yvanzo – MetaBrainz Blog

Search upgrades: Nov 30, 2026

MusicBrainz is announcing a set of upgrades for its search service on November 30, 2026. The main change will be upgrading Solr from version 9 to 10. Fixes and improvements will be released alongside this. Some of these changes may break some specific search requests. Finally, a new feature will be released making it possible to use the search service to search for (musical) genres. See below for more information.

Breaking changes

The following tickets may break search requests in some way.

SEARCH-444: Improper ‘relation-list’ in ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be a breaking change for accessing related entities in area and URL search results.
SEARCH-642: Drop ‘id’ fields for cdstub and tag. This will technically be a breaking change, but it was broken by design as the values for these search fields are not documented and have never been intended for public use anyway.
SEARCH-666: Use quality names rather than numeric IDs. This will be a breaking change for release searches that use quality search field.
SEARCH-752: Relationships have an extra ‘target’ property in JSON output. Fixing it by removing the redundant property target will be a breaking change if you are accessing it in search results. The “proper” way to do this is to use the property target-type and access the property id under the property named after this target type.
SEARCH-764: Upgrade to Solr 10. This will be a breaking change for mirror owners only, not for search requests. More specifically, it is advised to change the Solr configuration and to re-index the whole MusicBrainz database.

Soft changes

The following tickets will improve search with breaking any requests:

SEARCH-452: Index all URL relationships. So far, only URL relationships to Artist and Release were indexed. URL relationships to all other entity types will be indexed too.
SEARCH-646: Return exact match first for tag search. It should improve tag search results using indexed Solr search compared to direct Postgres search.
SEARCH-677: Include disambiguation of event’s place and work’s recording. Places related to searched events and recordings related to searched works will now be outputted with disambiguation comment, in the same way other related entities are outputted in search results.
SEARCH-680: Index genre annotations. It will add genre annotations to the results of annotation search which is already supported for all other annotation-able entity types.
SEARCH-681: Support indexed search of genres. It will add “Genre” as a target type for search, just like most other searchable entity types.
SEARCH-751: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘event’ and ‘work’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.
SEARCH-753: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.

Miscellaneous

A MusicBrainz Server release is also expected to go with some of these changes.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.

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.