Category: Development

MusicBrainz web service: Time to adopt a Tos?

I recently got word that at least one for-profit company (who shall remain nameless right now) is/was using the MusicBrainz web service in their paid commercial offering. Personally, I don’t think its OK for a for-profit company to be consuming the resources of a non-profit — we make all of our data and software available … Continue reading “MusicBrainz web service: Time to adopt a Tos?”

I recently got word that at least one for-profit company (who shall remain nameless right now) is/was using the MusicBrainz web service in their paid commercial offering. Personally, I don’t think its OK for a for-profit company to be consuming the resources of a non-profit — we make all of our data and software available for companies to download and use for free (as in speech and beer). If someone wants to use our data for their product, they should do it with their own resources.

For the first set version of the Terms of Service, I would like to keep things simple and not add too many rules. Given that I would like to solicit feedback about adopting the following Terms of Service for the web service:

I’d like to get some feedback on this, so please leave a comment:

  • Does this make sense philosophically?
  • Do you spot any problems with this setup?
  • What else should we consider?

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The impending quasi-death of Style Guideline #5

On January 8th, 2006 we will update the server with the Style Guideline 5 Disaster Relief fix that was discussed at the MusicBrainz Summit 7. From the wiki page: The plans are as follows: Allow albums with various artists on the tracks but which are attributed to one artist to be moved to this artist. … Continue reading “The impending quasi-death of Style Guideline #5”

On January 8th, 2006 we will update the server with the Style Guideline 5 Disaster Relief fix that was discussed at the MusicBrainz Summit 7.

From the wiki page:

The plans are as follows:

Allow albums with various artists on the tracks but which are attributed to one artist to be moved to this artist.

Change the StyleGuideline like this: “If two or more primary artists perform on a track, create a collaboration artist for them and attach the track to it.”

Note, that the use of “feat.” will still be valid for guest performing artists.

For more information on this change, please read the wiki page. These changes are now live on the staging server if you want to give them a try.

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libmusicbrainz and libtunepimp test releases

On the excessively long road to the next stable Picard release I need to do a stable release of libmusicbrainz and libtunepimp. Both of those are now complete with all the bug fixes that I want to get into these before the next release. If you run Linux or Mac OS X, please take a moment to download, compile, test and install these two tarballs:

  1. libmusicbrainz-2.1.2-pre1.tar.gz (Changelog)
  2. libtunepimp-0.4.0-pre6.tar.gz (Changelog)

Please note that the independent python bindings for libmusicbrainz have been wrapped back into libmusicbrainz itself and can be found in the python directory of the tarball. libmusicbrainz has a new example program called getrels that shows how to retrieve AR links via the web service. libtunepimp has undergone major changes and now sports a plug in system that will make it easier to add more formats.

Unless these tarballs have major issues, I plan to update the version numbers to 2.1.2 and 0.4.0, respectively, and release them in the coming days. Then I’ll focus on getting stable release of Picard out the door.

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Server mini update

We just updated the server with a set of minor bug fixes. Mostly formatting and appearance bugs have been fixed and new preferences to control how the top menu works have been added. That’s it — happy brainzing!

We just updated the server with a set of minor bug fixes. Mostly formatting and appearance bugs have been fixed and new preferences to control how the top menu works have been added. That’s it — happy brainzing!

Server updated finally!

The server has been updated – this release includes a redesigned navigation system, changes to the Autofix (a.k.a. Guess Case) tool and Album Editor. Track durations can now be edited and a number of smaller bugs have been fixed. A big thanks goes out to g0llum, lukz, matt and djce for making this release a … Continue reading “Server updated finally!”

The server has been updated – this release includes a redesigned navigation system, changes to the Autofix (a.k.a. Guess Case) tool and Album Editor. Track durations can now be edited and a number of smaller bugs have been fixed.

A big thanks goes out to g0llum, lukz, matt and djce for making this release a reality. Now that we have this pesky re-org release out of the way, we hope to bring you several more releases before the end of the year.

Continue reading “Server updated finally!”

Server Updates

The server has been updated once again, bringing you Album Languages, completely rewritten Guess Case functionality, fancy-looking input forms and a few bug fixes. Read on for the full change log…

The server has been updated once again, bringing you Album Languages,
completely rewritten Guess Case functionality, fancy-looking input forms
and a few bug fixes.

Read on for the full change log…

Continue reading “Server Updates”

Wikidocs server release

We just updated the main server with improved and updated documentation and improved news item handling. This release allows us to delegate the documentation tasks of MusicBrainz to a greater number of people, which should keep our documentation more up to date. Wikidocs A number of static web pages for documentation and other content that … Continue reading “Wikidocs server release”

We just updated the main server with improved and updated documentation and improved news item handling. This release allows us to delegate the documentation tasks of MusicBrainz to a greater number of people, which should keep our documentation more up to date.

Wikidocs

A number of static web pages for documentation and other content that goes stale over time, has been replaced with a set of wiki pages. To accomplish this, we’ve created a separate new wiki that is accessible to a handful of brainerz who have volunteered as documentation experts. All of the pages in this wiki are camouflaged so that the end user doesn’t really see that it is a wiki. Visitors with an untrained eye should not notice that our documentation is now served via a wiki — the end user will just see that the wikidoc pages have a prefix of /wd.

Blog news and release notes

The Movable Type blog software is now used to publish release notes (such as this one) and general news entries. This centralizes the news into one convenient place where we can give measured access to various people in the community. It also removes some of the clutter that has built up in the main web page.

MetaBrainz and financial pages

The MetaBrainz web page has been launched and all financial pages have been moved there. More on this tomorrow during the official launch!

Changes of interest to developers

Dave Evans says:

Replication: changed DB_IS_REPLICATED to REPLICATION_TYPE – finer degree
of control. When importing data into a slave, refuse to import
non-replicated tables. Rewrote the replication slave code to be more
robust, and slightly faster.

Other minor fixes for when running as a slave.

committed a patch by Lukas Lalinsky to avoid a server trip when changing
artist type

Fixed very minor date-related error in RelationshipBox