Category: General

New advanced relationship: MySpace artist URL

(In an effort to spread the news about changes to the Advanced Relationship link types, I’m posting this and hopefully future changes here). Lukas has just added an Advanced Relationship that lets users link artists to their MySpace pages: forward: has a MySpace page at reverse: is a MySpace page for description: This relationship type … Continue reading “New advanced relationship: MySpace artist URL”

(In an effort to spread the news about changes to the Advanced Relationship link types, I’m posting this and hopefully future changes here).

Lukas has just added an Advanced Relationship that lets users link artists to their MySpace pages:

  • forward: has a MySpace page at
  • reverse: is a MySpace page for
  • description: This relationship type can be used to link a MusicBrainz artist to the equivalent entry in MySpace. Please, use URLs in format http://www.myspace.com/[artist]

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New fingerprinting questions answered

As promised, here and some answers to most common questions: “Is there a contact at MusicDNS?” — Yes, use this link. A contact us page will be added soon. “libofa doesn’t build on OS X” — the first rev, 0.9.1 with the first patch included will be posted later today. Stay tuned — this should … Continue reading “New fingerprinting questions answered”

As promised, here and some answers to most common questions:

  • “Is there a contact at MusicDNS?” — Yes, use this link. A contact us page will be added soon.
  • “libofa doesn’t build on OS X” — the first rev, 0.9.1 with the first patch included will be posted later today. Stay tuned — this should also build on OS X.
  • “Are there plans to implement the Creative Commons sampling license options?” — Yes. I’ll add that and the Public Domain ‘license’ later today.
  • “What does PUID stand for?” — They are Portable Unique Identifiers.
  • “How do I get a PUID into the fingerprinting system?” — Right now you need to use the MusicIP Mixer (free) to analyze the track to get a PUID generated for any tracks that do not have PUIDs yet. PUIDs should become visible to MusicBrainz within 24 hours. This is far from perfect, but all we could get done for now. We’ll improve this before too long.
  • “It’s nice that we have an alternative to TRM now, but I’m disappointed that this is a one-way relationship.” — Thats not quite accurate. Our partnership is focused on creating a balanced relationship, but there is a limit to what we were able to accomplish for this initial release. We’ll be working on improving this soon.
  • “When will a version for OS X be available?” — Hard to say. One of the underlying toolkits still has a number of bugs that prevent us from releasing it on the Mac. Hopefully I’ll have some time to look into this soon.
  • “Maybe an obvious question (or answer), but does this excellent news mean I’ll have to re-tag all my files?” — No. The fingerprints are only used to resolve the proper metadata. Once the tagger identifies the right track, it writes MusicBrainz ids to the files, which have not changed.
  • “Since the accoustic fingerprint is opensource is there a role that MusicIP NEEDS to play?” — There is a server component to this as well but that is not open source. Without the server, the client portion is less than useful.
  • “How well does it compared to TRM?” — It should have a lot fewer duplicates and collisions than TRM. But really, time will tell. Let’s start using it and we’ll see how well it works. I do know that the PUIDs won’t have to be trimmed to keep the service alive, so this is already a drastic improvement.

Let me know if there are more questions!

(Update: The support link is now fixed.)

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New fingerprinting technology available now!

I’m pleased to announce that as of right now, we have a new acoustic fingerprint provider! MusicBrainz has teamed up with MusicIP (formerly Predixis) and has integrated their MusicDNS service into MusicBrainz’ Picard Tagger. Version 0.7.0-beta1 is available for download right now! This partnership with MusicIP promises to be beneficial for both MusicBrainz and MuiscIP. … Continue reading “New fingerprinting technology available now!”

I’m pleased to announce that as of right now, we have a new acoustic fingerprint provider! MusicBrainz has teamed up with MusicIP (formerly Predixis) and has integrated their MusicDNS service into MusicBrainz’ Picard Tagger. Version 0.7.0-beta1 is available for download right now!

This partnership with MusicIP promises to be beneficial for both MusicBrainz and MuiscIP. The rough overview of our new relationship looks like this:

MusicIP provides:

  • Free fingerprint lookup services for official MusicBrainz projects. The fingerprint services are entirely hosted by MusicIP, which removes the burden of hosting service that is only tangential to our mission.
  • A GPL/APL licensed fingerprinting client library (Open Fingerprint Architecture Library aka libofa) that is ready to integrate into new applications today!
  • Other projects that wish to integrate fingerprinting services into their applications will need to sign up with the MusicDNS service. This service is free for non-profit projects (musicdns.org), and price-tiered for commercial projects such that even small startups have access. For more details, please visit MusicDNS.org.
  • $10,000 held in escrow for MusicBrainz, plus contractual commitment to supply hardware resources should MusicIP exit the fingerprinting business. This is designed to allow us to continue the service should they decide to stop providing the service.
  • a 10% cut on all income earned from fingerprinting queries where MusicBrainz metadata is provided via the MusicDNS service.
  • 800K acoustic fingerprint ids (PUIDs) that which are already loaded into our DB.
  • Travel, lodging and registration costs for myself to attend the SXSW

    conference, where all of this is being announced and released.
  • Allow us to exhibit in the MusicIP booth at SXSW this week. Including displaying our logo!

MusicBrainz provides:

  • One free live data feed for MusicIP’s use.
  • The right for MusicIP to sub-license the MusicBrainz data to their customers as part of their product offering — at full list price. MusicIP takes no cut.
  • Community support of the Open Fingerprint Architecture library. Many of the exact details on where the source code will live still need to be worked out over the next few weeks.

