MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
I was curious how our PayPal donations stacked up over time, so I downloaded our history and stuffed it into Excel and had it draw a pretty graph: Please note that this does not include donations received outside of PayPal (most notably $1200 from Paul Sharpe). Also, the December 2004 figures only include donations received … Continue reading “Donation history”
I was curious how our PayPal donations stacked up over time, so I downloaded our history and stuffed it into Excel and had it draw a pretty graph:
Please note that this does not include donations received outside of PayPal (most notably $1200 from Paul Sharpe). Also, the December 2004 figures only include donations received before December 19, when we switched over to accepting donations via the new MetaBrainz PayPal account.
In other news, we just received our official tax-exempt notification from the IRS — this can take months or even years. With the skilled help from our lawyers we were able to do it in just over 5 weeks of time — amazing. Now that we’re completely in business, we will make an announcement to … Continue reading “Tax-exempt recognition from the IRS”
In other news, we just received our official tax-exempt notification from the IRS — this can take months or even years. With the skilled help from our lawyers we were able to do it in just over 5 weeks of time — amazing.
Now that we’re completely in business, we will make an announcement to this effect sometime in January — stay tuned!
If you’ve been watching MusicBrainz from the sidelines waiting for the fabled Advanced Relationships (AR) feature, wait no more! We have begun the first phase of testing for AR, on our staging server. Before you ask questions or start giving us feedback, please read the AR announcement for more details on this new feature.
If you’ve been watching MusicBrainz from the sidelines waiting for the fabled Advanced Relationships (AR) feature, wait no more! We have begun the first phase of testing for AR, on our staging server.
Before you ask questions or start giving us feedback, please read the AR announcement for more details on this new feature.
Kim Plowright from the BBC was kind enough to invite me to speak to the BBC about online communities and MusicBrainz. The presentation went well and the question and answer session allowed us (Dave Evans, RJ@AudioScrobbler, Russ@AudioScrobbler and myself were in attendance) meet some of the BBC folks. Dan Hill from the BBC even asked … Continue reading “BBC Thinking Lunch presentation”
Kim Plowright from the BBC was kind enough to invite me to speak to the BBC about online communities and MusicBrainz. The presentation went well and the question and answer session allowed us (Dave Evans, RJ@AudioScrobbler, Russ@AudioScrobbler and myself were in attendance) meet some of the BBC folks. Dan Hill from the BBC even asked me how the Advance Relationship work was going — I was expecting all kinds of questions, but I was surprised by that one.
Here are the presentation slides I used.
Here is one picture I took from Pub Night: Going from left to right: rjmunro, michael@last.fm, zerogravitas, rj@audioscrobbler, russ@last.fm, kass@bbc, djve, Paul Sharpe, gavinclarke, cikkolata, somniloquy
Here is one picture I took from Pub Night:
Going from left to right: rjmunro, michael@last.fm, zerogravitas, rj@audioscrobbler, russ@last.fm, kass@bbc, djve, Paul Sharpe, gavinclarke, cikkolata, somniloquy
I know, I know, I know. Captchas discriminate against vision impaired people. Regardless, I have installed comment captchas (little images that contain a number you need to type in) as a comment spam blocking solution. Its worked well on my other blog, and I hope it will work well here. I’ve not gone back to … Continue reading “Comment spam, take II”
I know, I know, I know. Captchas discriminate against vision impaired people.
Regardless, I have installed comment captchas (little images that contain a number you need to type in) as a comment spam blocking solution. Its worked well on my other blog, and I hope it will work well here. I’ve not gone back to all the entries to make sure that all comments are turned on, but they should be for all new posts.
Let’s hope this works.
I had a really great time in Europe (Spain and Britain) in the last couple of weeks. Now I’ve returned to the states, cleaned up my travel gear and I’m trying to convince my body to get over the jet-lag and prepare for getting back to work tomorrow. The MusicBrainz Pub Night was a success, … Continue reading “Vacation, pub night and getting back to work”
I had a really great time in Europe (Spain and Britain) in the last couple of weeks. Now I’ve returned to the states, cleaned up my travel gear and I’m trying to convince my body to get over the jet-lag and prepare for getting back to work tomorrow.
