Author: ruaok

Developer changes

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve had a number of conflicts surrounding the development of the MusicBrainz server source code. Open source developers must work to foster the community of their projects and work towards creating a consensus towards new/improved features. After an increasing number of conflicts with the community Stefan was warned … Continue reading “Developer changes”

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve had a number of conflicts surrounding the development of the MusicBrainz server source code. Open source developers must work to foster the community of their projects and work towards creating a consensus towards new/improved features.

After an increasing number of conflicts with the community Stefan was warned that his actions as a developer were not acceptable. After countless emails and a number of Skype calls I warned Stefan that the next time he participated in an escalation with one of the community members that I would remove his developer privileges.

Today another one of these escalations took place and I removed Stefan’s developer privileges.

As of right now, I will assume all duties of the MusicBrainz server developer. I will fix any remaining bugs, settle remaining conflicts and work to get the next bug update done as soon as possible. Fortunately now that I can devote all my time to MusicBrainz, I will have more time to devote to getting new server features coded.

With a heavy heart,

Evil Overlord

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No release sunday

Too many bugs have rolled into allow us to to a bug fix update this weekend. Given the update fiasco from last time, we’re going to wait until the issues settle and these bugs are addressed. I know a lot of people are anxious to get this bug fix release out. If you are one … Continue reading “No release sunday”

Too many bugs have rolled into allow us to to a bug fix update this weekend. Given the update fiasco from last time, we’re going to wait until the issues settle and these bugs are addressed.

I know a lot of people are anxious to get this bug fix release out. If you are one of those people, make sure you get your bug reports in ASAP. Unloading a wad of bug reports that should’ve been raised weeks ago within 48 hours of a planned release will only hamstring the release process. If you’re one of the people who is anxious about getting bug fixes out, please enter your concerns now and not 2 days before the next attempted release date.

We’ll shoot for next Sunday as a the next update time.

Sorry folks!

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MusicIP open sources a small server extension

I’m pleased to announce that MusicIP has just open sourced a small extension to the MusicBrainz server! MusicIP contracted me to write a set of SQL scripts that would take their mirror of the MB database and create an extra table that stores the first release date for each track. As you may know we … Continue reading “MusicIP open sources a small server extension”

I’m pleased to announce that MusicIP has just open sourced a small extension to the MusicBrainz server!

MusicIP contracted me to write a set of SQL scripts that would take their mirror of the MB database and create an extra table that stores the first release date for each track. As you may know we have this for albums, but we haven’t had (or needed) this for the track level.

If you’d like to check out this extension, you can find it here. Take a look at the README file to see how this should be used.

Please note that this code is checked into the RELEASE_20060712 branch — once we’re finished with dev work on this branch we will merge it back into the trunk.

Big thanks to Wendell Hicken and Matthew Dunn of MusicIP!

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To search aliases or not?

In ticket #1731 we’re currently discussing the merits of having the artist aliases searched by default. Compare these two searches: Search without aliases for “Jennifer” Search with aliases for “Jennifer” The perfect match for Jennifer is half-way down the page of results if aliases are included. Jennifer is all the way at the top (where … Continue reading “To search aliases or not?”

In ticket #1731 we’re currently discussing the merits of having the artist aliases searched by default. Compare these two searches:

  1. Search without aliases for “Jennifer”
  2. Search with aliases for “Jennifer”

The perfect match for Jennifer is half-way down the page of results if aliases are included. Jennifer is all the way at the top (where it should be) when the aliases are not searched.

So, why does this happen?

Take for instance the top hit of the with aliases search: Jennifer Paige. She has an alias for “Jennifer Page“, so when Lucene ranks the search results, the word Jennifer appears twice, which is a better match than when the word appears only once. This disturbed our users and it plain feels wrong to me.

Then I tried to play with Lucene’s term boosting functions. Take this query:

aritst:jennifer^10 sortname:jennifer^10 alias:jennifer^0.0000001

In English, it says to search for Jennifer in artist names and sortnames and to make these hits 10 times more “important” than normal hits. It also says to search aliases and make hits from this vastly less important than normal hits. The result, Jennifer is at the top as we want. But, what happens when we search for Bjork (not Björk)?

We get this mess where Björk is the last search hit with a score of 0. (this is not the best example since the next version of search will automatically find Björk when searching for Bjork, but it still illustrates the problem)

As you can see, tweaking the searches to make things better one way, will make other searches worse. Do you think it its more important to search aliases by default or to have better search results by default?

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Call for bug-fix testing

We’ve fixed a number of bugs (321 of them as of right now!) and we should be ready to go for another bug-fix update of the main server this weekend. To avoid the mess we had last time, please take some time in the next few days to check the test server to see how … Continue reading “Call for bug-fix testing”

We’ve fixed a number of bugs (321 of them as of right now!) and we should be ready to go for another bug-fix update of the main server this weekend. To avoid the mess we had last time, please take some time in the next few days to check the test server to see how things are looking. Please test now and not after the release!

