Category: Development

Server update, 2014-03-31

We’re back with another musicbrainz-server release. Thanks this fortnight to contributions from chirlu, JesseW, reosarevok, and nikki, as well as the MetaBrainz team. This release is all bug fixes and small improvements of various sorts, though we’re likely to, in the next few days, release the code to automatically calculate recording times from track times (where applicable). Stay tuned!

The git tag for this release is v-2014-03-31.

Full changes:

Bug

  • [MBS-4706] – Inconsistent state with pending edits: 2 mediums at position 1
  • [MBS-5512] – “Relate to URL…” is missing the returnto= parameter and returns us to another page
  • [MBS-6681] – URL cleanup (social networking, other databases, etc.) overrides correct relationship types
  • [MBS-6897] – Release has multiple “Disc 1” mediums, apparently impossible to change in the editor
  • [MBS-7142] – Missing release artist in “Remove release label” edit
  • [MBS-7247] – Wrong search generated for CDstub
  • [MBS-7328] – Release Add/edit Recording Search is broken
  • [MBS-7340] – Can’t add work after fixing an error
  • [MBS-7342] – Release editor hangs on “Submitting edits…” after certain errors occur
  • [MBS-7343] – Angle brackets disappear on release editor preview
  • [MBS-7369] – Web page no longer has markup hooks for finding catalogue numbers.
  • [MBS-7372] – Release Editor: CD TOC x Track Parser breaks horribly
  • [MBS-7373] – Edit diff for reordering is misleading
  • [MBS-7378] – Inline search returns duplicate results when searching for the same text twice
  • [MBS-7380] – Statistics for work attributes are wrong
  • [MBS-7387] – ISWC in work meta description (web search description) on works is broken
  • [MBS-7388] – Server allows setting gender for choirs/orchestras
  • [MBS-7401] – “Non-group artists” stat shouldn’t count orchestras and choirs

Improvement

  • [MBS-1271] – Some pages say “please log in to…” and some don’t
  • [MBS-2754] – Recording page shows track number but not disc number for occurences
  • [MBS-6806] – Add social network autoselect for Instagram and blog autoselect for Tumblr
  • [MBS-7272] – Create relationship page should show recording artists
  • [MBS-7356] – ISE page should include a timestamp
  • [MBS-7364] – Artist /create and /edit should show Birth Area etc for Person
  • [MBS-7366] – Add padding to the header on edit pages

New Feature

  • [MBS-7341] – Add a button to reset previous recordings in the release editor

Task

  • [MBS-7368] – Add a name attribute to the type select in the links editor
  • [MBS-7382] – Make orchestra and choir behave and show like group
  • [MBS-7383] – Add orchestra and choir to the stats pages

More details for our 2014-05-15 schema change release

As promised last week, here is a more detailed explanation of what is going to be changing during our May 15th schema change release:

  • [MBS-5978] – Replication feed is missing release_tag: This will not change any database tables but will finally include release_tag data in our Live Data Feed.
  • [MBS-6709] – "None" is no longer the last Packaging type after adding Book and Cassette Case: See below for more details.
  • [MBS-2410] – Label types not a tree anymore: This bug and MBS-6709 add “parent”, “child_order” and “description” columns to all of the yellow tables on this diagram except for language, script and script_language.
  • [MBS-2714] – Add support for Series: Details are provided in the ticket itself.
  • [MBS-6144] – Remove the apparently-unused script_language table: Exactly what it says on the tin.
  • [MBS-6602] – Remove sortnames from areas: Removes the sortname column from the area table.
  • [MBS-6603] – Remove sortnames from labels: Removes the sortname column from the label table.
  • [MBS-6651] – Make it possible to disable dates for relationship types: Adds a “has_dates” boolean column to link_type, to indicate whether a particular relationship type allows dates or not. The upgrade will set them all to “can have dates” for now and we will manually disable the appropriate ones later.
  • [MBS-7205] – Link types should track assumed cardinality: Details are provided in the ticket itself.
  • [MBS-3674] – Make instruments entities: This adds the following tables: instrument, instrument_type, instrument_gid_redirect, instrument_alias, instrument_alias_type, instrument_annotation, edit_instrument, l_*_instrument, l_instrument_* (the usual AR tables to other entities).

