Category: Community

Cleanup of the Month is Back!

CatCat says:

After a pretty long pause Cleanup of the Month is back in business!

From now and roughly a month onward it is Bruce Springsteen that’s on the menu for fixing, please head on over and see if there is anything you can edit, remember validating and voting on edits is also helping!

Further, collecting information and finding good resources is good too, and you can help by collecting stats or writing a blurb here.

Good Luck Everyone!

Providing search server logs to a researcher

Khadija Elbedweihy, a student/researcher from the University of Sheffield has asked us to provide a months worth of our search server logs for research purposes. Khadija says the following about her research:

What my research is trying to do is finding out what kind of queries issued on linked data, what are their complexities and other statistics as well. This might go into another work which is for evaluating search tools working on linked data. So I’d use my analysis to see how we can best define evaluation queries that are based on real world usage and scenarios.

We have the logs and its easy for us to provide these logs for research purposes — and we like supporting research, especially if we can benefit from it. 🙂

We just need one final OK from our community that we’re not doing something stupid and/or betraying the trust/privacy of our users. I’ve created a tiny except of the two types of logs we propose to send to Khadija. The source IP addresses and any other information have been removed from the data — the only thing that remains are the timestamps when the request occurred and the URL that was requested. And these URLs do not contain any information that could identify our users in any way. That is it — we’d be providing no other information to Khadija.

Please take a look at the excerpt and sanity check us to make sure we’re not pulling an AOL here. 🙂

Fundraiser for NGS Hardware

Rolling out NGS (Next Generation Schema) onto the main servers is going to be hard if we have to do it with our current hardware. If we can raise $15,000 to purchase new servers we will make this process much easier and with much less down time. Also, our current hardware is starting to get old and more failure prone. By purchasing newer hardware we can serve more users using less power, which will make MusicBrainz be responsible for less pollution!

Please make a donation today to help MusicBrainz raise money to cover the costs for a much needed hardware upgrade:

Our Next Generation Schema, improves MusicBrainz on many fronts. Its a complete re-write of our 11 year old codebase using modern tools (Catalyst, Moose, Template Toolkit) and a drastic improvement of our schema. The new schema fixes many of the problems of the old schema and introduces many new concepts that allow us to model music data better.

For instance, instead of having conflated artist names like “Queen & David Bowie” we will now have Artist Credits, which will link to the artists “Queen” and “David Bowie” individually. Releases will now have mediums and tracklists which will allow us to re-use tracklists in different releases, which makes release more accurate and removes duplication from the database. Tracks have been changed to recordings and if the same recording is used in two different releases the same recording (with the same MBID) will be used in both releases. NGS also introduces new concepts like musical Works, that can represent Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as an abstract Work, which then has been recorded into recordings and releases after his death. The goal is to remove artists like Beethoven and Bach from the list of releases and recordings since they never actually recorded anything while they were alive.

The overall goal is to allow MusicBrainz to grow into a complete music encyclopedia, rather than a CD lookup service that it started out as. This new codebase and schema allows us to grow and add many more features that we’ve not been able to add to the old code base. If you’d like a preview, please take a look at our test server.

All donations are tax deductible since MetaBrainz is a 501(c)3 non-profit! Thank you for your support!

The Guardian adds MusicBrainz IDs to its articles via its Open Platform

Martin Belam from the Guardian says:

The announcement is that we’re adding Linked Data to the Guardian’s Open Platform. We’ve tagged about 20,000 articles with MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs, and we’ll add more sources soon.

So, for example, if you want to use our Cee Lo coverage on your web site or for an iPhone or iPad app or wherever, you can query the Open Platform to get content from the Guardian to integrate your app.

There are more details in this introduction and more more information on how to search the Guardian with MusicBrainz IDs. I’m really stoked that MusicBrainz IDs are reaching beyond the music world. If we reached mainstream journalism today, where are we going tomorrow?

Thanks for all of your hard work Martin!

