Category: Development

Server update, 2018-05-30

React migration resumes with this server release which features rewritten area search results page and fixes a few regressions in editing forms. Thanks to reosarevok who added support for crediting label in relationship. Beatport, Musopen (score) and six other databases are now handled as external links. Some more small issues have been addressed too, including web service/collection bugfix, release display improvement, and other external links updates. The git tag is v-2018-05-30.

Sub-task

  • [MBS-9719] – Convert the area search results page to React

Bug

  • [MBS-9675] – Lyrics language dropdown missing while creating works from the relationships editor
  • [MBS-9676] – Cannot select work attributes on non-English localisations
  • [MBS-9704] – 400 Bad Request error when requesting user-tags (or user-ratings) and user-collections
  • [MBS-9710] – Release editor: Add a new recording: You haven’t made any changes!
  • [MBS-9715] – Non-standard barcode entering broken

New Feature

  • [MBS-9630] – Extend relationship credits to labels

Task

  • [MBS-9565] – Update the CD Baby logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9609] – Update the Bandsintown logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9646] – Normalize Bandcamp URLs to https
  • [MBS-9670] – Update the Facebook logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9700] – Extend BnF URLs auto-select, cleanup and validation to instruments

Improvement

  • [MBS-6130] – Clean and validate Beatport URLs
  • [MBS-8629] – Hide part works from release view
  • [MBS-9326] – Add Beatport links to the sidebar
  • [MBS-9614] – Match musa24.fi with the “purchase for download” release-URL relationship type
  • [MBS-9618] – Extend setlist.fm URL auto-select and validation to series/festivals
  • [MBS-9682] – Allow selection of “download for free” with Google Play
  • [MBS-9684] – Add DRAM to the other databases whitelist
  • [MBS-9685] – Auto-select, clean and validate Musopen URLs as score download for free for works
  • [MBS-9694] – Add TouhouDB to other database whitelist
  • [MBS-9697] – Add the Library of Congress Name Authority File to the other DBs whitelist
  • [MBS-9698] – Add SNAC to the other dbs whitelist
  • [MBS-9702] – Add Prog Archives to the other DBs whitelist
  • [MBS-9717] – Add NDL Authorities to the other DBs whitelist

Server update, 2018-05-09

This bugfix release mainly addresses UI regressions from the previous server release. Thanks to reosarevok, it now handles license links for works and SoundCloud links for places. Another change is that emails sent with a hidden address from the website by other editors are now using noreply@musicbrainz.org like other emails from the website do. The git tag is v-2018-05-09.

Bug

  • [MBS-9658] – /instruments page breaks if a new instrument type is added but not used
  • [MBS-9673] – Entity search options in the header are no longer translated
  • [MBS-9693] – Tags without vote are not immediately visible
  • [MBS-9705] – Overview tab link is now appended with /show
  • [MBS-9708] – Querying area containments is very slow

Task

  • [MBS-9639] – Extend Soundcloud relationship to places
  • [MBS-9688] – Add autoselect and cleanup for work license rel
  • [MBS-9692] – Normalize VocaDB and UtaiteDB URLs to HTTPS
  • [MBS-9696] – Replace @users.musicbrainz.org with noreply@musicbrainz.org in hidden email From field

Server update, 2018-04-23

After two months of rewriting parts of the website renderer to React/JSX, it was about time for an intermediate release. We tried hard to make as little changes to the rendered web pages as possible. Thanks to spellew for rewriting the ISRC and “not found” pages. MusicBrainz finally gets rid of Google Analytics, thanks to chirlu’s early contribution. Besides, this release contains a few small user interface improvements and bugfixes, as well as usual additions to the lyrics whitelist. The git tag is v-2018-04-23.

Sub-task

  • [MBS-9606] – Rewrite ISRC index page to React/JSX
  • [MBS-9607] – Rewrite “not found” pages to React/JSX
  • [MBS-9626] – Rewrite entity headers to React/JSX
  • [MBS-9635] – Rewrite Wikipedia extract to React/JSX
  • [MBS-9689] – Rewrite the election pages to React/JSX
  • [MBS-9690] – Rewrite the aliases pages to React/JSX

Bug

  • [MBS-9374] – Langcode not displayed when searching works
  • [MBS-9548] – Same link showing twice on the sidebar
  • [MBS-9628] – Items from main menu do not expand down in IE11 on MusicBrainz
  • [MBS-9636] – Edit annotation tab in Work uses the wrong sub header even if work type is available
  • [MBS-9668] – Non-English breaks the instrument list