I would also like to remind people that if you find a bug to report it via our bug tracker. Please do not mail bug reports or mention them in IRC in hopes of having them fixed. Also, if you don’t report a bug before the release, please don’t scream your head off if the issue hits the main servers when we do the release.

Go test on the staging server and report bugs or look at the list of closed bugs.

Thanks to Stefan for fixing all these bugs!

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libtunepimp releases

Lukas just released two new bug fix versions of the tunepimp library. The following changes were made:

libtunepimp 0.5.1:

  • Fixed broken symlink problem in plugins/tta/Makefile.am
  • Don’t write files/directories with leading dots. (#1427)
  • Added SetNotifyCallback to the Python bindings.

libtunepimp 0.4.3:

  • Fixed check for TagLib 1.4 in configure.in + few other build system fixes.
  • Fixed buffer overflow in lookuptools.cpp (patch by urs_fleisch at yahoo dot de).
  • Fixed memleaks in the WMA plugin.

Download either of these releases from the libtunepimp download page. Thanks Lukas!

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Magic MP3 Tagger increases its sponsorship of MusicBrainz

Matthias, the creator of the Magic MP3 Tagger has offered to increase his sponsorship of MusicBrainz! We just agreed to have him sponsor us to the tune of 250 Euros a month or 10% of his registrations, whichever is greater. In exchange for the guaranteed 250 Euros a month, we added more prominent links to … Continue reading “Magic MP3 Tagger increases its sponsorship of MusicBrainz”

Matthias, the creator of the Magic MP3 Tagger has offered to increase his sponsorship of MusicBrainz! We just agreed to have him sponsor us to the tune of 250 Euros a month or 10% of his registrations, whichever is greater. In exchange for the guaranteed 250 Euros a month, we added more prominent links to his tagger.

This is a win-win situation for both projects and I am really glad to have one more source of income to cover our increasing costs of hosting and maintaining this service.

Thanks Matthias!

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New server image for 20060712 release available

Rod Begbie has created a new VMWare player image based on the 20060712 release of the MusicBrainz server. The VMware Player and Rod’s image allows you to download the free VMWare player and then run a musicbrainz server on your windows or Linux machine, without having to go through the pain of doing a full … Continue reading “New server image for 20060712 release available”

Rod Begbie has created a new VMWare player image based on the 20060712 release of the MusicBrainz server. The VMware Player and Rod’s image allows you to download the free VMWare player and then run a musicbrainz server on your windows or Linux machine, without having to go through the pain of doing a full install of the MusicBrainz server.

Thanks Rod!

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Usability fixes live on server

A number of you had reported various usability issues with the new server update — we just updated the server with some more fixes. For the run-down of what we changed, please see the list of recently closed bugs. Thanks to all those who reported bugs and helped us sort out these issues! Technorati Tags: … Continue reading “Usability fixes live on server”

A number of you had reported various usability issues with the new server update — we just updated the server with some more fixes. For the run-down of what we changed, please see the list of recently closed bugs. Thanks to all those who reported bugs and helped us sort out these issues!

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TRM, Picard and Picard on OS X

As the TRM server is getting close to another pruning round it flaked out for a few hours today — its back up and running now. I had hoped that we would’ve come along further in moving Classic Tagger users over to Picard, but instability problems of the wxWindows toolkit continue to plague Picard users. … Continue reading “TRM, Picard and Picard on OS X”

As the TRM server is getting close to another pruning round it flaked out for a few hours today — its back up and running now.

I had hoped that we would’ve come along further in moving Classic Tagger users over to Picard, but instability problems of the wxWindows toolkit continue to plague Picard users. For some users it works great, for others it crashes every 30 seconds, and yet its stable for Lukas who is working on Picard the most. This makes using Picard very difficult and even harder to convince our users who love the track based Classic Tagger to move to Picard.

Given this, we plan to do the following:

  1. Extend the end-of-life deadline for TRM until the end of 2006.
  2. Migrate Picard away from wxWindows and start using the Python bindings for the QT toolkit.
  3. Revamp the user interface in Picard to support both track based tagging and album based tagging.
  4. Make the Picard user interface easier to use for new users and offer methods other than drag and drop to tag files.

We hope to complete all of this before the end of the year. But, should we not make that deadline, we’ll extend it again until most everyone feels that Picard has replaced the Classic Tagger. The key metric for turning off the TRM server is to watch the traffic to the TRM server slow to a near crawl so that when we do turn it off that only stragglers will be affected.

Tobias Rundström has volunteered to work on a UI mock-up of the new Picard UI that will be based on our Picard user interface brainstorming. Once he has done that we’ll post screenshots or maybe even an application for people to look at and give us feedback on.

Finally, the switch to QT will also have positive benefits for Picard on Mac OS X. The QT toolkit is considerably more stable on the Mac than wxWindows and that will enable us to finally roll out a Mac OS X version of the tagger. I understand that there is frustration about the lack of a tagger on OS X — Geof Morris has now even offered up a bounty for someone to develop a new UI for Picard for the Mac. But, there isn’t anything we can do for a few months — please sit tight. We’re aware of the situation and are as unhappy about it as you are!

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