We had to fix some last minute migration issues and are running a test migration right now. If everything turns out well, we’ll be 8 hours behind schedule.

And after being more than a year late, what is 8 hours (or so…)?

The count of open edits has been dropping nicely and we’ve decided to push the no-edit date back to May 12. We could’ve done the 13th, but Friday the 13th didn’t seem like a good idea for this. 🙂

For more information on this, please read our preparing for NGS guide.

Once we move to NGS on May 16th, we’re going to require each application that makes requests to our web service to have a proper User-Agent header string. The User-Agent string needs to identify the application and the version of the application that is making the request; having a generic User-Agent string like “Java/1.6.0_24” or “PHP/5.3.4” does not allow us to properly identify the application making the requests.

IMPORTANT: 6 Months after we release NGS (Nov 16th) we’re going to start blocking common generic User-Agents strings, so please make sure that you send us a proper User-Agent header as part of your request.