Task

  • [MBS-3643] – Add Musixmatch to the lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-6530] – Remove Google Analytics
  • [MBS-9645] – Extend Geonames autoselect to places
  • [MBS-9648] – Add a bunch of lyrics sites to the whitelist

Improvement

  • [MBS-8417] – Wikipedia extract language fallback should be smarter
  • [MBS-9681] – Group core entity types in search options

Our next major challenge: Fixing the MusicBrainz site design for an improved user experience

Back in 1998 when I started playing with Perl and wrote the CD Index (the pre-cursor to MusicBrainz). I was learning web development and had little understanding of web design. The tools I was using were primitive at the time and the results were cringeworthy and have not withstood the test of time.

Fast forward some 18 years and we’ve arrived at the current MusicBrainz site design — there have been minor facelifts over time and a bigger one once we released NGS back in 2011. But really, the site design hasn’t changed much and we’ve kept gluing features and new bits of data onto the crappy design, leaving us with the current mess of a UX experience we know as the modern MusicBrainz.

Our community has been asking us to improve UX for a long time — we need to:
• Empower our community with better tools for developing, editing, viewing the magnificent data that we have.
• Build a stronger foundation for further development, interaction, and extension of our projects in future
• Make our projects more welcoming to newcomers, by lowering the learning curve as well as keeps the workflow of an advanced editor intact.

Fortunately for us, Chhavi [a design student from IIT, India] has become an active contributor to the MetaBrainz projects. She has been studying our sites and how we work as a team and has volunteered to drive the process to fix the UI and the user experience issues on the MusicBrainz site. She has proposed a part of this work as her Google Summer of Code project.

Our overall goal as a team is to create a design system which will help the designers and developers stay in sync, give a more unified theme to our projects, and make it easier for new contributors to join our projects. This will also make it much easier for our developers to address your requests for features/bug fixes faster in the future.

We are not barging into your online lives and trying to make our sites pretty — instead, we are focusing on the real experiences you have with them. We held long detailed conversations during our last summit in Barcelona, where Chhavi was also present and discussed a lot of concerns that might be running in your head while you read this.  As part of this initiative, we have been interviewing a number of key members of our project to understand what we and our users really need from this revamp. We have also kept track of community discussions around this topic. From this we decided that our users fall into three broad categories:

  1. There are those who contribute to code and understand database tech.

  2. Experienced/advanced MusicBrainz editors who don’t understand database tech.

  3. New users, who feel hopelessly lost in the current scenario.

To make all this research/discussion/feedback available for everyone to go through, we have started a Jira issue type Design that tracks all the design related tickets of MusicBrainz. The most notable tickets that show mock-ups of future MusicBrainz pages include:

When you look at these pages, please keep in mind that we’re trying to clean up the clutter and to make things simple and clean. Easier to understand for an experienced editor or a new one. The data that we have should be presented in a way that makes sense. The data should present the gaps and holes that it presently has, for people to be able to improve the data gaps. Data should also be our binding link to exploit the full potential of the projects that we have, such as ListenBrainz or CritiqueBrainz.

We are not trying to fluff things up and make them look pretty. Prettiness might come with the simplicity that we are chasing. Having user flows that do not hamper the speed and makes our life easier, is our utmost goal.

That said, we are happy to receive feedback on the upcoming designs as well as the process– if you have any, please post your comments to the appropriate tickets in Jira that we linked above. We’re currently getting some pressing dev tasks out of the way before we start the actual implementation of the redesigned project. Once our team is ready to work on this, we will public more blog posts about how this project will unfold and how it will impact our users.

 

No Spring 2018 schema change

We recently decided not to have a spring 2018 schema change release. As usual, we still have some bits left over to finish up from the last spring schema change. More importantly, we’re making a concerted effort to improve the user experience (UX) of the MusicBrainz site — more on that in a blog post later.

We may decide to do an autumn 2018 schema change, but this depends on how well our UX efforts progress over the course of winter and spring.

Server update, 2018-02-09

This server release mainly introduces a confirmation request when adding a new release (or a new medium to a release) without setting a format, because entering this information is often skipped, yet the editor usually knows it. It also contains URL cleanup updates and localization bugfixes, and the instrument list template has been rewritten in React. The git tag is v-2018-02-09. Thanks to naiveaiguy and spellew for their contributions!