Server update, 2014-03-17

Another fortnight and another release with a small crop of bugs and then some! The biggest changes this week:

  • Work attributes support, originally part of last May’s schema change, is finally done and released!
  • PDF support for the Cover Art Archive. PDFs won’t appear as the front cover, since they can’t generally be displayed in a browser and the Internet Archive doesn’t currently create thumbnail images for them.
  • Removing RDFa. Most of you probably never used it anyway, but as we’ve been talking about for a while now, and especially with the great work LinkedBrainz has been doing, it was time to stop poorly half-maintaining rapidly-disintegrating RDFa support on musicbrainz.org itself.

Aside from that, we have the usual crop of fixes, primarily cleanup from the fixes above, the new release editor, and the new URL relationships.

The git tag for this release is v-2014-03-17.

Bug

  • [MBS-5244] – Remove bits of RDFa which were commented out because of invalid HTML.
  • [MBS-6067] – Internal server error when using query parameter with a lookup in the webservice
  • [MBS-7267] – Country column is blank when looking up a FreeDB ID
  • [MBS-7299] – Place types and alias types are not translatable
  • [MBS-7300] – Existing image URLs always link to .jpg when adding an image
  • [MBS-7311] – RE: Guess case dropdown doesn’t update when changed on the other tab
  • [MBS-7319] – Not possible to enter Facebook URLs by typing
  • [MBS-7322] – URL are not added when creating work with ISWC
  • [MBS-7323] – Can’t edit artist because of badly retrieved URL
  • [MBS-7324] – ISE: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::AutoEditorElections->nominate “Can’t call method “name” on an undefined value at lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Controller/AutoEditorElections.pm line 34, line 3
  • [MBS-7325] – ISE: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::AutoEditorElections->nominate “Can’t call method “is_auto_editor” on an undefined value at lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Controller/AutoEditorElections.pm line 29, line 3.”
  • [MBS-7326] – ISE: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::AutoEditorElections->nominate “Forbidden at lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Data/AutoEditorElection.pm line 53, line 3.”
  • [MBS-7329] – Importing a multiple artist freedb release gives a seeding error for the “artist” field
  • [MBS-7332] – ISE trying to see release merge
  • [MBS-7333] – beta: ISRC code missing from heading on ISRC page
  • [MBS-7334] – Beta: IPI codes no longer shown in artist and label sidebars
  • [MBS-7335] – Deprecated relationships are no longer prevented from being added
  • [MBS-7336] – URL error messages don’t always get shown

Improvement

  • [MBS-4116] – Cover art archive: Support .pdf
  • [MBS-7318] – Label bubble should appear when focusing the catalogue number input field

New Feature

  • [MBS-5863] – Dynamic work attributes (UI)

Task

  • [MBS-1263] – RDFa code is too separate from main MB code and is starting to bit rot
  • [MBS-7330] – Add Wikimedia Commons and CPDL to the score whitelist

Next schema change release: May 15, 2014

As per our twice a year schedule of making schema changes that impact our Live Data Feed users, I’d like to announce the set of tickets that we’re going to implement for the next release.

We have quite a few clean-up tickets in this batch and a handful of improvements — some of the improvements are a lot of work, but won’t seem that way on the surface. However, the one major new feature we’re going to add are Series. Series will allow us to mark a set of releases as belonging to a series (e.g. Now this is what I call crappy music!). This has been a long long requested feature and we’re finally at a point where we can implement this.

