MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
Navap undertook a re-write of our privacy policy page to make the page more consistent and better organized. However, the actual policy did not change — just the wording/formatting of the page has changed.
Please take a look at the diff of the changes and the new page.
(This post is mostly only for full disclosure — seeing Facebook being shredded for its new policy is making me overly cautious right now.)
The fabulous Music Hack Day is happening in Boston on November 21-22. Sadly, I will be in London/Hamburg that weekend and can’t make it to Boston. The organizers have requested that we have someone represent MusicBrainz at the hack day. Are there any MusicBrainzers who live in/near Boston who would like to go to the hack day and represent MusicBrainz?
Knowledge of the project, our web interface, MBIDs and our web service would be really useful to have. Please post a comment if you’re interested. And even if you’re not interested in representing MB, it looks to be a great event that you should go to in any case!
UPDATE: Alastair Porter has volunteered! Thanks Alastair!
I’m about to finish writing the web service (version 1 & 2) for NGS, based on the work that Lukas started a few months ago. The NGS web service currently does not have a compete means of tweaking how much XML is returned for a given resource. Lukas wondered if we should keep our existing approach or start using a new approach that Last.fm (and others) use.
Compare our current approach:
/ws/1/release-group/052c7adb-5e2d-3cf3-b303-6c2a7d3e5b1c/?type=xml&inc=releases (docs)
to the Last.fm approach:
/2.0/?method=album.getinfo&artist=Cher&album=Believe (docs)
Should we keep our current resource focused URL structure or move to a method centric approach in our v2?
If you’re a fan of the old skool structure, please leave a comment and tell us what could be improved. What do you like about the web service? What do you hate?
For some background — as of the NGS release we will be making a lot of changes:
[ MusicBrainz readers: Please ignore this post — its only so that others can find the solution to a problem I just solved ]
If you are running the Perl module Text::Unaccent (version 1.07) on a 64 bit system, you’ll find that it fails its test cases. This is due to a mismatched type in the Perl module. Apply this patch to your Text::Unaccent code, recompile and the tests will pass!
When our first beta testing date rolled around we were not quite ready for testing and had hoped that in two weeks we could catch up and be ready. Sadly, that was not the case. We’ve made some changes in our team and are redoubling our efforts to get a working release editor finished as soon as possible.
Since we’ve made some changes our pace going forward is not clear yet, which makes setting a new schedule very hard. We’re now ready to start using our bug tracker to keep track of remaining tasks and bugs as they appear. To see how we are progressing on finishing NGS, take a look at the MusicBrainz NGS (Beta 1) milestone.
I hope to have a more firm schedule soon. Stay tuned.
We’re going to be changing how the traffic routes through our servers on Sunday September 13th near mid-day PDT, late evening UK time. In theory you should not notice any traffic interruptions, but theory doesn’t always match up with practice.
Before we start the maintenance, we’re going to announce the switch over to the new route in our IRC channel #musicbrainz on irc.freenode.net .
With a little luck no one will notice our tinkering.
Update by djce: The change is now complete and seems to be working just fine. Thank you for your patience.
Paul Taylor and Aurelién Mino have completed the re-write of our search server — please help us test this new code-base. Here is Paul’s write up:
This update rewrites the existing Search Indexer and Searcher with a
pure Java release whilst maintaining full compatibility with the
existing Musicbrainz Server, prototype by luks, completion by ijabz and
murdos. The aims were
1. Better performance
Search performance should be greatly improved for indexing and
especially search.
The intermediate python layer has been removed.
The webserver layer has been removed
When searching have a single Java VM , that can now be properly
configured/optimized
The latest Lucene and Java libraries are used
2. Better Search Results
The following bugs have already been fixed
Perhaps most importantly stop words are no longer and issue so when do a
search for something that exists in the database you should always get a
match, i.e artist:”the the” or track:”is this it?”
and range queries work properly
i.e
and theres a host of other bugs and enhancements that can now be
resolved quite easily
3. Maintainability
The code has been simplified, i.e no hand coding of xml or html or
having to deal with escape characters.
Now has a full set of unit tests, can also easily generate metrics such
as code coverage reports.
No dependency on Linux or Python, making it easier for new developers
to contribute, removing the burden from ruaok.
Testing Stage
Please try it out on http://musicbrainz.homeip.net both as a websearch
and as an XML Service to find any omissions in functionality and any
situations where the search results aren’t good as before.
Paul / ijabz
I’m sad to say that we’re a little behind on getting our core features finished for NGS. Given that, we’re pushing back the schedule to start NGS testing on September 15th. We need more time to finish working on the complex release editor and round out a number of other features.
Stay tuned for more details!
Mark your calendars: The next MusicBrainz summit will happen on 28 November, 2009 in Nürnberg, Germany! More details will come in the following weeks…
As we’re working hard on the next generation schema, (NGS) we’re now deep in the middle of working on the release editor. We’re working hard to embrace modern UI design concepts and we’re shooting for a clean and uncluttered look. Part of this effort will require the creation of a number of icons that fit in our new site design.
Does anyone know of an icon designer who would be willing to help us design a handful of icons? This is an important aspect of our next release, so if we need to pay for professional icon design, so be it. We would of course love to find a qualified volunteer or perhaps a designer who would be willing to give us a discount.
If you know someone, please leave a comment.