Sub-task

  • [MBS-9590] – Rewrite the instrument list in React/JSX

Bug

  • [MBS-9599] – Translations are not applied on the 404 page
  • [MBS-9600] – Work attribute type and value names are not translated on the work edit form
  • [MBS-9603] – Series ordering type descriptions are not translated on the series edit form

New Feature

  • [MBS-9368] – Ask for confirmation when leaving format empty

Task

  • [MBS-9587] – Add a few Japanese lyrics sites to the whitelist

Improvement

  • [MBS-9562] – Improve Deezer URL cleanup
  • [MBS-9597] – Update VGMdb URL cleanup to use https
  • [MBS-9612] – Remove locale from Last.fm URLs

Server update, 2018-01-24

This small server release brings a new report for recordings, updates URL cleanup, and provides enhancement for guessing letters’ case in French titles. It also features preliminary changes for further switch to live search, still available for test. The git tag is v-2018-01-24. Thanks again to naiveaiguy and haruute for their contributions!

New Feature

  • [MBS-9425] – New Report: “Recordings with same name by different artists with same name”

Task

  • [MBS-9582] – Add UtaTen to the lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-9608] – Update Bandsintown URL cleanup to reflect new URL format

Improvement

  • [MBS-5345] – Guess Case > French mode > Le, La, Les, L’ or L’ followed by only one word. That word should be capitalized

Inviting testers for MusicBrainz live search

Hello everyone!

So as you might know, I recently joined the MetaBrainz team and my first project was the completion of our long-standing Solr search project to provide live search indexing for the MusicBrainz database.

I am happy to announce that we are finally rolling out an alpha release for you to test out. You can try it at https://test.musicbrainz.org/search or use the webservice end-point at https://test.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/

What this means –

  1. You can now instantly search for entities that have been updated. There should be a maximum 15 second delay between the database update and the entity changes being reflected on the search.
  2. This implies that once we have ironed out the Solr search we can finally retire the direct database search on the main site and use Solr with its advanced search syntax. For details on the new syntax features you can refer to the Lucene query parser documentation. For details on field types you can refer to our Search Syntax guide.
  3. As I said, the Solr search is still in its alpha stage, thus it can be unstable and have bugs. As such do not depend on it for your critical applications.
  4. Speaking of bugs, here’s where we need your help the most! We want testers to use Solr as extensively as possible and file any bugs you encounter at our Solr Issue tracker. You may encounter bugs like –
    • Missing fields in the API output for the webservice.
    • Certain types of queries not working in Solr search that happen to work on the main website.
    • Missing data/edits/updates not being indexed.
  5. Since we haven’t ported our search analyzers in their entirety, Solr might have worse search results than our main search.

I would like to re-iterate – Solr is still in alpha and not everything is perfect. We need your help to make it so.

 

Server update, 2018-01-10

Here’s the first release of 2018! Its main changes are listed below. It also brings a few additional small bug fixes and code refactoring, such as changing the sidebar rating and tag UI components to use React. The git tag is v-2018-01-10. Thanks to naiveaiguy and haruute for their contributions!

Bug

  • [MBS-9370] – Tests race condition triggers error “Couldn’t connect to the renderer”
  • [MBS-9578] – Editor private subscriptions/tags/ratings pages should not be linked to

New Feature

  • [MBS-8206] – New Report: Official/Promotional Releases supporting Disc IDs that don’t have an attached Disc ID

Task

  • [MBS-9561] – Add Anison Generation to the otherDBs whitelist
  • [MBS-9566] – Add Brahms IRCAM to the otherDBs whitelist
  • [MBS-9574] – Add patronage auto-select/cleanup for Drip URLs

Improvement

  • [MBS-8576] – Show work type description in work editing form

Server update, 2017-12-21

Winter has arrived! And so did the latest release of the MusicBrainz server, bringing updates (React 16.2.0 and Lodash 4.17.4), code refactoring, and a bunch of bug fixes. Thanks to navap for updating the documentation search and to reosarevok for adding La Boîte aux paroles to the Lyrics whitelist. The git tag is v-2017-12-21.

Bug

  • [MBS-9525] – Database dump sometimes fails to sync to FTP
  • [MBS-9540] – Release lookup does not return user ratings in json ws
  • [MBS-9542] – New default iTunes link format (without “id” characters) is denied
  • [MBS-9547] – ModBot leaves note with broken unicode
  • [MBS-9570] – Email header fields with non-ASCII characters are not correctly encoded
  • [MBS-9577] – Google custom search engine (WikiDocs) is out of date

Task

  • [MBS-9560] – Add http://laboiteauxparoles.com/ to the lyrics whitelist

Improvement

  • [MBS-9575] – Make “Enable vinyl track numbers” opt-in for new users