Category: General

Our move to the shiny new Sun server is finally complete! I’m pleased to announce that the new server is largely bored with the traffic we’re throwing at it right now — which is exactly what I had hoped for. This gives us a lot of room to grow our database.

Thanks again for the kind donation Sun Microsystems!!

I’m pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $30,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! This doubles the amount that Google gave us last year and reinforces Google’s commitment to supporting MusicBrainz. Combined with Google’s Summer of Code Project, Google is supporting MusicBrainz to the tune of $45,000 for 2007!

This donation will allow us to:

• Hold Summit 8 that will build on and review the work done in Summit 7 and lay out a concrete roadmap for implementing the Next Generation Schema. MetaBrainz will pay for key players to attend this upcoming summit.
• Increase the salary for Robert Kaye to more competitive rate.
• Hire a part time developer to work on MusicBrainz and drive the implementation of the Next Generation Schema.

Thank you very much Google! Thank you to Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn and Tiffany Griffith at Google’s Open Source group.

Our previous hardware wishlist is now fully checked off — thanks to Minor Ventures and Sun Microsystems for making that happen!

But, as we grow we will always need more hardware, so I want to post a new wishlist for 2007. Here are the things that MusicBrainz needs:

• A 24, 32 or 48 port Gigabit switch with VLAN support. Example: HP ProCurve 2900-24G
• A number of 80pin U320 SCSI drives 73G or larger: Example: Cheetah 10K.7 Ultra320 SCSI 73-GB Hard Drive

If you work for a company (or have a friend who does) that makes switches or hard drives, please consider hitting up the company for a donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation. Equipment donations are tax-deductible and I would be happy to give the donating company a tax-write off receipt!

UPDATE: James points out that Cisco has a program that makes donations to orgs like us. Could I convince anyone to volunteer to contract Cisco and apply for a grant on behalf of MetaBrainz??

Jaikoz MP3 Tag Editor is the newest member of our tagger affiliate program!

Paul Taylor has recently released a new version of his tagger and has agreed to join our affiliate program. With Jaikoz joining, I’ve laid down the details of the affiliate program so that others can participate in this program. If you are interested in finding out more about the program, please read our Tagger Affiliate Program page.

Welcome aboard Paul!

UPDATE: Paul points out that he has been paying 10% for a couple of years now and that taggers should kick down 10% was his idea in the first place.

After 9 days of frustrating work to replace our failing main web server, we’ve implemented plan K (plans A – J failed!). Plan K involved making a previously unreliable server (lingling) reliable again by installing software RAID and then moving all of the services onto this machine. We just finished with that and the new web server seems to be handling the load well so far.

Now its up to Dell to fix our server — fortunately, much to my surprise, we still have a service contract on that machine. So, its up to Dell to diagnose and fix the box and then we’ll put it back into rotation. Also, Steve Wyles (inhouseuk) has agreed to lend a hand in diagnosing the issues on moose, the new Sun Server — we’re suspecting a copy of Solaris that is too old to handle this new architecture.

So, expect more downtime in the future as we shuffle fixed machines back into rotation. Hopefully we’ll be able to proceed with a more sane pace from here on out.

Once again, giant kudos to Dave Evans for all his hard work! Thanks Dave!

I’m very pleased to announce that Sun Microsystems has donated at beefy database server to the MetaBrainz Foundation!

This 2U rackmount server comes with 12GB RAM, two dual-core AMD processors (2216) @2.4Ghz, 4 SAS 73GB Drives, dual power supplies and enough fans to make a complete racket. And, to top it all off its really sweet looking and made by Sun, the legendary makers of reliable hardware!

I bet some of you are wondering why Sun would simply donate a $11k server to the MetaBrainz foundation, right? Well, during a session break at the Future of Music Policy Summit in Montréal Paul Lamere from Sun Research came up to me and introduced himself: “Hi! I’m Paul Lamere from Sun Research and we love the MusicBrainz data — is there anything we can do to help?”

Our hardware wish-list still had a powerful database server on it and knowing how I want to grow MusicBrainz this new server was becoming more important all the time. So I expressed my desire for a new database server and Paul and I continued to talk quite a bit about this during our stay in Montréal. In the coming weeks Paul made a concerted effort to stay on point and continuously follow up on the donation process. From the time we first spoke about the possible donation until we actually had hardware in hand was only about 10 weeks time — an amazingly fast process — I was expecting a 6 month lead time for something this large.