The MusicBrainz Pub Night was a success, if I say so myself. We ended up settling on the third pub in the list: Old Thameside. At its peak we had 14 people present, which is a record for getting Brainzerz together in one room. I really enjoyed meeting people face-to-face, espousing the virtues of MusicBrainz and getting people fired up about contributing.
We had a great number of conversations throughout the evening, but we mainly avoided plotting grand new schemes that we wouldn’t have time to implement. We did talk quite a bit about the new non-profit, AdvancedRelationships and our perennial problem of reducing the number of open moderations. We all had a good laugh at the last one — no matter what we do, it seems that open moderations tends to hover around 4000-5000 open moderations.
I really hope that in the coming year we can tackle a number of the things are we’re hoping to work on, so that we can have another full fledged summit towards the end of next year.
Thanks to everyone who showed up to the pub night — it was a really fun evening!
The IRS has just acknowledged our non-profit tax exempt application that I filed on October 29: And with this, I should finally be able to turn on the Amazon associate ids for the site, so we can start earning a little bit more money. And there is also a Cafe Press t-shirt we can start … Continue reading “Non-profit filing acknowledged!”
The IRS has just acknowledged our non-profit tax exempt application that I filed on October 29:
And with this, I should finally be able to turn on the Amazon associate ids for the site, so we can start earning a little bit more money. And there is also a Cafe Press t-shirt we can start selling. Stay tuned!
I previously mentioned that Lucene rocks — well, that is not giving it enough credit. I’m working on the guts to a Lucene enabled Picard tagger, and in doing so I have created a simple script that chewed through a given set of mp3 files and attempts to match them up with MusicBrainz. My friend … Continue reading “Lucene based tagging update”
I previously mentioned that Lucene rocks — well, that is not giving it enough credit. I’m working on the guts to a Lucene enabled Picard tagger, and in doing so I have created a simple script that chewed through a given set of mp3 files and attempts to match them up with MusicBrainz.
My friend Vee once gave me a CD full of hip-hop music to give to my GF. I took one look at it and stared in shock! What a mess — not many id3 tags, mostly no album names at all. Lots of friends vs friendz problems — much slang used in inconsistent ways. Ick!
I ran this through the old tagger a while back and it matched roughly 30% of the tracks. I’ve been using this set of files to tune the new tagging engine and once things got cached into memory, it chewed through over 100 files in under 7 seconds:
60% matched: 64 files matched, 41 files with suggestions, 1 files not matched.
60% !! Check the results for yourself!
And of the 41 files that have suggestions at least 80% of them have the correct match in the top 3 closest matches. I’m floored — it works so well, and there are a number of improvements still left to make. The downside? You need the 700Mb lucene index on your hard drive. That’s going to be more than 250Mb to download. 🙁 I’ll have to work out the right combination of BitTorrent, caching, and P2P solutions to tackle that minor issue.
But this is really stunning!
In the last two weeks I managed to combine working on MusicBrainz, creating a new open source project and earning money to pay the bills! This is quite rare these days, so I am pleased all around. As some of you may know, I have been doing contract work for CD Baby. When Derek, the … Continue reading “Lucene web service”
In the last two weeks I managed to combine working on MusicBrainz, creating a new open source project and earning money to pay the bills! This is quite rare these days, so I am pleased all around.
As some of you may know, I have been doing contract work for CD Baby. When Derek, the owner and lead geek at CD Baby, asked me what MusicBrainz does for searching, I launched into a long cheerleading rant about Lucene. I managed to convince Derek that Lucene is the way to go, and to convince him to sponsor the open source development of the new Lucene Web Service. Luckily Derek agreed that as long as the project was going to be available under the BSD license that he would agree to open source the work.
Triple cheers for Derek and CD Baby please!
So, the web service is now done and I’ve applied for a new project on SourceForge — once that is approved, I will release the source code for everyone to check out. I’ll post another message here when that is complete.
If you’d like to check out the working web service, try this link.