Category: Community

Concert listings on MusicBrainz?

During the last summit we spoke about listing concerts on MusicBrainz artist pages. So far we’ve had three concert listing providers approach us about listing concerts on our artist pages.

I generally hate the idea of advertising and I find the idea of advertising on MusicBrainz as very distasteful. But, being alerted to a concert in your area while browsing MusicBrainz seems like a very valuable addition to our site, especially if people are willing to provide the data for us for free!

So, I have two questions for the general MusicBrainz community:

  1. How do you feel about concert listings on MusicBrainz?
  2. Should we make the concert data providers pay for us showing their concert information? Since three companies have already approached us, it seems that we have leeway to ask for payment for this service. (This then would allow us to pay for some of the programmers who slave over making MB better for everyone).

Regardless of payment or not, we would rotate providers while showing listings to give every provider a fair number of impressions for their concert listings.

Please post your comments below!

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz integration!

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz are two community-powered sites about music which share some of the same passionate users. LyricWiki contains song lyrics and MusicBrainz contains metadata (detailed info) about music.

As of today, the two projects are going to be able to work together better than ever. Now that LyricWiki has obtained licensing, MusicBrainz can now link to song lyrics without worrying about legal issues. LyricWiki has given explicit permission to MusicBrainz to do so and MusicBrainz has added LyricWiki links (as an AR type) to their standard.

Linking from LyricWiki to MusicBrainzLyricWiki to MusicBrainz

To link to an artist, track, or release on MusicBrainz, put “musicbrainz= [UUID]” into the footer (ArtistFooter, AlbumFooter, or SongFooter) template. For [UUID], put in the MusicBrainzIdentifier. This has been available for quite a while, but hopefully there will be many more links now that we’re working more closely.

Linking from MusicBrainz to LyricWikiMusicBrainz to LyricWiki

To link a release or a track to LyricWiki, copy the LyricWiki album or track URL and then navigate to the proper release or track page in MusicBrainz. Be sure to be logged in and then click on “Relate to URL” link. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the LyricWiki URL to MusicBrainz.

This is an exciting opportunity for the two projects to be more closely linked together. We’re looking forward to it!

– Sean Colombo & Robert Kaye

mb_server is now hosted on Git

Today we are officially marking the transition of mb_server (that’s the code name for the MusicBrainz Server – the website) from Subversion to Git. This is now hosted at git.musicbrainz.org, and the “musicbrainz-server/core.git” repository contains the stable and unstable development branches (named master and next, respectively).

If you are just interested in setting up MusicBrainz locally, and not interested in development, the same instructions apply as before – use the latest RELEASE branch from Subversion. The git changes should only be of interest to those who were running the “trunk” branch from Subversion, and wish to test or contribute to the upcoming NGS server.

For more information about Git & MusicBrainz, see the Git wiki page

Privacy policy page re-written for clarity, policy remains unchanged

Navap undertook a re-write of our privacy policy page to make the page more consistent and better organized. However, the actual policy did not change — just the wording/formatting of the page has changed.

Please take a look at the diff of the changes and the new page.

(This post is mostly only for full disclosure — seeing Facebook being shredded for its new policy is making me overly cautious right now.)

MusicBrainz Summit 10 Wrapup

We’ve just finished our 10th MusicBrainz Summit, this time held in Nürnberg, Germany. It was a great success, with a number of participants and a lot of discussion! This time, we’ve managed to note all the discussions. So, if you missed the summit and want to catch up on what we talked about, head over to our wiki page with the summit notes, which contains a summary of just about everything we mentioned.

Thanks to everyone who came, and bring on the next summit!

Please help test our new search server

Paul Taylor and Aurelién Mino have completed the re-write of our search server — please help us test this new code-base. Here is Paul’s write up:

This update rewrites the existing Search Indexer and Searcher with a
pure Java release whilst maintaining full compatibility with the
existing Musicbrainz Server, prototype by luks, completion by ijabz and
murdos. The aims were

1. Better performance

Search performance should be greatly improved for indexing and
especially search.

The intermediate python layer has been removed.
The webserver layer has been removed
When searching have a single Java VM , that can now be properly
configured/optimized
The latest Lucene and Java libraries are used

2. Better Search Results

The following bugs have already been fixed

Perhaps most importantly stop words are no longer and issue so when do a
search for something that exists in the database you should always get a
match, i.e artist:”the the” or track:”is this it?”

example

and range queries work properly

i.e

example

and theres a host of other bugs and enhancements that can now be
resolved quite easily

bug list

3. Maintainability

The code has been simplified, i.e no hand coding of xml or html or
having to deal with escape characters.
Now has a full set of unit tests, can also easily generate metrics such
as code coverage reports.
No dependency on Linux or Python, making it easier for new developers
to contribute, removing the burden from ruaok.

Testing Stage

Please try it out on http://musicbrainz.homeip.net both as a websearch
and as an XML Service to find any omissions in functionality and any
situations where the search results aren’t good as before.

Paul / ijabz

Google donates another $30,000!

Google’s Open Source Office has once again decided to support MusicBrainz with another $30,000 donation! Read about how we use Google’s money on the Google open source office blog:

Last year, Google’s generous donation paid for a much needed server and it allowed us to hire our Google Summer of Code™ student (Oliver Charles) part time after the program wrapped up. The donation also helped pay for mundane things like keeping the lights on, backup disks and paying for insurance. But the most fun part that we spent money on last year was our phenomenal MusicBrainz Summit in London.

Thank you very much to everyone at the Google Open Source Office! MusicBrainz would be moving slower and be much more dull without your support!

Looking for a new maintainer for pymb2 and libdiscid

Matthias Friedrich (yalaforge) finds himself with little spare time on his hands these days and has asked me to find a new maintainer for the Python MusicBrainz library (pymusicbrainz2) and for the C based libdiscid library. While libdiscid doesn’t require immediate work, the pymb2 library needs to have support for Release Groups (from the 2009-05-24 server update) added in.

Matthias suggested that anyone interested in becoming the maintainer should write a patch to add the needed release groups support. I think this is a good idea — anyone interested?

If so, please post a comment!

And thanks for your hard work on these projects Matthias!

UPDATE: Our Help Wanted page has been updated to reflect our current needs.

Wiki Migration

Today’s the day – our wiki is being migrated to MediaWiki.  The old “moin” wiki is now read-only (and will remain so, at least for a few months), and is available on oldwiki.musicbrainz.org.  The new wiki, once all the data has been migrated across, will be at the usual address.

As soon as the migration is complete, I’ll switch wiki.musicbrainz.org over to point to MediaWiki.

Unfortunately it won’t be possible to also migrate the user accounts from moin to mediawiki, so regrettably this means that once mediawiki us up, you’ll have to re-create your accounts.  Sorry about that.

Update: the switch has been made – if you have any questions to ask or problems to report about this, please see the WikiMigration page.  Thanks!