yvanzo – MetaBrainz Blog

MusicBrainz search upgrades, 2025-05-29

After last year’s migration of the Solr back-end powering the search features of musicbrainz.org to a new cluster running major version 9, and last week’s database schema change, here is a pack of search upgrades affecting both musicbrainz.org and the MusicBrainz mirror.

For users, a new search field mediumid is available for the advanced release search, the MBID of artist credits and mediums is added to the output of the search API, and the barcode search field is now ignoring spaces. These improvements are fairly minor compared to the rest of the upgrades which unlock further development of the search components.

For mirror owners, SolrCloud 9 is now available, along with an improved indexer and scripts to load backups from musicbrainz.org and an improved indexer. Also Docker Compose 2 is now required. Actually, those are the changes from last autumn’s announcement. Solr 7 will remain available for one more month starting from now, buying some transition time. A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is available that matches these search component changes. See the v-2025-05-29.0-solr9 release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to Krikooo, JoshDi, mglubb, nelgin, and PeterCodar for their feedback.

MusicBrainz mirror security advisory, 2025-01-29

After the recent disclosure of CVE-2025-24814 which is affecting those of MusicBrainz mirrors that publish the port for the search service, we remind mirror owners to follow upstream security recommendations when publishing ports. See the release notes for details.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-10-21

As mentioned in the banner of MusicBrainz website for a week already, images for events and releases are currently unavailable due to the Internet Archive (IA) recovering from a DDoS attack. See the IA’s Mastodon page for follow-up. Both the Cover Art Archive and the Event Art Archive were available from the Internet Archive which is doing its best to restore services safely, that will take as many days as necessary. Meanwhile, today’s server update temporarily disables editing images, until our access to the Internet Archive is fully restored. It also brings some updates behind the scenes. Last but not least, it also features a few improvements and bugfixes, mainly contributed by volunteers without whom this would not have the same significance!

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to derat, Divyansh Gupta, and Serial-ATA for having contributed to the code. Thanks to Dan and HibiscusKazeneko for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Arainuki, Aris_8585, blit, Echelon666, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-10-21.0.

Major upgrade for mirrors: November 25, 2024

MusicBrainz is announcing a major mirror upgrade for November 25, 2024. The minimum required version of Docker Compose will change from v1.21.1 to v2. Search will be upgraded from Solr 7 to Solr 9. Mirrors will likely require a reinstall from scratch, we will provide instructions by release day.

This upgrade is not going to break replication for existing mirrors, even mirrors that have enabled live search. However, Solr 7 dumps will no longer be available.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-07-22

Here is yet another summer release featuring mainly bugfixes and improvements, not to mention some refactoring behind the scenes.

We – Aerozol, bitmap, reosarevok and yvanzo – are very enthusiastic about the increasing number of volunteer contributions for this release; see the many acknowledgements below:

Thanks to derat for fixing the layout of the sidebar after loading image, and for highlighting the fields changed by the guess case tool.
Thanks to julian45 for adding improving support of e-onkyo links (~5k URLs currently in the database).
Thanks to JadedBlueEyes for having further improved the display release titles when listed.
Thanks to Freso, lazybookwyrm, sanojjonas, tommycrock, and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements.
Thanks to bovirus, brtc, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, weeeeei, and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations.
And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

The git tag is v-2024-07-22.0.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-07-11

Keep enjoying your summer with this refreshing release dessert, mainly fixing bugs and making improvements after the large two-course meal that was the database schema change and the addition of event art.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to chaban, Piotr, Relaxo5, salo.rock, and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ApeKattQuest/MonkeyPython, Aszazin, Early6431, Felipe Silva, Lunae_XD, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, wileyfoxyx, WorldPioneerXXX, yyb987, and yyoung for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-07-11.0.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-06-24

You may notice some exciting changes to event pages today. We’ll be making a proper announcement of the “EAA” in a separate post soon. 🙂

We have several other bug fixes and improvements as part of today’s release, plus a new report about video recordings for editors.

In the back-end, we’re making better use of our PostgreSQL standby, which should help with scalability. Development-wise, we’ve done a lot of JavaScript refactoring and upgrading of dependencies.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to JadedBlueEyes for aligning release titles in release groups. Thanks to Aerozol, atj, chaban, Chiark, Mathias Kunter, RVMWSN, sammyrayy, UltimateRiff, VBZPPlNQyJ, wileyfoxyx, yindesu and zas for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ApeKattQuest, BestSteve, BlueCamille, Felipe Silva, kellnerd, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, wileyfoxyx, yyb987, and Zetas70, for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-06-24.

MusicBrainz search upgraded to Solr 9

Earlier this week the Solr back-end that powers the search functionality of the MusicBrainz website and REST API was migrated to a new cluster running version 9.6.1. This brings a much needed increase in stability and performance, and opens up future possibilities for search feature improvements.

A migration path to SolrCloud 9 will be provided for mirrors as soon as possible. In the meantime we will continue to provide pre-built search indexes compatible with Solr 7. Once a migration path is available the indexes will be provided in the new backup format introduced in Solr 8.9.

MusicBrainz Server hotfix, 2024-04-30

A lack of robustness in MusicBrainz Server’s usage of Postgres indexes, combined with a malicious trend of jamming music databases, ended up with [MBS-13536] blocking the replication for mirrors having legacy indexes and [MBS-13555] blocking the creation of new mirrors. Additionally, a patch for [MBS-7646] showing aliases in more places, currently deployed in beta, needed to be partly deployed on the main servers to ensure cache consistency. Those are the reasons for this hotfix ahead of the upcoming schema change release.

While the issues [MBS-13536] and [MBS-13555] have been affecting mirrors, preventing these from happening again is done through [MBS-13562] only on the side of our main servers, thus no MusicBrainz Docker release is needed.

Thanks to derat for continuously contributing to the MusicBrainz Server code. Thanks to chaban, lotooo, Matthieu42, and nohattila for having reported those bugs. And thanks to all others who keep translating and testing the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-04-30-hotfix.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-04-09

This release includes a rewrite of the artist credit editor, which should make it more reliable and also allows undoing row removals, the bane of the too-quick-for-their-own-good editor! It also includes a lot of other small fixes and improvements.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

In case your mirror is older than Postgres 12 migration in 2020, if some update scripts didn’t work for some reason back in that time, you might have the following error in the file mirror.log or mirror.log.1 since yesterday:

ERROR:  index row requires xxxxx bytes, maximum size is 8191

Then open a PostgreSQL invite, for example as follows:

admin/psql

Finally, run the following SQL instructions:

SET search_path = musicbrainz, public;
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS track_idx_musicbrainz_collate;
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS track_idx_name;
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS track_idx_txt;

See MBS-13536 for more info.

Thanks to HibiscusKazeneko, kellnerd, lotooo, mr_maxis, sammyrayy and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to BestSteve, brtc, Leonie2, salo.rock, Vac31, wileyfoxyx and ypkim for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-04-09.