Category: General

Digital West (our hosting company) will be performing switch maintenance tomorrow:

Date: Saturday, 5/22/2010, 11:59 PM Pacific Time to 12:30 AM Pacific Time

Digital West will be performing necessary maintenance to our switch farm. This may result in brief losses (10 seconds to 4 minutes) of Internet connectivity between the times listed above, depending on the nature of the service you subscribe to at Digital West.

For once it won’t be our fault that you can’t reach MusicBrainz. 🙂

I’m very pleased to announce that the BBC has extracted a small chunk of its sizable Orpheus classical works database! The Orpheus database contains 114,160 works in total, with 206,179 sub-parts. The first 1000 works are serialized into XML here:

• Works
• Parties
• Forms

Some notes about this data:

1. The parties data hasn’t been matched to MusicBrainz artists yet. Nearly all composers have birth/death dates, which should help loads.
2. Works can only have a single level of sub-parts. So things like opera have the level encoded into the title of the parts.
3. There is also performance/recording information that could be included, but there might be political issues around that.
4. More reference data is available, if that is useful.
5. The party/party name mapping hasn’t been dumped properly. That can be done if it becomes a problem.
6. The dump format can be adjusted if need be.

The purpose of this data is twofold: First, I asked the BBC to provide us some data that would allow us to do a good job establishing our database of Works. As of right now we have not defined what exactly a Work in NGS is and what it will do. There are entire sets of Advanced Relationship link types linking to Works that are yet to be defined and we need to start working on those links types soon. We also need to define the list of Work types that we’ll allow in NGS.

Second, this data would be awesome to have in MusicBrainz. While we haven’t been granted access to all of this data, this is certainly a possibility moving forward. And the BBC has spent a lot of time over the years grooming this database, so we have the potential for making a great jump forward for MusicBrainz classical knowledge by importing this complete data set. But, this should be mostly a thought exercise for now – we’re not about to import any data since we have a ton of other things to do. But once we’re comfortable with our Works setup, then we can start considering if, how and when we’d integrate this data.

Big thanks to the BBC and especially Nick Humfrey who tracked down this data and obtained permission for its release!

UPDATED: The migration is complete and the data on the new instance is up to date again.

Our FreeDB gateway hosted with OSUOSL will be offline for portions of April 7th March 30 since our virtual machine is being migrated to a new physical machine.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

As we’re working hard on the next generation schema, (NGS) we’re now deep in the middle of working on the release editor. We’re working hard to embrace modern UI design concepts and we’re shooting for a clean and uncluttered look. Part of this effort will require the creation of a number of icons that fit in our new site design.

Does anyone know of an icon designer who would be willing to help us design a handful of icons? This is an important aspect of our next release, so if we need to pay for professional icon design, so be it. We would of course love to find a qualified volunteer or perhaps a designer who would be willing to give us a discount.

If you know someone, please leave a comment.