This new server will allow us to free up the existing database server to be another web server front end. Stimpy our front-end web server has been showing signs of being overloaded (hence the recent couple of downtimes. 🙁 ) and bringing online another front end for all of our web service queries will spread the load over more machines. The only downside is that we need to purchase more power since we’re at our max for our current contract.

I’m quite excited by this development. This database server gives us room to grow features and the number of users we can handle at the same time. We have more hard drives to spread the load across and room to easily grow the memory to 16GB (or even 32GB, but at greater cost). I think this machine is going to be our workhorse server for the next few years.

Thank you Paul Lamere, Sun Research, Sun Microsystems — we deeply appreciate your support of MusicBrainz!

P.S. It has been suggested that a dedicated MusicBrainz editor be give then chance to name the new machine. If you have someone in mind, please post a comment below.

Technorati Tags: donations, metabrainz

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking more about how to fund a developer to work on MusicBrainz server features full time. Part of that thinking was taking a critical look at our traffic and our donations. Here is a graph of our overall traffic to musicbrainz.org:

Aside from a traffic spike in Dec 2005/Jan 2006, our traffic is steadily increasing, which means our bandwidth/hosting bill is also increasing. It used to be that donations covered our bandwidth/hosting costs, but that hasn’t been the case since we switched to the new hosting facility in February of this year. Our donations per month (excluding larger “special occasion” donations) are shown below:

Compared to our traffic, there is much more variability here and aside the “special occasion” big ticket donation (from Google, MusicIP, Cory Doctorow, etc) our donations from end users have shrunk, if anything. I would like to increase our rate of donations so that we can have donations cover our traffic costs again and have our licensing income go towards paying people to work on MusicBrainz.

I know that we’re not trying hard enough to solicit donations from our tagger users. Back in the day before Dave implemented auto pruning on the TRM server, the TRM server would slow down and tagger users would get a “we need more hardware, donate please” message. This would result in a wave of donations from users. To me, this shows that tagger users will respond if forced to. Our “please donate” nag dialog on the tagger is not effective in getting enough people to dig around in their wallets and make a donation to MusicBrainz.

My first approach to nagging users more to donate is to add a nag screen to the taglookup.html page that looks up a file in case the file has no PUID or TRM fingerprint. This page is most likely in use by people tagging their music collections and less so by people focusing on editing MusicBrainz.

Currently, people who donate $10 will receive no nag screen in Picard for six months and I think I’d like to apply this rule here as well. Also, other prolific contributors to MusicBrainz will also not receive the nag screen (via the seekrit NoNag flag on user’s accounts). Before I tromp off to implement this, I’d like to ask you for some feedback:

1. What do you think of this idea in general?
2. Do you think that six months no nag is a fair deal for $10?
3. How do you think we should implement this nag screen?

My first idea is to have a nag panel appear over (and deliberately obscure) the taglookup results every 5 lookups. The nag panel will require people to click on the panel to fully be able to view the results. If the user has JavaScript turned off, the nag panel will be shown above the results and lots of white space will be shown below the nag panel, requiring the user to scroll down to view the results.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks for all your feedback! I’ve starting coding the nag dialog and also started the process of getting another credit card processing company. So far I’ve gotten a quote that should be reasonably competitive to PayPal — if this goes through we’ll be offering people the choice to donate with their credit card via this new company or via PayPal. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: donations, metabrainz

The FreeDB import feature is currently broken due to FreeDB.org being switched over to MAGIX (whatever that means). This switch was less than elegant since it seems that the old port 888 method for retrieving the CD info and web searches have been switched off.

Currently the MusicBrainz server uses the old port 888 method, so we need to code the server to retrieve data via HTTP. freedb2.org has web searching features, so we’re going to be switching over to use them instead of freedb.org.

In the meantime, you can use the track parser to import CDs from FreeDB. Sorry for the inconvenience!

UPDATE: Seems to be working now. Let’s see if things hold.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz

MusicIP just donated $500 to offset the cost of me traveling to the Future of Music Summit in Montreal this week! Thanks Matthew Dunn and the rest of the MusicIP team!

If you haven’t played with MusicIP’s offering, I would suggest you go check it out — their MusicIP Mixer is an awesome tool that lets you make playlists based on the acoustic analysis of your music. Its a great tool for rediscovering your own music collection!

Technorati Tags: metabrainz, music ip, musicbrainz

MusicBrainz will not be reachable for about 5 minutes starting tomorrow Sept 20th at midnight, PDT. Digital West is reconfiguring their network during this time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz