Category: Development

Guess case for classical music

Keschte (g0llum) says: This concerns mostly the classical editors. I’ve finally taken my time to develop the requested guess case mode for the classical style guidelines. These are mostly regular expressions which cover most of the cases that require tedious manual editing. You’ll find some of the examples I’ve worked with in the header of, … Continue reading “Guess case for classical music”

Keschte (g0llum) says:

This concerns mostly the classical editors. I’ve finally taken my time to develop the requested guess case mode for the classical style guidelines. These are mostly regular expressions which cover most of the cases that require tedious manual editing. You’ll find some of the examples I’ve worked with in the header of, please go to the sandbox and try out your titles. Feel free to enter any issues you find into the bug tracker.

Cheers, and have fun testing!

–keschte

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New fingerprinting technology available now!

I’m pleased to announce that as of right now, we have a new acoustic fingerprint provider! MusicBrainz has teamed up with MusicIP (formerly Predixis) and has integrated their MusicDNS service into MusicBrainz’ Picard Tagger. Version 0.7.0-beta1 is available for download right now! This partnership with MusicIP promises to be beneficial for both MusicBrainz and MuiscIP. … Continue reading “New fingerprinting technology available now!”

I’m pleased to announce that as of right now, we have a new acoustic fingerprint provider! MusicBrainz has teamed up with MusicIP (formerly Predixis) and has integrated their MusicDNS service into MusicBrainz’ Picard Tagger. Version 0.7.0-beta1 is available for download right now!

This partnership with MusicIP promises to be beneficial for both MusicBrainz and MuiscIP. The rough overview of our new relationship looks like this:

MusicIP provides:

  • Free fingerprint lookup services for official MusicBrainz projects. The fingerprint services are entirely hosted by MusicIP, which removes the burden of hosting service that is only tangential to our mission.
  • A GPL/APL licensed fingerprinting client library (Open Fingerprint Architecture Library aka libofa) that is ready to integrate into new applications today!
  • Other projects that wish to integrate fingerprinting services into their applications will need to sign up with the MusicDNS service. This service is free for non-profit projects (musicdns.org), and price-tiered for commercial projects such that even small startups have access. For more details, please visit MusicDNS.org.
  • $10,000 held in escrow for MusicBrainz, plus contractual commitment to supply hardware resources should MusicIP exit the fingerprinting business. This is designed to allow us to continue the service should they decide to stop providing the service.
  • a 10% cut on all income earned from fingerprinting queries where MusicBrainz metadata is provided via the MusicDNS service.
  • 800K acoustic fingerprint ids (PUIDs) that which are already loaded into our DB.
  • Travel, lodging and registration costs for myself to attend the SXSW

    conference, where all of this is being announced and released.
  • Allow us to exhibit in the MusicIP booth at SXSW this week. Including displaying our logo!

MusicBrainz provides:

  • One free live data feed for MusicIP’s use.
  • The right for MusicIP to sub-license the MusicBrainz data to their customers as part of their product offering — at full list price. MusicIP takes no cut.
  • Community support of the Open Fingerprint Architecture library. Many of the exact details on where the source code will live still need to be worked out over the next few weeks.

As you can see, the deck is stacked much in our favor. MusicIP has gone above and beyond the call of duty to setup this relationship. We’re all very excited by this new partnership, since it extends our reach into the commercial realm and welcomes MusicIP into the open source world. We are also announcing a partnership with the Creative Commons where MusicBrainz will now be able to track Creative Commons licenses.

Due to all of this, there has been a lot of frantic development at MusicBrainz over the last 8 weeks. Moving to a new colocation facility, more bandwidth, more servers, a new web service and a new text search were all in preparation for today. As you may have noticed, the MusicBrainz service has been a little bit more spotty as we’ve worked hard to push out new features and move to the new colo. The good news is that we’ve brought more database servers online to help spread the load to more machines as people come to investigate our new version of the Picard Tagger. Hopefully the web site should still respond well even if the replicated servers are working hard to handle the new web service traffic for Picard 0.7.0. Once I return from SXSW, I’ll be focusing on getting the service stable, better documented and generally ready for the future.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Relatable for the use of their TRM fingerprint technology. Without Relatable MusicBrainz would’ve never been able to grow as fast as it has. I appreciate everything that Relatable has done for MusicBrainz, but MusicBrainz has simply outgrown TRM and it is time to move on. We will continue to provide the TRM service for another 6 months from today. If you have an application that uses TRM, please visit MusicDNS.org today to find out how you can migrate to this new fingerprinting service.

