Category: General

Upcoming releases: Release groups and Next Generation Schema

In the past month there has been a ton of activity behind the scenes here at MusicBrainz and I can finally give a cohesive update on our plans for the next few months.

The much anticipated Release Groups release has been coded by Lukas in a weekend code sprint based on the old Mason codebase. Even though we had declared the old codebase as end-of-life, we have decided to push release groups out using the older code in order to satisfy the needs of the BBC and other customers. As part of this release, I will also add ISRC support and include a handful of bug fixes. Expect this release in May — I’ll post again when the date is firmly set.

And what is even more exciting is that we’re about to start work on our much anticipated Next Generation Schema (NGS). Discussed and planned over and over again, we’ve finally settled on an approach that appears to make everyone happy. As part of SoC, we’re likely going to accept Oliver and Lukas’ proposals to work on NGS over the summer. The goal is to implement all of the new schema in one release based on the TemplateToolkit/Catalyst work that Oliver has been working on since last summer. We’re going to take a step back and create a new object model/schema and then glue the TT UI onto the new object model.

The schedule puts the TT/Catalyst/NGS release into final beta test on August 31, with a release following in 15-30 days after that date. Please note, however, that there will be no other release based on Oliver’s TT work before NGS is release in September. We had to skip that release in order to pull in the schedule to make the target date of August 31.

I am quite excited by the work that is being done in the server area right now — we’re on our way to get past some significant hurdles. Just yesterday I got a first glimpse at the MusicBrainz site partially translated to Dutch — startling at first, but quite exciting when you think about it.

Many thanks to Matt Wood at the BBC for having the patience and dedication to work with MusicBrainz. Many thanks to Lukas for the coding sprint to get Release Groups off our collective plate. And of course many thanks to Oliver, Nikolai, Brian for your continuing hard work on TT. And thanks to everyone who has been supporting this team over the past few months.

Wiki Migration

Today’s the day – our wiki is being migrated to MediaWiki.  The old “moin” wiki is now read-only (and will remain so, at least for a few months), and is available on oldwiki.musicbrainz.org.  The new wiki, once all the data has been migrated across, will be at the usual address.

As soon as the migration is complete, I’ll switch wiki.musicbrainz.org over to point to MediaWiki.

Unfortunately it won’t be possible to also migrate the user accounts from moin to mediawiki, so regrettably this means that once mediawiki us up, you’ll have to re-create your accounts.  Sorry about that.

Update: the switch has been made – if you have any questions to ask or problems to report about this, please see the WikiMigration page.  Thanks!

Problem delivering mail to gmail / googlemail

This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problem is now fixed, but regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost.

This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problems started on Tuesday morning (UK time).  On Friday morning the problem was identified as a broken DNS server, which was then fixed, thus resolving the problem.

Regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost.  The number of lost messages is approximately:

  • 103 ‘subscriptions’ messages from Tuesday
  • 61 ‘subscriptions’ messages from Friday
  • 297 other messages (new user signup, edit notes, etc)

Please accept our apologies for this error.

MusicBrainz Server Roadmap

After considering all of the options and taking in tons of feedback from our developers, our community and our customers, I’ve finally settled on the following road map for the MusicBrainz server. The plan allows us to follow the release early, release often methodology and should hopefully make most people happy:

TemplateToolkit/Catalyst Release

  • Date due: Late March/April
  • Non schema change release
  • Deployed as beta.musicbrainz.org starting in early march
  • 100% features of 2008-11-23 release supported.
  • Full Guess Case supported, but no new features
  • Many UI improvements, including a generally speedier interface
  • Internationalization support: Support will be under the hood, but we may not immediately support new languages.
  • Ease of installing mb_server: Use modern tools to draw in more server developers.
  • Search improvements: CD Stubs. Possibly: Advanced Relationships, edits
  • Closing a whole host of old bugs, introducing many new ones. 🙂

This release doesn’t add many new features, but in general we feel that the user interface experience will improve so much that our end users will be happy with this new release. Also, since we’re keeping to a non-schema change release, we will be able to load this release and let people test with live data on beta.musicbrainz.org. I believe this well get more people to come help us test the new interface and hopefully have a smooth rollout of the new features.

