Category: Development

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

Server update, 2017-10-31

Boo! Release cycle was interrupted during the MetaBrainz Summit 17 and is now back to the usual period of two weeks. This release contains a lot of code refactoring, some admin tooling, and a few fixes. Optimizations were made to parts of the web service, particularly for JSON and browse requests. Anti-spam measures taken in July have been relaxed, as well as the period of time allowed for auto-editing newly added entities. The git tag is v-2017-10-31.

Bug

  • [MBS-9313] – Adding first release event should be an auto-edit
  • [MBS-9513] – User interface locales with country code are not working

Task

  • [MBS-9488] – Rename “limited user” to “new user”
  • [MBS-9519] – Hide biography, homepage, and collections description of limiter users from not-logged-in users

Improvement

  • [MBS-9496] – Modbot “ac being changed because of name change” edit note is confusing
  • [MBS-9505] – Extend time period to edit your own entries to 1 day
  • [MBS-9515] – Block adding Wikipedia relationships to anchors

Server update, 2017-09-18

This release enables relationship credits for areas and places, contains more URL cleanup & auto-select fixes, and changes the behavior of the artist-merge option to rename credits to only rename those that match the original artist names.

The git tag is v-2017-09-18.

Bug

  • [MBS-9380] – ReverbNation URLs are not correctly cleaned up
  • [MBS-9394] – Upper case CD Baby URLs are blocked as “not allowed or incorrectly formatted”
  • [MBS-9446] – PartialDate is missing a TO_JSON method
  • [MBS-9455] – “Performance of” attributes not showing if rel is orderable
  • [MBS-9471] – Relationship editor breaks if two link attribute types have the same name

New Feature

  • [MBS-9469] – Add autoselect for VIAF for places

Task

  • [MBS-9316] – Add Operabase to the otherDBs whitelist
  • [MBS-9353] – Do not show collections or user profiles to people not logged in

Improvement

  • [MBS-9019] – Extend relationship credits to places
  • [MBS-9303] – Add support for Facebook’s fb.com domain
  • [MBS-9334] – Enable URL cleanup for Recochoku artist URLs
  • [MBS-9435] – Update Rock.com.ar URL format
  • [MBS-9444] – Update the YouTube logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9457] – Update the Patreon logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9458] – “Rename artist and relationship credits” should only rename matching credits
  • [MBS-9459] – Enable relationship credits for Areas
  • [MBS-9467] – Add support for fallback Patreon user URLs with numeric ID

 

New MusicBrainz virtual machine released

I have recently released a new MusicBrainz virtual machine. This virtual machine includes all the important bits of MusicBrainz so you can run your own copy! I’d been hoping for feedback if people have encountered any problems with this VM, but I’ve not received any feedback. Here is to hoping that no news is good news!

For information on how to download, install and access this new virtual machine, take a look at our MusicBrainz Server setup page. The new VM can be downloaded from here via direct download or a torrent download.

Most of the outstanding bugs should be fixed in this release — if not, please open a new ticket.