The good news about this release is that a large number of the tickets are already implemented! The big tickets are still in progress, but the smaller ones are already in review. We’re hoping that we’ll have a less hasty push to the finish line this year with lots of time for testing. And we’re hoping for ponies too! 🙂

Server update, 2014-03-03

Here we are with a fresh server release! Following up on the recent release of the new release editor, this week we’re releasing a revamped way to edit URL relationships directly from entity editing pages. Other than that, a variety of bug fixes and small improvements, as you can read below! Thanks to chirlu and mineo for supplementing the MetaBrainz team’s work this release.

The git tag for this release is v-2014-03-03.

Bug

  • [MBS-4154] – Search error when doing tag lookup with exclamation marks
  • [MBS-5411] – insert or update on table “cover_art” violates foreign key constraint “cover_art_fk_edit”
  • [MBS-7043] – Moving a DiscID from its present medium to the same medium causes the DiscID to be removed
  • [MBS-7080] – Can’t click on results in inline search after multiple lookups
  • [MBS-7110] – URLs with square brackets broken in edit notes
  • [MBS-7118] – Server allows “reorder cover art” edit that does nothing
  • [MBS-7240] – remember_login token is not allocated if the username casing used when logging in does not match the database
  • [MBS-7255] – Reusing the tracklist for a release with a discID blocks track times
  • [MBS-7259] – Release countries are missing from the duplicates tab
  • [MBS-7261] – The “Plus” button for track additions is out of layout after the recent update
  • [MBS-7262] – The date field of the “release event” start taking 2 rows after the recent update
  • [MBS-7263] – Edit of recordings in track list when adding new release does not work
  • [MBS-7265] – It’s possible to enter release merges without an edit note
  • [MBS-7274] – RE submitted apparently empty recording edits
  • [MBS-7275] – Two places with empty addresses fail to merge.
  • [MBS-7281] – editor page. “Last 24 hours” link contains strangely encoded characters &
  • [MBS-7287] – Clearing both the label and catalog number of an existing release label throws an ISE
  • [MBS-7288] – beta: cdbaby kills the external links editor
  • [MBS-7289] – URLCleanup doesn’t remove non-encoded left-to-right mark
  • [MBS-7290] – Hybrid SACD doesn’t allow discIDs

Improvement

  • [MBS-1397] – When the same editor adds and removes the same object at the same time, the original edit should get cancelled
  • [MBS-3130] – Make it possible to edit the URL of a specific relationship
  • [MBS-3583] – “Add Release” form should assist adding ASIN, discogs and wikipedia relations
  • [MBS-3662] – Ability to add/relate to multiple URLs at once
  • [MBS-5734] – Make it possible for url|text substitutions to also have arbitrary attributes
  • [MBS-7226] – Require email address to sign up
  • [MBS-7292] – release editor. “edit note” wiki page link is not target=”_blank”
  • [MBS-7293] – Release merges: With “merge releases and recordings” strategy, show recordings that will be merged in the edit display

New Feature

  • [MBS-7159] – Allow adding/editing external links/url relationships to an entity from its edit page

Our embedded RDFa will be going away in two weeks

We’ve been trying to find anyone making use of the RDFa embedded in our pages, but we’ve been unable to find anyone.

Given that the RDFa makes our templates much harder and cumbersome to edit, we’ve decided to go ahead and remove our RDFa support in two weeks time.

Since we could not find anyone who actually uses our RDFa, this shouldn’t be a problem. But we suspect that someone, somewhere will be angry with us for removing the RDFa support without any warning or without being asked for feedback. :-/

Server update, 2014-02-17

We’ve got a new server release! This is a big one, because it replaces the old release editor with a shiny new one — all based on work done during GSoC 2013 and finally completed now. Besides fixing close to 100 tickets that people have reported in the past, there are some visible changes you may notice:

  • Tab switches are much faster, so the UI should feel more responsive overall.
  • The “Add Missing Entities” tab has been removed; you can still create a new artist or label from within the release editor from the bottom of any inline search results menu. See our previous blog post on this feature for further information/guidance.
  • The UI for editing artist credits now includes buttons to copy and paste entire credits between pages.
  • Seeding release data should be less buggy, and the release editor now provides useful error messages if seeded data is incorrectly formatted.

The new release editor is a large overhaul that required many code changes – if you notice any issues with it, or any regressions from the previous release editor, please don’t hesitate to open an issue on our bug tracker, so we can look into it ASAP.

This release also features several fixes/improvements by chirlu and nikki, in addition to the MetaBrainz team. See the full list below!

The git tag for this release is v-2014-02-17.

Bug

  • [MBS-2034] – Release editor help/description bubbles break with a resizeable textarea
  • [MBS-2124] – UX: Not obvious how to close the "artist credits" dialog in advanced tracklist editor
  • [MBS-3501] – Basic track-parser does not filter/ignore track times when importing a CD + tracknames from FreeDB
  • [MBS-3524] – 502 Bad Gateway when assigning different recordings to lots of tracks
  • [MBS-3649] – Seeding release editor causes an internal server error if you literally pass "mediums.n.format_id"
  • [MBS-3796] – Release editor can allow the same artist to be created twice without either having a disambig comment
  • [MBS-3824] – Discs are ordered incorrectly on Recordings tab of Release editor
  • [MBS-3829] – New track parser only parses one track if medium is minimized
  • [MBS-4006] – Track Parser: "Track names start with a number" seems to work backwards
  • [MBS-4193] – Add missing entities forgets selections
  • [MBS-4194] – Warning about missing edit note before attempting to submit release
  • [MBS-4196] – Unknown bug during tracklist edit
  • [MBS-4312] – Track parser tries to reorder tracks even for rels with DiscIDs
  • [MBS-4329] – Changing release artist after adding tracks doesn’t update track artists
  • [MBS-4521] – Recordings tab has non-existent tracks
  • [MBS-4549] – Not possible to filter Various Artists by artist credit
  • [MBS-4550] – Problems with "Add Missing Entity" and the credits in the Edit Note tab
  • [MBS-4559] – "Copy all track changes to associated recordings" check box inconsistent when going back to recordings tab
  • [MBS-4571] – Track parser can be opened from collapsed disc, opens empty
  • [MBS-4598] – Release editor is showing non-existent tracks for a release
  • [MBS-4725] – Up and down arrows on tracklist tab of release editor should be disabled if release had discids
  • [MBS-4802] – Creating new artist from release editor shows wrong in preview
  • [MBS-4820] – No way to sync recordings with tracklist without making an edit
  • [MBS-4848] – Guess case is missing on the add missing entities tab
  • [MBS-4851] – When editing a release selecting ‘Infer track durations from associated recordings’ without changing the recording linked to the track has no effect.
  • [MBS-4953] – Internal server error while adding new recording in the release editor
  • [MBS-5158] – Using the "add missing entities" tab of the RE ends up implicitly creating ACs, rather than not (or explicitly) creating them
  • [MBS-5159] – "Add missing entities" tab can only find matches if the artist name is in the same order as the entered text
  • [MBS-5296] – 13-track release added from 12-track discID
  • [MBS-5334] – Release Editor : "NaN:aN" for empty length
  • [MBS-5393] – "Add Missing Entities" doesn’t update when adding a new VA release
  • [MBS-5455] – Adding multiple releases simultaneously sometimes shares the session
  • [MBS-5516] – Regression: Changing an accent in track title triggers recording confirmation
  • [MBS-5569] – Internal server error when seeding the release editor
  • [MBS-5571] – Going back to tracklist on releases with DiscIDs is messy
  • [MBS-5646] – Clicking "Add a new recording" on the recordings tab of the release editor doesn’t select the radio button
  • [MBS-5687] – ISE when trying to go to another "tab" in release editor (at "Edit Note" tab)
  • [MBS-5731] – Internal server error if release editor is seeded with indexes starting from 1 not 0
  • [MBS-5738] – Internal Server Error – adding recordings to a new release
  • [MBS-5801] – ISE when going back to "edit note" after having ‘tabbed’ back to fix an AC
  • [MBS-5805] – Internal server error when importing a CD stub
  • [MBS-5806] – Internal Server Errors when adding a release
  • [MBS-5817] – Track Parser and Collapsed Mediums
  • [MBS-5894] – ‘Guess sort name’ in the release editor just copies the artist name
  • [MBS-5936] – release editor internal server error on release add
  • [MBS-5957] – Internal Server Error
  • [MBS-6013] – ISE in release editor caused by corruption in recordings tab data.
  • [MBS-6044] – Internal server error when trying to submit a tracklist while adding a new release.
  • [MBS-6060] – Internal Server Error when trying to go back from "Edit Note" to "Recordings"
  • [MBS-6064] – Internal server error when adding new artist in the release editor with same name/comment as existing artist
  • [MBS-6127] – Edit tracklist and add track artist + copy track changes to recordings -> new artist not shown
  • [MBS-6654] – tooltip for the current artist is not shown in the release editor
  • [MBS-6875] – missing space in new member relationship before list of vocals instruments
  • [MBS-6964] – checkboxes for "Also update the recording with track changes" don’t appear immediately
  • [MBS-7035] – ISE submitting a new album
  • [MBS-7082] – Beta: Release editor error messages not being correctly translated
  • [MBS-7100] – Option to view non-official release groups not available when there are no official release groups
  • [MBS-7143] – Relationship Editor display error with right-to-left languages
  • [MBS-7190] – data corruption: Merging Releases chooses the wrong release date
  • [MBS-7191] – Release merge might discard some or all release events
  • [MBS-7199] – "historical" after area names is not translable
  • [MBS-7204] – Some tools pad track numbers with leading zeroes? (the release editor by default doesn’t)
  • [MBS-7206] – Opening a tracklist with a fullwidth space (\u3000) causes the Recording to become unset
  • [MBS-7207] – Impossibility to credit artist as "0" (zero)
  • [MBS-7209] – WorldCat URLs should not be considered scheme independent
  • [MBS-7239] – FixTrackLengths script doesn’t fix some mediums due to requesting unimplemented and meaningless separate_tracklists option to edit medium edits
  • [MBS-7244] – Server not responsive to large track edits
  • [MBS-7245] – Properly abort the database setup if tar can’t extract the database dumps.

Improvement

  • [MBS-908] – Parser cannot handle commonly used punctuation other than period for tracknumber
  • [MBS-1684] – Release editor doesn’t properly handle when you made no changes
  • [MBS-2104] – Make it easier to possible to copy multiple artist credits when editing a release
  • [MBS-2159] – Artist credit "toggle" should be consistent
  • [MBS-3279] – Recordings search during add release should favor recordings from same release group
  • [MBS-3781] – No way to conveniently change all track artists and credits on a release
  • [MBS-4186] – It is impossible to ‘Guess Sort Name’ alone, add pre-defined sort name types
  • [MBS-4253] – Clicking an entity in Add missing entities should open it in a new tab
  • [MBS-4296] – Implement "Change all identical credits" on the RE
  • [MBS-4331] – Release editor > Recording search on Recordings tab should use track info for searching : track artist and track length
  • [MBS-4456] – Make the track parser keep the artists unless told not to
  • [MBS-4540] – Don’t replace track authors with "various"
  • [MBS-4726] – Up and down arrows on tracklist tab of release editor should be first column of table
  • [MBS-5530] – Ask for confirmation when closing the release editor window
  • [MBS-5662] – Focus the track parser when clicking the track parser button
  • [MBS-5792] – Fix the Release Editor superticket
  • [MBS-5899] – Normalize archive.org HTTPS URLs
  • [MBS-6026] – Make Recent Additions show *all* recent additions, not only approved ones
  • [MBS-6247] – Support redirect_uri in POST data when seeding
  • [MBS-6255] – Refactor templates in release editor
  • [MBS-6473] – release editor / recordings tab : display and focus recording search name input field (HUGE TIME GAIN)
  • [MBS-6580] – link to artist mbids in 2nd column in edit release/recordings
  • [MBS-6595] – Show flags for countries
  • [MBS-6922] – Display table with information when merging labels
  • [MBS-7145] – release editor : after inline finding of the searched label, grey help popup is not moved and updated to label row
  • [MBS-7168] – Simplify browse pages
  • [MBS-7233] – Change sidebar label: OCReMix → OC ReMix