Please welcome our new Style Leader: Nikki

The MusicBrainz Style Leader has a really hard job — this position requires people to to have a thick skin, a deep understanding of MusicBrainz and the patience of a saint. Its a really challenging job! And because of this, people burn out fast and generally abandon their jobs after a while. This has been the pattern for many years for us and its been very frustrating. And now its has happened again: Brian, the Style Leader up til today, has not been responding to me. I’ve not heard anything from him in weeks.

In an effort to try and break out of this cycle, I am going start a new experiment: Make the Style Leader a paid position.

While we have some money in the bank, its not massive amounts of money and the pay for this position reflects just that. Its not a whole lot of money, but I am hoping its enough money to offset the pain of being the Style Leader and will keep the Style Leader engaged over a longer period. With that in mind, I am proud to announce that Nikki will be our next Style Leader and our first paid Style Leader.

Nikki has been tasked to ensure that the style process moves along and is properly documented. Her goal is to drive consensus among the brainerz who participate in the important Style process and to keep proposals on track. Once a proposal’s RFC/RFV periods are up, its Nikki’s job to ensure that the proposal is acted upon by the appropriate people. She should also help to keep the style process evolving as the MusicBrainz style needs evolve.

Thank you for all your hard work Brian! I look forward to working with you more closely Nikki!

BTW: Warp will still be involved in helping Nikki lead the style process, but his focus is on NGS for the time being. We’re very much dedicated to staying focused on delivering NGS as soon as we can.

Looking for a contract programmer for C++/Python work

UPDATE: This position has been filled.

A soon-to-be partner of MusicBrainz is looking for an engineer for contract work. This company is looking for a person who has the following skills:

  1. Strong Python and C++ skills with experience in building applications on Windows, Linux and Mac.
  2. Open source programming experience
  3. Server programming skills a plus
  4. Solr and audio programming experience a plus
  5. Ability to be a self starter, handle task coordination via Skype and IRC.

The work would involve working with MusicBrainz and the partner company. This contract would be full time for 2-5 months, depending on the workload which isn’t very clear yet. After that the contract would taper off to 10-20 hours per week on an ongoing basis. Depending on how main portion of the contract goes, the company may decide to give more hours to the contractor on new projects. The pay for this position is still being determined, but its safe to assume that it would be a fair rate for an engineer based in the US. This engineer can be located anywhere, but the pay is likely to be appropriate for US rates. If you are interested in this position, please send your resume to helpwanted at musicbrainz dot org.

Please take the MusicBrainz Survey!

Jess Hemerly, who is has been studying MusicBrainz as part of a class at UC Berkeley, has devised a survey for MusicBrainz users to get a better understanding of who contributes to MusicBrainz and why. She says:

I’m a researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a MusicBrainz editor (agreatnotion). I’m interested in how and why people contribute to MusicBrainz and how it can be better. Your participation will help us learn more about you, our community, and how to sustain a successful peer-produced database. The survey takes about 15 minutes, and all personal information—like username and email—will remain confidential. My advisor and I will review and analyze the results and hope to share our analysis with the academic and open source communities. The results will also be made available to the MusicBrainz community.

Take the survey here. The survey will be open for two weeks, until July 23, 2010.

Thank you for participating!

MusicBrainz Pub Gathering in London on 16 June

I will be in London again soon and its been a while since we’ve gathered to have a pint. If you’re in or near London and feel like meeting up with other Brainerz, please keep the evening of June 16th open.

If anyone has any suggestions for a pub that is reasonably central, but not overly noisy, please make a comment in this blog post.

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you!

Six Degrees of Black Sabbath

For many years I’ve espoused MusicBrainz should collect enough information that would allow us to track connections between disparate artists through a game of six degrees of separation. And now Paul Lamere from the EchoNest has done exactly this for Music Hack Day San Francisco.

Six degrees of Black Sabbath allows you to enter two artists and it will search the MusicBrainz advanced relationships to find a connection between your two artists. See Paul’s blog post for more details.

Very very cool to see interesting applications like this appear in the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

Thanks Paul!