Author: ruaok

Six Degrees of Black Sabbath

For many years I’ve espoused MusicBrainz should collect enough information that would allow us to track connections between disparate artists through a game of six degrees of separation. And now Paul Lamere from the EchoNest has done exactly this for Music Hack Day San Francisco.

Six degrees of Black Sabbath allows you to enter two artists and it will search the MusicBrainz advanced relationships to find a connection between your two artists. See Paul’s blog post for more details.

Very very cool to see interesting applications like this appear in the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

Thanks Paul!

Possible network outages tomorrow

Digital West (our hosting company) will be performing switch maintenance tomorrow:

Date: Saturday, 5/22/2010, 11:59 PM Pacific Time to 12:30 AM Pacific Time

Digital West will be performing necessary maintenance to our switch farm. This may result in brief losses (10 seconds to 4 minutes) of Internet connectivity between the times listed above, depending on the nature of the service you subscribe to at Digital West.

For once it won’t be our fault that you can’t reach MusicBrainz. 🙂

Summer of Code: Accepted projects

Congratulations to the following students for being accepted to Summer of Code for MusicBrainz:

  1. Jamie McDonald (jdamcd): MusicBrainz Android Mobile Application
  2. Sean Burke (leftmost): Improve collections feature
  3. Jens Lukas (jensl): Development of an iPhone application for MusicBrainz

We’re currently in the community bonding period and work on these projects will start soon. Currently Jens and Jamie are reconciling their respective applications into one coherent application specification so that the application we deliver for Android and iPhone behave in similar manners.

Congratulations Jamie, Jens and Sean!

The BBC contributes some works data!

I’m very pleased to announce that the BBC has extracted a small chunk of its sizable Orpheus classical works database! The Orpheus database contains 114,160 works in total, with 206,179 sub-parts. The first 1000 works are serialized into XML here:

Some notes about this data:

  1. The parties data hasn’t been matched to MusicBrainz artists yet. Nearly all composers have birth/death dates, which should help loads.
  2. Works can only have a single level of sub-parts. So things like opera have the level encoded into the title of the parts.
  3. There is also performance/recording information that could be included, but there might be political issues around that.
  4. More reference data is available, if that is useful.
  5. The party/party name mapping hasn’t been dumped properly. That can be done if it becomes a problem.
  6. The dump format can be adjusted if need be.

The purpose of this data is twofold: First, I asked the BBC to provide us some data that would allow us to do a good job establishing our database of Works. As of right now we have not defined what exactly a Work in NGS is and what it will do. There are entire sets of Advanced Relationship link types linking to Works that are yet to be defined and we need to start working on those links types soon. We also need to define the list of Work types that we’ll allow in NGS.

Second, this data would be awesome to have in MusicBrainz. While we haven’t been granted access to all of this data, this is certainly a possibility moving forward. And the BBC has spent a lot of time over the years grooming this database, so we have the potential for making a great jump forward for MusicBrainz classical knowledge by importing this complete data set. But, this should be mostly a thought exercise for now – we’re not about to import any data since we have a ton of other things to do. But once we’re comfortable with our Works setup, then we can start considering if, how and when we’d integrate this data.

Big thanks to the BBC and especially Nick Humfrey who tracked down this data and obtained permission for its release!

NGS Beta 2: May 24th 2010

After much scheduling and getting our ducks in a row, we’re pleased to announce the final beta release of NGS on May 24th! This is one year after our last release, so this date is a little bitter/sweet for us. I had hoped to get this release out before then, but the team is making sure we’re getting this release right, and there are a ton of difficult things to get right.

And the tentative release date for NGS is going to be in July. No promises on a firm date yet.

Welcome our newest customer: ZeeZee

After a slow 2009, I’m glad to announce that we have a new customer for our live data feed: ZeeZee.de in Germany!

ZeeZee operates an interesting music service: You select music to record and that selected music is then downloaded from Internet Radio stations and organized so that you can download the music onto your own computer.

Welcome to the MusicBrainz ecosystem, ZeeZee!

Summer of Code 2010: We've been accepted!

I’m proud to announce that we’ve been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code program again!

If you’re a student who is interested in participating in Summer of Code and would like to apply to work on a MusicBrainz related project, review our ideas page first. Then review the information we’ll be asking for on our Organization page for GSoc.

On March 29, the student application period starts. If you are thinking of applying, start the process now — getting to know the community and community review take a bit of time to complete, so don’t delay!

Good luck to applying students!