Task

  • [MBS-3658] – Check whether the release editor handles multiple values for track names correctly
  • [MBS-6820] – Document how to set up replication

Sub-task

  • [MBS-5532] – Long translated strings mess up the release editor

Announcing python-musicbrainzngs, release 0.5

We’ve just release a new version of python-musicbrainzngs, a library for accessing the Musicbrainz webservice from python.
Version 0.5 comes with a lot of new features, including:

  • Support for URL entities
  • Support for Area entities
  • Support the experimental JSON webservice
  • Support fuzzy disc lookup by TOC
  • add a -count element to browse and search requests
  • added support for link type UUIDs
  • deprecated puid and echoprint support

And a number of bug fixes and other small changes. See the CHANGES file  for more information.

For consistency with online repositories and distribution packages, we’ve renamed some URLs. You can now find the library on github and readthedocs at:

  • https://github.com/alastair/python-musicbrainzngs
  • http://python-musicbrainzngs.readthedocs.org

You will be automatically redirected if you access the old urls.

Thanks to Johannes Dewender, Ian McEwen, Wieland Hoffmann, Simon Chopin and Ryan Helinski for contributing to this release.

The new version can be downloaded from github, pypi, or installed with pip

  • https://github.com/alastair/python-musicbrainzngs/releases/tag/v0.5
  • https://pypi.python.org/pypi/musicbrainzngs
  • pip install musicbrainzngs

Server update, 2014-02-03

Another release for you! This time it’s fairly small, due to assorted work on longer-term projects, as well as a meeting including the main team in Chicago. Thanks to nikki for a lot of i18n fixes, and chirlu for the new reorder cover art UI, adding to the MetaBrainz team’s work!

The biggest user-facing change is that cover art can now be reordered by drag-and-drop. Thanks to chirlu for that patch!

The git tag for this release is v-2014-02-03.

Bug

  • [MBS-7074] – Regression: Inline search from an entity page finds the same entity
  • [MBS-7095] – ISRC/ISWC bubble shows [removed] when adding a recording/work
  • [MBS-7115] – Collections page only shows the first 25 collections.
  • [MBS-7154] – Attach CD TOC : some”show tracklist” buttons don’t work
  • [MBS-7169] – Internal server error loading non-existent relationship type page
  • [MBS-7174] – Artist level Vimeo links are matched to the wrong relationship type
  • [MBS-7175] – “Add Release” doesn’t seem to check the data in Label field in any way, says any text in label field is valid, gives no error
  • [MBS-7177] – Selecting a rel then another in the relationship editor causes a weird mixup
  • [MBS-7197] – Releases ISE when release groups are merged

Improvement

  • [MBS-4374] – Use drag’n drop for re-ordering cover arts
  • [MBS-5869] – “New Image Goes Here” wrap-around
  • [MBS-7194] – Compile templates to files, and cache template compilation for a longer period

Sub-task

  • [MBS-5146] – Translation of “Quick Links” on http://i18n.mbsandbox.org/user/[username]/edits/open overlaps the text next to it if too long.
  • [MBS-5232] – Guess case modes and their descriptions untranslatable
  • [MBS-5418] – Display of AE elections a bit broken when translated strings are longer than in English