As you can see, the deck is stacked much in our favor. MusicIP has gone above and beyond the call of duty to setup this relationship. We’re all very excited by this new partnership, since it extends our reach into the commercial realm and welcomes MusicIP into the open source world. We are also announcing a partnership with the Creative Commons where MusicBrainz will now be able to track Creative Commons licenses.

Due to all of this, there has been a lot of frantic development at MusicBrainz over the last 8 weeks. Moving to a new colocation facility, more bandwidth, more servers, a new web service and a new text search were all in preparation for today. As you may have noticed, the MusicBrainz service has been a little bit more spotty as we’ve worked hard to push out new features and move to the new colo. The good news is that we’ve brought more database servers online to help spread the load to more machines as people come to investigate our new version of the Picard Tagger. Hopefully the web site should still respond well even if the replicated servers are working hard to handle the new web service traffic for Picard 0.7.0. Once I return from SXSW, I’ll be focusing on getting the service stable, better documented and generally ready for the future.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Relatable for the use of their TRM fingerprint technology. Without Relatable MusicBrainz would’ve never been able to grow as fast as it has. I appreciate everything that Relatable has done for MusicBrainz, but MusicBrainz has simply outgrown TRM and it is time to move on. We will continue to provide the TRM service for another 6 months from today. If you have an application that uses TRM, please visit MusicDNS.org today to find out how you can migrate to this new fingerprinting service.

I bet there will be tons and tons of questions. I will batch up the questions and the post up follow up messages to try and respond to your questions.

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Site move (kinda) complete

We’ve moved into the new digs! While the main services are working, we still need to clean up many loose ends. Please bear with us as we configure various bits and pieces. Thanks! Technorati Tags: colo, service

We’ve moved into the new digs! While the main services are working, we still need to clean up many loose ends. Please bear with us as we configure various bits and pieces.

Thanks!

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Colocation move

The move to the new colocation facility at Digital West has started! Yesterday I spent quality time with our new servers moving them into a shared rack. We’ll move the service over to these new servers in the coming few days and then we will move the existing servers into this rack as well. Hopefully … Continue reading “Colocation move”

The move to the new colocation facility at Digital West has started! Yesterday I spent quality time with our new servers moving them into a shared rack. We’ll move the service over to these new servers in the coming few days and then we will move the existing servers into this rack as well. Hopefully ends users won’t see much change at all — we hope to limit our downtime to an hour or so while we copy data to the new servers.

Here are some pictures of the move (before we moved in, the back of the rack and the front of the rack):

before_move_in.jpg

rack_back.jpg

rack_front.jpg

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Server and $1000 donated

Yesterday was another great day for MusicBrainz! We had an anonymous benefactor donate a spiffy Athlon based 1U server with 2GB ram and RAID-1 SCSI drives. Three cheers to anonymous donors! Also, Matthew Mullenweg donated a cool $1000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation. Its not everyday that someone drops such a large donation on this project. … Continue reading “Server and $1000 donated”

Yesterday was another great day for MusicBrainz! We had an anonymous benefactor donate a spiffy Athlon based 1U server with 2GB ram and RAID-1 SCSI drives. Three cheers to anonymous donors!

Also, Matthew Mullenweg donated a cool $1000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation. Its not everyday that someone drops such a large donation on this project. (Hasn’t happened since Derek Sivers did it last year!)

Thank you very much, Matthew and Anonymous Donor!

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Prix Ars Electronica 2006 invitation

MusicBrainz just received an invitation in the Digital Communities category for the Prix Ars Electronica 2006. We certainly fit the bill for this category, but I am not sure I have the time necessary to fill out the application. Would anyone be interested to help out with the application process? Technorati Tags: prix ars electronica, … Continue reading “Prix Ars Electronica 2006 invitation”

MusicBrainz just received an invitation in the Digital Communities category for the Prix Ars Electronica 2006. We certainly fit the bill for this category, but I am not sure I have the time necessary to fill out the application. Would anyone be interested to help out with the application process?

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Hardware wishlist & colo migration

MusicBrainz has been growing by leaps and bounds — pretty much every month is our busiest yet and our overall service is getting noticeably slower. Many moderation searches are timing out because too many tagger users are putting a heavy load on our database server. After the recent fundraiser, I started thinking about how to … Continue reading “Hardware wishlist & colo migration”

MusicBrainz has been growing by leaps and bounds — pretty much every month is our busiest yet and our overall service is getting noticeably slower. Many moderation searches are timing out because too many tagger users are putting a heavy load on our database server. After the recent fundraiser, I started thinking about how to expand the capacity that MusicBrainz has, and there is no quick fix.

This is complicated by the fact that CCCP is full and cannot accept new servers. We’re outgrowing this service and its time for us to move to a new hosting company. I am considering different options for this, but I am very much favoring a data center here in SLO. This will give Jeff Simmons (our sysadmin helper) and myself immediate access to all of our machines. Right now our machines are 200 miles away from here, which does not lend itself to quick fixes.

So, I would like to expand our capacity and move our servers closer to home at the same time. For that we need to purchase or preferably beg for more hardware. Our hardware wishlist looks like this:

  • One database class server — 2U, dual 32 Bit processors, 12GB RAM, RAID-10 SCSI with loads of fast SCSI drives (donated!)
  • Two webserver class servers — 1U, dual 32/64 bit processors (AMD preferred), 4GB RAM, SATA or SATA RAID, with SATA drives (donated!)
  • One server mobo, 2GB RAM, SATA or SATA Raid, with SATA drives (donated/purchased!)

I know, those are stiff requirements that clock in near $10k new. And I also know that I may as well be smoking crack — but hey this is a wishlist, right?

So, if someone has this killer hardware laying around or they are looking for a serious tax write-off please start by leaving a comment.

UPDATE: So much for smoking crack — this wishlist is now checked off and complete!!

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