Category: Search Server

MusicBrainz search upgrades, 2025-05-29

After last year’s migration of the Solr back-end powering the search features of musicbrainz.org to a new cluster running major version 9, and last week’s database schema change, here is a pack of search upgrades affecting both musicbrainz.org and the MusicBrainz mirror.

For users, a new search field mediumid is available for the advanced release search, the MBID of artist credits and mediums is added to the output of the search API, and the barcode search field is now ignoring spaces. These improvements are fairly minor compared to the rest of the upgrades which unlock further development of the search components.

For mirror owners, SolrCloud 9 is now available, along with an improved indexer and scripts to load backups from musicbrainz.org and an improved indexer. Also Docker Compose 2 is now required. Actually, those are the changes from last autumn’s announcement. Solr 7 will remain available for one more month starting from now, buying some transition time. A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is available that matches these search component changes. See the v-2025-05-29.0-solr9 release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to Krikooo, JoshDi, mglubb, nelgin, and PeterCodar for their feedback.

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MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-06-24

You may notice some exciting changes to event pages today. We’ll be making a proper announcement of the “EAA” in a separate post soon. 🙂

We have several other bug fixes and improvements as part of today’s release, plus a new report about video recordings for editors.

In the back-end, we’re making better use of our PostgreSQL standby, which should help with scalability. Development-wise, we’ve done a lot of JavaScript refactoring and upgrading of dependencies.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to JadedBlueEyes for aligning release titles in release groups. Thanks to Aerozol, atj, chaban, Chiark, Mathias Kunter, RVMWSN, sammyrayy, UltimateRiff, VBZPPlNQyJ, wileyfoxyx, yindesu and zas for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ApeKattQuest, BestSteve, BlueCamille, Felipe Silva, kellnerd, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, wileyfoxyx, yyb987, and Zetas70, for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-06-24.

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MusicBrainz search upgraded to Solr 9

Earlier this week the Solr back-end that powers the search functionality of the MusicBrainz website and REST API was migrated to a new cluster running version 9.6.1. This brings a much needed increase in stability and performance, and opens up future possibilities for search feature improvements.

A migration path to SolrCloud 9 will be provided for mirrors as soon as possible. In the meantime we will continue to provide pre-built search indexes compatible with Solr 7. Once a migration path is available the indexes will be provided in the new backup format introduced in Solr 8.9.

MusicBrainz schema change release, 2022-05-16 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2022 schema change today! Thanks to all who were patient during today’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers, and thanks to ikerm2003, mfmeulenbelt rinmon and salo.rock for updating the translations.

This is once again a fairly minor release as far as schema changes go, but please do report any issues that you come across, especially related to the propagation of ratings and tags.

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MusicBrainz servers update, December 2020

Let’s end the year 2020 on a brighter note with new releases of both MusicBrainz Server and its companions for advanced indexed search.

The most urgent task was to lower the risk of leaking private data again (see previous incident) by reducing the scope of editor data passed to the renderer.

The most visible improvement of the website is the addition of instrument illustrations by IROM. Thanks to him for these very welcomed drawings. See sistrum for an example; we will keep adding illustrations to other instruments little by little.

The most useful improvements to the API are the addition of their first release date to recordings (both in lookup and search) and release groups (which were missing it in search results), and the addition of MBIDs for artists’ gender and releases’ status.

Advanced indexed search has also been improved to allow searching for releases by type of packaging, for recordings and release groups by first release date, and to simplify searching for releases by type of medium’s format.

Finally, a fair number of smaller bugs have also been fixed, and React conversion is being continued.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to amCap1712 for fixing a pair of bugs in outputting search API results, and jesus2099 for fixing a bug in seeding the release editor. Thanks to avilla, CatQuest, chaban, jgrmstr, jstranger, Lotheric, loujin, nikki, Psychoadept, and serg for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, mfmeulenbelt, and salorock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tags are v-2020-11-12 for MusicBrainz XML Metadata Schema, v-2020-12-14 for MusicBrainz Server, v-2020-12-24 for MusicBrainz Simple Solr Search Server Schema, v2.0.0 for Search Index Rebuilder, and v3.4.1 for MusicBrainz Solr Query/Response Writer.

Bug

  • [MBS-4555] – Seeding the release editor when logged out loses the seeded information
  • [MBS-8438] – The same event is displayed twice on an artist’s “Events” tab if they have multiple roles on it
  • [MBS-10664] – Regression: HTML tags are incorrectly displayed in editor’s bio
  • [MBS-11092] – Some issue with userscripts/plugins and beta site
  • [MBS-11169] – Artist credit doesn’t display properly in release pages when credits are at the bottom of the release instead of inline
  • [MBS-11207] – Error messages from DBI are badly encoded
  • [MBS-11212] – Incorrect quality attribute in “ws/2/release”
  • [MBS-11214] – Relationships with different link order not split on “see at bottom” medium rels display
  • [MBS-11220] – Release editor seeding is displayed in wrong language
  • [MBS-11223] – Releases with “unknown tracklist” on a medium failed to load in the “Edit Relationships” tab
  • [MBS-11227] – Unexpected URL used when removing release groups from merge queue
  • [SEARCH-623] – Gender ID is missing from JSON/XML artist search results
  • [SEARCH-624] – Status ID is missing from release in JSON/XML search results

