Summer of Code: Accepted projects

Congratulations to the following students for being accepted to Summer of Code for MusicBrainz:

  1. Jamie McDonald (jdamcd): MusicBrainz Android Mobile Application
  2. Sean Burke (leftmost): Improve collections feature
  3. Jens Lukas (jensl): Development of an iPhone application for MusicBrainz

We’re currently in the community bonding period and work on these projects will start soon. Currently Jens and Jamie are reconciling their respective applications into one coherent application specification so that the application we deliver for Android and iPhone behave in similar manners.

Congratulations Jamie, Jens and Sean!

NGS Beta 2: May 24th 2010

After much scheduling and getting our ducks in a row, we’re pleased to announce the final beta release of NGS on May 24th! This is one year after our last release, so this date is a little bitter/sweet for us. I had hoped to get this release out before then, but the team is making sure we’re getting this release right, and there are a ton of difficult things to get right.

And the tentative release date for NGS is going to be in July. No promises on a firm date yet.

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

Testing the NGS live data feed

If anyone would like to test out the NGS replication, which I’ve setup from the test server, follow these instructions:

  • Download and install the mb_server source code from SVN trunk. Follow these instructions.
  • Set your server type in DBDefs.pm to RT_SLAVE
  • Download and import this dataset.
  • Insert this required row into the database, using our psql program:
    cd /admin
    ./psql READWRITE
    insert into replication_control values (1, 12, 36169, '2010-01-23 00:00:02.604674+00');
    
  • Now run admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges a few minutes after the hour to keep up to date with the data on the test server. Please note that this system may not be stable yet and that we will occaisionally load new data on our test server, which will require you to reload the data on your server.

Good luck!

Database on test server updated

The database on the test server has been updated with the latest data and search indexes to match the latest work that ijabz’ has done. This update was in preparation for testing the replication system, which I’ll invite the general public to try in a few hours.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The passwords on the test server are now the same as the passwords from the main server as of January 23.

Announcing NGS Beta 1!

After many years of discussion, planning and hard work, we’ve finally reached the much anticipated Next Generation Schema Beta 1 release!

For all the information on this release, please take a look at our release notes. Then head over to the test server and play with it!

Most important of all, please note that we are using Jira to keep track of bug for the MusicBrainz server now. Please do not enter bugs for Beta 1 into the old (trac) bug tracker!

Many thanks to the countless people who have helped make NGS a reality!

NGS Beta 1 is coming: Monday January 18

I’m pleased to announce that we’re almost ready to release beta 1 of the much anticipated Next Generation Schema. All of the important core functions are complete and we’ve even done a first round of sanity checking to make sure what what we release will be useful. We won’t have all of the features for NGS done — there will be some things that we simply won’t have finished by then.

But, this release is important since we feel that we want the community to help us take a look at NGS and help us flush out problems before we polish NGS for release.

We’ll have loads of more details and even some documentation for you by next monday. Stay tuned!

MetaBrainz hires Kuno Woudt (warp) as a full time developer!

I’m pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has hired its first full time developer! On Februrary 1, 2010, Kuno Woudt will join Oliver Charles on the MusicBrainz development team and both of them will focus to finish NGS as soon as possible. With Kuno we are effectively tripling the engineering capacity we have dedicated to writing code for NGS. This will free me up to focus more on managing the development process as well as focusing on more business development issues. An increased focus on business should allow me to find the extra income to pay Kuno and to keep us in the black!

I’m excited by this development — having dedicated developers working on finishing NGS is what has been needed for several years now. I’m very much looking forward to releasing NGS and then having a number of smaller releases in 2010!