I bet there will be tons and tons of questions. I will batch up the questions and the post up follow up messages to try and respond to your questions.

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Server updated

We just updated the main server with the latest and greatest features:

New Features

  • Lucene Search – New search functions that uses a Lucene text search engine. See the text
    search documentation     for details on how to use this new search. However, indexes are currently only updated once a day, so the old search
    feature is still available for when you need to find something that may have changed in the last day.
  • XMLWebservice – This new XML based web service drastically improves on the old RDF based web service by being more standards compliant and
    having a much more granular control over what data is returned for each query. Read the documentation
    how to use this new service. Please note that this is in BETA and the service is still subject to change!
  • New option to “approve” edits for auto moderators (719)
  • New links “Create relationship with this artist/album/track” and “Relate to URL” to speed up the process of
    adding AdvancedRelationships (21)
  • Adding more complete release dates is now auto moderation. (759)
  • New option to automatically subscribe to artists created by you (995)
  • Numerous improvements and bugfixes to the guess case and related Javascript tools.
    (12)
  • Subscribing to an artist redirects to the artist page, rather than the (sometimes) large list of subscribed artists
    (605)
  • More “intelligent” defaults guessing of new track artists for album moves (1015)
  • For move, artist changes and some other edits: link every participating entity in the moderation pages, and add as much information as necessary
    for checking its correctness. (610, 623 and
    920)
  • Improved Disc Id move, target album is searchable and moves are allowed for VA albums (155)
  • Reports: 2 small reports added (albums with language but no script and the other way around (621),
    simplification of the MultipleTRMsPerAlbum report for faster creation.
  • ASIN ARs now update the relevant albummeta table data as well. (1039)

Fixed bugs

  • Fixed merging of albums/artists with AdvancedRelationships (916)
  • Album Moving in batch mode will now change track artists as well (972)
  • Fixed some issues in “best match” calculation for searches (985)
  • Fixed failed moderations counter in user profile (1018)
  • Fixed bugs in ASIN AR cover image URL extraction. (1061)
  • and many more we already forgot about — please see this
    report     for all the bugs that were closed for this releases.

Thanks to everyone who helped in this release!

Planned TRM Server outage

The TRM server will be going for a multi-hour road trip to SLO tomorrow, which means that the server gets to take a break and enjoy picturesque views of the California countryside. Thus, there will be no TRM service tomorrow from between 1100 and 1200 PST (1900 GMT – 2000GMT) until about 1800 – 2000 … Continue reading “Planned TRM Server outage”

The TRM server will be going for a multi-hour road trip to SLO tomorrow, which means that the server gets to take a break and enjoy picturesque views of the California countryside. Thus, there will be no TRM service tomorrow from between 1100 and 1200 PST (1900 GMT – 2000GMT) until about 1800 – 2000 PST (0200 GMT – 0400 GMT). It should be less, but something always happens, right?

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Site move (kinda) complete

We’ve moved into the new digs! While the main services are working, we still need to clean up many loose ends. Please bear with us as we configure various bits and pieces. Thanks! Technorati Tags: colo, service

We’ve moved into the new digs! While the main services are working, we still need to clean up many loose ends. Please bear with us as we configure various bits and pieces.

Thanks!

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Service status update and upcoming release

Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started. Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the … Continue reading “Service status update and upcoming release”

Update: The move was postponed by approx. 24 hours, and has now been started.

Its been a rough week for MusicBrainz, that’s for sure. First off, about a week ago a post about MuiscBrainz bubbled to the top of digg.com and that sent masive waves of traffic to us. That died down later in the week until all those people came back on the weekend and overwhelmed the servers. Our puny, but trusted, web server zim is just stretched too thin to handle all the load thrown at it. I apologize for the down-time and random errors you’ve been seeing in the last week.

And all that is about to get worse, but then it should get much better. Today is the day that we’ll attempt to move into the new data center (colocation facility) here in SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA). Starting very shortly after this post we’ll take a stab at moving the site onto new servers that should at least double, if not triple our current capacity to handle traffic.

We expect this move to take nearly three hours, during which you should use our mirror servers (or the staging server) if you need your MusicBrainz fix:

  • http://test.musicbrainz.org
  • http://de.musicbrainz.org
  • http://nl.musicbrainz.org

Last, but not least, we have finally updated the test server with the next release scheduled to be released next sunday on 2006-03-05. This release includes:

  • Many bug reports (see trac for a list of recently closed bugs)
  • WikiDocs: The improved replacement to the first generation wiki documentation system
  • Lucene search: A much improved search facility that is faster and vastly more accurate. This first version will not search for stop words or punctuation — we’ll improve this later.
  • XML Web Service: The newly designed and much more efficient based on XML (not RDF!) goes into beta with this release. This new service is vastly improved over the last one and uses common tools and common best practices for web services. This service alone should improve the performance of our systems. For details see the web service documentation. (We’ll also have new native python bindings to go with these!)

We’ll get a much more detailed ChangeLog out as the week progresses. So, happy playing with the new features while we move the site!

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Releases: Picard and libtunepimp

We released the 0.6.0 version of Picard today — this release fixes many bugs and adds the much anticipated mp4, mpc and wma plugins! Also included in this release are support for generating cuesheets, M3U, PLS and XSPF playlists. The downloads links are: picard-0.6.0.tar.gz (*nix tarball) picard-setup-0.6.0.exe (windows installer — XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98, … Continue reading “Releases: Picard and libtunepimp”

We released the 0.6.0 version of Picard today — this release fixes many bugs and adds the much anticipated mp4, mpc and wma plugins! Also included in this release are support for generating cuesheets, M3U, PLS and XSPF playlists.

The downloads links are:

To make all the changes happen inside of Picard, we also needed to release a new version of libtunepimp:

Thanks again to Lukáš Lalinský for brining you this release!

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Two Dell Poweredge servers donated!

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with: Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors 2 Gb RAM 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller These two machines help us quite a … Continue reading “Two Dell Poweredge servers donated!”

Halsey Minor with Minor Ventures and David Ulevitch of Freedom Networks just donated two Dell Poweredge 1750 servers to the MetaBrainz Foundation! Each of these two 1U servers clocks in with:

  • Dual 2.8 Ghz Xeon processors
  • 2 Gb RAM
  • 2 Ultra 320 36Gb SCSI drives with RAID controller

These two machines help us quite a way toward our current hardware fundraising goal — now we only need to find a beefy database server and we’re ready to migrate into the colocation facility here in SLO.

Thank you so much Halsey and David — the entire MusicBrainz community will love you for your generous donation!

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Hardware wishlist & colo migration

MusicBrainz has been growing by leaps and bounds — pretty much every month is our busiest yet and our overall service is getting noticeably slower. Many moderation searches are timing out because too many tagger users are putting a heavy load on our database server. After the recent fundraiser, I started thinking about how to … Continue reading “Hardware wishlist & colo migration”

MusicBrainz has been growing by leaps and bounds — pretty much every month is our busiest yet and our overall service is getting noticeably slower. Many moderation searches are timing out because too many tagger users are putting a heavy load on our database server. After the recent fundraiser, I started thinking about how to expand the capacity that MusicBrainz has, and there is no quick fix.

This is complicated by the fact that CCCP is full and cannot accept new servers. We’re outgrowing this service and its time for us to move to a new hosting company. I am considering different options for this, but I am very much favoring a data center here in SLO. This will give Jeff Simmons (our sysadmin helper) and myself immediate access to all of our machines. Right now our machines are 200 miles away from here, which does not lend itself to quick fixes.

So, I would like to expand our capacity and move our servers closer to home at the same time. For that we need to purchase or preferably beg for more hardware. Our hardware wishlist looks like this:

  • One database class server — 2U, dual 32 Bit processors, 12GB RAM, RAID-10 SCSI with loads of fast SCSI drives (donated!)
  • Two webserver class servers — 1U, dual 32/64 bit processors (AMD preferred), 4GB RAM, SATA or SATA RAID, with SATA drives (donated!)
  • One server mobo, 2GB RAM, SATA or SATA Raid, with SATA drives (donated/purchased!)

I know, those are stiff requirements that clock in near $10k new. And I also know that I may as well be smoking crack — but hey this is a wishlist, right?

So, if someone has this killer hardware laying around or they are looking for a serious tax write-off please start by leaving a comment.

UPDATE: So much for smoking crack — this wishlist is now checked off and complete!!

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