Improvement

  • [MBS-1424] – Add a “First release date” field to recordings
  • [MBS-11188] – Block smart links: “album.link”
  • [MBS-11224] – Releases with no medium should show a clear message in the relationship editor
  • [MBS-11225] – Make “staticbrainz.org/irombook/” URLs autoselect for image relationship
  • [MBS-11271] – Reduce the scope of editor data passed to the template renderer
  • [SEARCH-319] – Add first release date to the results of indexed search for release groups
  • [SEARCH-574] – Make release’s format search field insensitive to spaces and separators

New Feature

  • [MBS-10590] – Allow displaying IROMBOOK instrument images on MusicBrainz
  • [MBS-11216] – Split report “InstrumentsWithoutWikidata” from “InstrumentsWithoutAnImage”
  • [SEARCH-218] – Add first release date to the fields and results of indexed search for recordings
  • [SEARCH-384] – Add first release date to the fields of indexed search for release-groups
  • [SEARCH-590] – Add packaging to the fields of indexed search for releases

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-11018] – Convert Add Relationship Type edit to React
  • [MBS-11211] – Convert the login page to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-10634] – Rework the “Instruments without an image” report to only look at IROMBOOK images
  • [MBS-11210] – Allow more subpaths for “saisaibatake.ame-zaiku.com”

MusicBrainz Server update, 2020-10-19

Today’s MusicBrainz Server brings a new data report, a continued conversion to React, some bugfixes and small improvements, but also tests refactoring.

Meanwhile, the search server has been updated twice in a row to fix bugs in JSON output mostly with MB Solr 3.2 (release notes) and MB Solr 3.3 (release notes), including the MusicBrainz API breaking change announced last month.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to amCap1712 for fixing bugs in MB Solr, and to loujine for contributing code with yet a new data report. Thanks to Avamander, bonchiver_, chaban, draconx, eloise_freya, GTF1982, hawke, hibiscuskazeneko, jesus2099, jrv, kellnerd, Kid Devine, Psychoadept, selflessself, and wcw1966 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt, and salorock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2020-10-19.

Bug

  • [MBS-10221] – Track Parser not filling in artists
  • [MBS-11149] – Misspelling of the word “misspellings”
  • [MBS-11150] – Add CD-TOC wrongly defaults to last listed artist when none selected
  • [MBS-11156] – Track parser unsets “Various Artists” track artist credits
  • [MBS-11162] – Work type description bubble starts as default even if type is selected
  • [MBS-11174] – Editor profile added entities: Missing Add release edit type 216
  • [MBS-11176] – Heading of the release group section in the external links sidebar has disappeared

Improvement

  • [MBS-5225] – Allow showing tracklists everywhere when attaching/viewing discIDs
  • [MBS-7256] – Add “Expand all mediums” option to the release page
  • [MBS-8725] – Allow mediums to have an unknown tracklist
  • [MBS-11115] – Show detailed information when attaching disc IDs
  • [MBS-11139] – Use HTTPS for display on Library of Congress links
  • [MBS-11163] – Show type descriptions when editing entities
  • [MBS-11165] – Update the VK logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-11167] – Normalize vk.com links to HTTPS
  • [MBS-11173] – When deleting users, change their No and Yes votes on pending edits to Abstain

New Feature

  • [MBS-11117] – Report for mediums with very long durations from discID

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-11141] – Convert Edit Relationship edit to React
  • [MBS-11152] – Convert entity/ratings page to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-11148] – Remove Google Play links from the sidebar

MusicBrainz Server update, 2020-09-21

React conversion tasks are conspicuously absent from today’s release, but that’s just because we needed to take some time to get it all working with the recent refactoring. This new server update mainly brings strong security improvements for the OAuth service. It also comes with a fair amount of smaller bugfixes and improvements. The most noticeable of these probably are the added details to the merge recordings’ form and the statistics by entity type on editors’ profile pages.

Announcement for MusicBrainz API users: A small but breaking change will be deployed on October 19th (in one month from now), to fix the JSON formatting of release packaging in search results (SEARCH-579).

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to kellnerd and loujine for contributing code. Thanks to calculator.ftvb, chaban, hibiscuskazeneko, jesus2099, kellnerd, lalinksy, psychoadept, rdswift, and spitzwegerich for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to jesus2099, kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt, outsidecontext, and salorock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2020-09-21.

