MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
I’d like to remind everyone that the next server release is scheduled for this Sunday November 23. We’re still working on scheduling for the release, but it will happen on Sunday. Expect the MusicBrainz to be unavailable for at least 1 hour.
Also, please be aware that with this release the TRM server will be decommissioned — the Classic Tagger will then be officially deprecated, but it should continue to work — even without TRM support.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Wood, the BBC has officially hired Jason Emmett to work full time on the MusicBrainz server!
Jason, who will be working in the BBC offices in London will be working with Oliver to finish the port to Template Toolkit branch. After that both of them will tackle the Release Groups that we’ve deemed to be a worthy intermediary step. A few weeks ago the MusicBrainz server had only table scraps of love, moving it along quite slowly. Today we have nearly 1.5 full time people working on the server source code. This gives me tons of hope that we can shoot for doing 3-4 releases in 2009.
Thank you so much for all of your efforts, Matthew Wood. Thank you for all of your support BBC! Welcome on board Jason!
Murdos, Niklas, Luks, Dave Evans and I have all been working on the upcoming server release and we would like to invite you to help us test this massive release. Most of the features for this release have been debugged, but a few bugs are still outstanding.
The test server has been updated with all of the latest features and is ready for you to log in with your normal user account with the password ‘mb’. The list of features in this release is described in this blog post and this post.
Submit new bug reports to our bug tracker. Also see, the milestone for this release to see which bugs have been fixed and which bugs are still open. Please check the open bug list before reporting a new bug.
Thanks to everyone who helped take part in the development for this release!
The final feature to be included in the upcoming release are CD Stubs. From the documentation page:
Many times people would like to contribute CD data to MusicBrainz, but would prefer to not learn to be part of MusicBrainz. These people would rather just toss some data into a pile and go on with their lives to listen to their music or rip their CDs. CD Stubs enable users to do just that.
With this release people who come to look up a CD, but MusicBrainz does not know about that CD, will be given a choice to either enter the CD as a CD Stub or to join MusicBrainz and to enter the CD into MusicBrainz proper. (This is the red pill/blue pill decision point). Note that users who are logged in to MusicBrainz when looking up a CD will not be given the option to enter a CD Stub.
To submit a CD Stub to the test server, use any MusicBrainz enabled CD lookup application to submit a CD to MusicBrainz. You must not be logged into the test server, otherwise you will never be given the option to submit a CD Stub. Then follow the instructions for how to submit a CD Stub.
To retrieve the CD Stub you must use the XML Webservice. CD Stubs are not available via the old RDF web service. Use this URL to fetch data for CDs that will also return CD Stubs if no CDs are available in the main DB:
http://[test.]musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release?type=xml&discid=[discid]&toc=[toc]
This URL is also available via libdiscid and its example program discid.
Our Subversion server (SVN) and bug tracker will be down for about 1 hour starting 3pm PDT/2200 UK/2300 EU. We’re migrating SVN to a new server and upgrading to Subversion 1.5 for improved features.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
UPDATE: The move is complete and we’re now running Subversion 1.5. Thanks for your hard work Dave!
Murdos has been busy merging the various development branches into trunk — thanks for your work. I’ve updated the test server with the latest codebase. Come check out the latest new features:
(to log in use your normal log in name and password ‘mb‘)
We’ve got more bug fixes coming in the next couple of weeks. Also, the next server release has been scheduled for 2008-11-23. As usual, please report bugs to our bug tracker.
UPDATE: I had to clear everyone’s collections because of a bug. That’s fixed now — please start over again.
UPDATE2: Due to complaints by stodgy brits, Music Newz is now called Music News. 🙂
Our test server is back online and ready for you to come test Niklas’ new Collection feature!
If you’re interested in taking a look, head to our test server.
Log in with your usual account name and the password ‘mb‘
Then head to the Collection menu and give the new feature a spin!
We’re now tracking issues in our bug tracker. Set ticket component to MusicBrainz Server, milestone to Server 2008-11-XX and assign to: Niklas.
Documentation for the new feature is here — its still very basic, please help out with documentation or add your documentation comments to the wiki page. There is also documentation for the web service.
Sorry for the long wait!
UPDATE 1: There is a batch add script — stay tuned for details on this.
UPDATE 2: If you have problems logging in, clear all of your cookies for all musicbrainz.org domains.
A number of people have expressed interest in running mb_server on Apache 2, rather than Apache 1 as mb_server currently requires. Our current roadmap calls for the next mb_server release to stay on Apache 1 and the following Template Toolkit branch to move to Apache2. There will be a lot of changes to the codebase going to TT, so it makes sense to make the switch to Apache 2 at that time since we have to test everything anyway.
LAADHARI Saber has created a “quick and dirty” port of mb_server to apache2. The patch uses the Apache2 compat module and still has some problems with Auth.pm in the Web Service.
Given our roadmap, we’re not going to accept this patch into our codebase, but I wanted to offer up this patch to anyone who wanted to use it.
Thanks LAADHARI Saber!
If you’re not interested in following server development as it pertains to our SVN repository, then skip this post.
Today, Lukáš, Oliver (acid2) and I had a bit of a chat, discussing how to proceed with branches in our SVN repository. The chat ambles along for a while, so I’ll recap our plans here:
This gives us the flexibility for each one of us to work into their direction and it doesn’t commit us to the TT branch. While all things point to TT being the basis for our next release, its good to keep our options open for now. I’ll post a follow up post once these branches have been properly put in place.
Thanks Lukáš and Oliver!
I’ve been working on the new Dashboard feature that shows edit stats, hot edits, recently changed data and lots more stuff. Preview the Dashboard and let me know what you think! What other pieces of data should we add to this?
And, I’ve skipped doing proper CSS for this page — I suck as CSS and I’m hoping that someone will volunteer to do a better job of formatting the page and making it look pretty. If you have CSS skills, please let me know if you’d like to help!
Next, is the music newz page (formerly trivia) that shows upcoming/recent releases and recently deceased artists. I’m really struggling with the name for this page. Trivia is a terrible name and so is muisc newz. What should we call this page?
The CSS caveat applies to this page as well — but once the Dashboard gets an overhaul I can apply the same CSS to the data display page.
UPDATE: I’ve removed references to the poorly named suggestions for a reader in UAE.