NGS Release

  • Date due: To be determined — hopefully sometime this summer
  • Major schema change release
  • Full NGS object model under the hood.
  • Expose ReleaseGroups, if not other new NGS features
  • Keep old edit system in place

The major piece of work in this release is the new NGS schema/object model. How we graft the existing edit system on top of the new schema remains to be seen — this task contains many unknowns, which is why it was yanked from the upcoming release. We’ll end up doing more work overall by having the TT/Catalyst release first, but this approach allows us to release early, release often.

NGS Improvements releases (may be one or more releases)

  • Date due: weeks after NGS
  • Non-schema change releases
  • Bug fixes
  • Incremental improvements in NGS
  • Exposing new NGS features if the NGS release didn’t expose 100% of the new features

Depending on how we work out the NGS release, I can see smaller follow up releases that improve the NGS release or expose more portions of NGS that weren’t previously exposed. Exactly how this shapes up will not become clear until we near the NGS release.

Edit System Rewrite

  • Timeframe: To be determined
  • Schema change release
  • Improve may aspects of our edit system.

Our edit system has been straining under its current load for some time. This release will throw out the edit system entirely and build a new more flexible system that allows the user to change more data with fewer edits and allows the user to find edits easier.

If you have questions on the roadmap, please post them in the comments.

The Dashboard is back!

After the last release our new spiffy lastupdate feature that was supposed to keep track of when data in the database changed brought our database server to its knees. 🙁

The problem was that if we had an artist, we would also go update all of its releases. And if you updated a release, the artist and label had to be updated. We turned off all of the cascading updates and our server went back to normal.

Thus, for the time being updates will not cascade. If you update an artist, none of the releases or associated labels will update. In the future we will see if we can improve on this.

The good news in this is that the Dashboard feature is still useful, so I’ve turned it back on and made it live on the main server.

P.S. We just passed our 10 millionth edit!!

General update: Things are hoppin'!

A belated Happy New Year to all MusicBrainzers out there!

If things seem quiet in MusicBrainz land, don’t be fooled! The style mailing list is quite busy with activity as the style process has been rebooted. Development is happening at a frenzied pace as most developers are focusing on the server rewrite that has been in progress since summer last year. In a sense its already fulfilling one of its goals: More developers are taking a look at the improved, easier to understand and easier to install codebase. I don’t think we’ve ever had this many developers tinkering with the server source code!

We’re now in the process of coordinating a growing team of developers and charting the course for future releases. Its still too early to really tell what the next release will include exactly, but once a concrete plan starts shaping up, I’ll post an update here. Also, another team of people is hard at work at creating a new binary install of Picard for OS X. You can follow all the happenings on the developers mailing list.

Finally, the MetaBrainz Foundation, the legal entity that pays the bills for MusicBrainz made it through another year of being self sufficient! In 2008 the non-profit earned $126,442.26 and spent $94,717.79. Now we have $30,000 more in the bank than we did this time last year. This finally gives us money to spend on development to move MusicBrainz along! For all the details on how we earned/spent our money, check out our finances page and our 2008 Profit and Loss statement.

Finally, the BBC continues to tout the virtues of MusicBrainz: BBC Music talking semantics

Onward into an exciting 2009 we go!

Connectivity problems resolved

A few of you have reported problems with connectivity to the MusicBrainz site in the last week. With help from various people in Canada and Europe we’ve been able to provide information for Digital West (our provider) to fix the problem. As of 11:38 PST the problem was fixed.

If you are still experiencing problems, please post a comment here or open a bug in our bug tracker.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!

New customer: Cloudspeakers in Utrecht

I’m pleased to announce that I signed a new customer in the Netherlands yesterday! I met the Cloudspeakers team in Utrecht and spent a day discussing their business and how Cloudspeakers can work with MusicBrainz in the future.

After many conversations during the day, we ceremoniously signed the data license contract over an elegant and extremely tasty Indonesian meal. A day well spent!

A big thanks to Chris, Stan, Adriaan, Charlie and Francis! Thanks for inviting me, paying for meals and even my flight to the Netherlands. I look forward to working with you!

Reminder: Server update is coming this Sunday. And TRM are going away!

I’d like to remind everyone that the next server release is scheduled for this Sunday November 23. We’re still working on scheduling for the release, but it will happen on Sunday. Expect the MusicBrainz to be unavailable for at least 1 hour.

Also, please be aware that with this release the TRM server will be decommissioned — the Classic Tagger will then be officially deprecated, but it should continue to work — even without TRM support.