Bug

  • [MBS-10880] – Series automatic ordering (without numbers) fails for new release group
  • [MBS-11065] – Smart link blocks affecting legitimate links
  • [MBS-11069] – Diff highlighting not visible for certain display resolutions
  • [MBS-11098] – Big Cartel URLs are denied for labels
  • [MBS-11101] – Series relationships not showing for work series

Improvement

  • [MBS-2768] – Display AcoustIDs, Annotation and any other useful info when merging recordings
  • [MBS-7473] – Adding a new discid: Allow to specify the target by its releaseid
  • [MBS-11017] – Normalize IMSLP URLs to HTTPS and add validation
  • [MBS-11058] – Tighten security of OAuth service
  • [MBS-11061] – Don’t allow MusicBrainz URLs in relationships
  • [MBS-11062] – Link basic how-tos from the front page
  • [MBS-11086] – Add icon for tabs with errors in release editor
  • [MBS-11109] – Block further more smart links
  • [MBS-11119] – Set a Content-Security-Policy header on account/admin related forms

New Feature

  • [MBS-7485] – OAuth token revokation through API
  • [MBS-9769] – Show entities added statistics on editor profile page
  • [MBS-10835] – Disallow creating new accounts with an e-mail already in use
  • [MBS-11097] – Support PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) by OAuth clients

Task

  • [MBS-10921] – Clear editing history of unrelated recording-of relationship edits

MusicBrainz Server update, 2020-06-02

Now that PostgreSQL has been upgraded to version 12 (see earlier instructions), regular improvements, bugfixes, and React/JSX template refactoring are back on the menu. The most noticeable improvement is probably that we are now able to display more specific error messages in the URL relationship editor when a link is not allowed, instead of always giving a generic “not good”-style message. There are even new features, for admins only, that will allow them to spot and delete sock-puppets and to temporarily disable edit notes from editors who continue to be disrespectful to others without having to delete their accounts outright.

In news not directly connected to the MusicBrainz website, the public search endpoint has been moved from the old search server to the Solr-based search server. This can be used by slave servers if they do not need, or can not afford, to host their own search indexes.

And while talking about slave servers, a new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available. It follows this update of MusicBrainz Server and fixes a regression that affects servers with live indexing. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to Cyna for converting more edits’ display to React, to KamranMackey and navap for updating external links’ icons. Thanks to alastairp, BestSteve, chaban, chirlu, cyberskull, Freso, hibiscuskazeneko, jesus2099, and Kid Devine for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to eduardomariohs, kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt, salorock, and stich94 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2020-06-02.

Bug

  • [MBS-9010] – Alerts about new edit notes are separate for production and beta
  • [MBS-10613] – Version info footer is shown on some pages in production
  • [MBS-10732] – Internal Server Error: Adding a collaborator to a collection without selecting from autocomplete dropdown
  • [MBS-10839] – “Add selected recordings for merging” missing in standalone-only overview
  • [MBS-10849] – Add release group preview on RE shows “This entity has been removed”
  • [MBS-10850] – Bad Amazon URLs report doesn’t ignore “streaming page” relationship
  • [MBS-10855] – Historic track edit involving since-removed entity doesn’t show recording
  • [MBS-10863] – “Edit barcode” edit doesn’t show barcode

New Feature

  • [MBS-10834] – New account flag for disabling ability to write edit notes
  • [MBS-10845] – Tool to allow account admins to look up accounts by e-mail

Improvement

  • [MBS #1516] – Update Facebook, Google Play, and Spotify icons
  • [MBS-7822] – Update OverClocked ReMix favicon
  • [MBS-8412] – Align number of edits per page
  • [MBS-9516] – Display specific error messages depending on URL validation rules
  • [MBS-9963] – Update Genius link format and logo
  • [MBS-10412] – Update URL cleanup for Niconico URLs, specifically channel links for artists
  • [MBS-10727] – Deny kasi-time.com URLs for lyrics
  • [MBS-10789] – Add validation for Genius links
  • [MBS-10813] – Update the Bandcamp logo used in the sidebar
  • [MBS-10831] – Allow niconico channel links for other entities than artist
  • [MBS-10840] – Capitalise “in key” info correctly in English guess case
  • [MBS-10841] – Add “Guess case” per-medium
  • [MBS-10842] – Remove report user link from deleted editor profiles
  • [MBS-10853] – Link to overview page for edits by subscribed editors in subscription email

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-10397] – Convert Edit Event edit to React
  • [MBS-10399] – Convert Edit Recording edit to React
  • [MBS-10793] – Convert historic Move Release edit to React
  • [MBS-10799] – Convert historic Move Release to RG edit to React
  • [MBS-10817] – Convert Edit Label edit to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-7781] – Merge duplicate artist credits
  • [MBS-10785] – Remove link to FreeDB Gateway documentation
  • [MBS-10822] – Change tableColumns tables to use named parameters
  • [MBS-10860] – Merge the production and beta Redis stores
  • [MBS-10878] – Convey search queries from slave servers to Solr

MusicBrainz Docker composes with Solr 7

The MusicBrainz virtual machine is dead, long live the MusicBrainz Docker Compose project. In fact, the virtual machine has been running it for years. Mostly because the data loaded with the virtual machine was too soon obsolete, it doesn’t seem worth it anymore. Plus, new search indexes are much larger than before, and using Docker Compose directly is much more versatile.

The MusicBrainz Docker Compose project has been deeply revamped since two years ago and now ships the new search server based on Solr 7. It can be used for mirroring the MusicBrainz website and database, testing your own app with a local MusicBrainz web service, or developing the MusicBrainz Server itself. Check out the release notes!

Thanks to everyone who reported issues and contributed patches for two years!