Author: ruaok

The UK Mirror is back up — thanks to Russ at last.fm for switching out the power supply on the server!

It appears that the world is slowly discovering MusicBrainz. Last month we pushed nearly 2M pages per day and smoke is pouring out of our poor search server. Fortunately we have some money in the bank so, the board of directors approved the purchase a new RAM-heavy server for use as our new search server. Then yesterday, Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress fame donated $5000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation!! That nicely covers the costs of our new search server (~$3000) and then some.

I’m also working on improving the search server so that it runs more efficiently and that we get fewer timeout errors. Things improved yesterday when I redirected all web-based searches to our new server. I hope to cut over the rest of the search traffic (web service traffic) to a better suited server later this afternoon.

In other words — I’m working hard to make sure the site stays responsive, even under the growing loads. Things should improve much more once we can deploy the new server mid-next week.

Stay tuned for more details on the changes on the search server!

Our mirror server in the UK suffered a power supply failure yesterday. The mirror will be down for at least a week as the replacement power supply finds it way to the UK. We’ll post an update once the mirror is back online.

Sorry for the hassle!

Now that the holidays are over its time to get back to work and kick MusicBrainz work back into high gear!

Its been my goal for many moons to make MetaBrainz self sufficient in order to not have to hold fundraisers in order to make ends meet. I’ve playing with these thoughts since 2002 when it looked like a business model could emerge with which to build a non-profit. And finally near the end of 2007 we reached this exciting milestone. Taking on new customers like Last.fm and the BBC made all the difference — we now have slightly more money coming in than we’re spending. We’re far from rich, but we’ve never been on more solid footing than this.

This gives me lots of hope for 2008! My plans now include trying to raise even more money so we can hire a full time server developer in order to make more progress on fixing bugs, writing new features and finally breaking ground on NGS. There is lots to do to keep things moving, but reaching sustainability is a strong vote of confidence from the universe that MusicBrainz and MetaBrainz may be up to something that could really work.

And that makes me smile. Onward!

P.S. Year end finances are more work to wrap up than usual. So, it will take longer than normal for me to post the finances for December and all of 2007.

Last.fm is now hosting the UK MusicBrainz mirror!

Big thanks to Russ and the whole Last.fm team for supporting MusicBrainz!

Sergey and Wendell at MusicIP have been working on two new reports:

1. Tracks attached to the wrong artist: This list contains tracks with similar names, which have been connected to artists which may be ambiguous – often this indicates an error in either the track assocation, or the artists themselves. To resolve the conflict, tracks assigned to the incorrect artists should be moved to correct artists, or the artists should be merged if they represent the same musical source.
2. PUIDs attached to the wrong artist: This list contains tracks which have the same PUID, but have been connected to conflicting artists. To resolve the conflict, PUIDs assigned incorrectly should be removed, tracks assigned to the incorrect artists should be moved to correct artists, or the artists should be merged if they represent the same musical source.

Thanks to Sergey and Wendell for creating these reports!

Just a quick update on the contract with Last.fm: Last.fm has signed the contract with MusicBrainz and will now be able to integrate MusicBrainz data into their service once again.

Three cheers!

Thank you much to Spencer at Last.fm for pushing this through!