Category: General

The heat wave in California over this past weekend fried the disks in my community mail server and I lost all the email from over the weekend. If you sent me mail over the weekend, (either to rob [fat] eorbit [dork] net or rob [fat] musicbrainz [dork] org) please re-send it so I can respond to it.

Sorry for the hassle and thanks for your understanding.

The UK mirror will be down from now (8pm BST, Noon PDT, 13 May) until about Noon BST, 4am PDT, 14 May due to scheduled power outage at last.fm where the server is hosted.

Sorry for the invconvenience!

Our FreeDB gateway has an upset table that needs mending. Inhouseuk will do that this coming Sunday, March 23rd between 09:00 – 12:00 GMT. The downtime should be less than an hour total.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. Thanks for baby-sitting the gateway, inhouseuk!

Simon Bennett-Smith shared this tip with us for using MusicBrainz with Exact Audio Copy:

I was delighted to recently discover your “MusicBrainz to FreeDB” gateway, as it is exactly what I would have wished for had I thought of it myself! However, following your directions I did encounter a problem in configuring “Exact Audio Copy” to accept the server URL:

I found that EAC will not accept a server that has been typed into the “Freedb server” box – it will only accept one from its own list of available servers, ie. one from the drop-down list.

Fortunately EAC creates this list in the Registry and it is updatable. The mb2freedb URL can be included by adding the Registry Key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAWSoftwareEACInternet OptionsHostshttp://freedb.musicbrainz.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi

From the next time EAC is started, the mb2freedb URL will be selectable from the drop-down list.

Maybe you could offer a downloadable .reg file containing, simply:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAWSoftwareEACInternet OptionsHostshttp://freedb.musicbrainz.org:80/~cddb/cddb.cgi]

@=””

I use EAC v0.95 beta3 and do not know if other versions use the same key, or even exhibit the same behaviour.

Thanks for sharing Simon!

The search server has undergone a complete overhaul and things are looking much better and much more stable now. In the last two weeks we have:

1. Upgraded the search engine to use Lucene 2.2 (we were using 1.0) I would expect a number of bugs and idiosyncrasies to go away now that we’re using an improved search engine. If you have a search bug pending, please take a minute to see if your bug still applies.
2. Removed all numbered types from the indexes. For instance, if you wanted to search for a band previously you had to search for artype:1. Now you can search for type:group or type:person. In the release search languages, scripts, countries, type and status are now indexed using text strings.
3. Purchased, installed and deployed a new search server with gobs of RAM. Searches are happening quite fast now.

For details on the new improved search syntax, please take a look at the search syntax page. If you find new bugs, please report them.

The UK Mirror is back up — thanks to Russ at last.fm for switching out the power supply on the server!

It appears that the world is slowly discovering MusicBrainz. Last month we pushed nearly 2M pages per day and smoke is pouring out of our poor search server. Fortunately we have some money in the bank so, the board of directors approved the purchase a new RAM-heavy server for use as our new search server. Then yesterday, Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress fame donated $5000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation!! That nicely covers the costs of our new search server (~$3000) and then some.

I’m also working on improving the search server so that it runs more efficiently and that we get fewer timeout errors. Things improved yesterday when I redirected all web-based searches to our new server. I hope to cut over the rest of the search traffic (web service traffic) to a better suited server later this afternoon.

In other words — I’m working hard to make sure the site stays responsive, even under the growing loads. Things should improve much more once we can deploy the new server mid-next week.

Stay tuned for more details on the changes on the search server!

Our mirror server in the UK suffered a power supply failure yesterday. The mirror will be down for at least a week as the replacement power supply finds it way to the UK. We’ll post an update once the mirror is back online.

Sorry for the hassle!

Now that the holidays are over its time to get back to work and kick MusicBrainz work back into high gear!

Its been my goal for many moons to make MetaBrainz self sufficient in order to not have to hold fundraisers in order to make ends meet. I’ve playing with these thoughts since 2002 when it looked like a business model could emerge with which to build a non-profit. And finally near the end of 2007 we reached this exciting milestone. Taking on new customers like Last.fm and the BBC made all the difference — we now have slightly more money coming in than we’re spending. We’re far from rich, but we’ve never been on more solid footing than this.

This gives me lots of hope for 2008! My plans now include trying to raise even more money so we can hire a full time server developer in order to make more progress on fixing bugs, writing new features and finally breaking ground on NGS. There is lots to do to keep things moving, but reaching sustainability is a strong vote of confidence from the universe that MusicBrainz and MetaBrainz may be up to something that could really work.

And that makes me smile. Onward!

P.S. Year end finances are more work to wrap up than usual. So, it will take longer than normal for me to post the finances for December and all of 2007.

Last.fm is now hosting the UK MusicBrainz mirror!

Big thanks to Russ and the whole Last.fm team for supporting MusicBrainz!