Category: General

Replication packet 61163 is large

I’d like to apologize for replication packet 61163 — our release created a very large replication packet (4.9Mb) that is going to take a while for clients to apply. Users using our slave software (musicbrainz-server and mbslave) can expect to see a much longer loading time and much greater use of disk space when this packet is applied.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Trouble with edits pending notices

We’re debugging some insidious database deadlock issue and we think we have a clue where the problems are coming from. In an effort to get the site stable, we’re going to disable the function that keeps track if a piece of data has edits pending or not.

If you’re editing, please disregard these indicators as they are likely to be wrong. We’re going to work up a permanent solution for this problem, but it is unlikely that we will have this solved before mid-next week.

Sorry for the troubles!

Our forums are back!

Our forums were compromised a while ago and we had to undergo massive yak shaving in order to set up a new home for our forums. Hosting many different types of software on one server makes that server hard to administer — we felt that the proper solution was to create a Virtual server host and give each type of software a new Linux instance to live in. We started with the forums, but we’re going to be moving a lot more stuff over to this virtual host in the coming weeks/months. Hopefully we can update our blog and our wiki in this process.

In any case, the forums are back online and running with the old posts, but the latest version of PunBB. In the move we lost our customized MusicBrainz theme for PunBB — if someone feels strongly about having the theme, please take a look at the PunBB docs and create a new theme. I’ll be glad to install that new theme on our server.

Thanks and sorry the forums were offline for so long!

Search server release: 2012-05-15

In case you haven’t gotten enough of release announcements, we have another one for you. Yesterday during the main releases we also released a new search server to match the main server release. Thanks much to Paul Taylor for working on this release to be timed perfectly!

UPDATE: The search server and the MMD schema repositories have been tagged with this tag:

release-2012-05-15

Bug

  • [SEARCH-198] – The artist is getting a lowered score on MBS
  • [SEARCH-199] – Search includes empty annotations
  • [SEARCH-200] – Search on release giving to much boost to matches on CatalogNo
  • [SEARCH-201] – explain option doesnt work if search results contain non ISO-8859-1 characters
  • [SEARCH-216] – Null pointer exception when building freedb

Improvement

  • [SEARCH-157] – Be able to search for a track by its metadata OR its puid
  • [SEARCH-186] – Search Server has hard coded redirect URL
  • [SEARCH-187] – Update Junit Test from 3 to 4
  • [SEARCH-202] – Allow searching for RGs based on their releases’ status
  • [SEARCH-204] – Upgrade codebase to Lucene 3.6
  • [SEARCH-214] – Add release group ID to the web service indexed search results for recordings

New Feature

  • [SEARCH-205] – Search server should return multiple ISWCs for works
  • [SEARCH-207] – Changes due to introduction of ISO-3 language code
  • [SEARCH-208] – Chnages due to Split release group attributes into two types Schema Change
  • [SEARCH-209] – Support for Multiple IPI Artists
  • [SEARCH-211] – Support for new Track ‘Number’ field in a track
  • [SEARCH-212] – Add abiility to index, display and search works by lyrics language as part of schema change
  • [SEARCH-213] – Changes due to MBS-1385:Support unknown end dates

Task

Search server index updating paused

Tomorrow’s release requires us to update the main server and the search servers at the same time. This presents a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem: We need to build new indexes even before we’ve migrated the database to our new schema.

To accomplish this, I’ve stopped index updating and created a separate database that will allow me to build some indexes that will be a few hours out of date when we release tomorrow. They will be slightly old, but at least we will have indexes that work.

I expect the indexes to be up to date about 3 hours of the release is complete. If you find the indexed search out of date, please use the direct search in the meantime.

Sorry for any inconveniences this may cause.

Universal Music UK launches the Artist Gateway… using MusicBrainz!

Universal Music in the UK just launched their Artist Gateway, a site to showcase their artists and to provide lots of detail about their artists. Universal is using MusicBrainz IDs and data throughout their system to give their site the proper structure and links to elsewhere on the net. To launch it, Universal put out a slick video, complete with a plug for MusicBrainz:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/41151572 w=450&h=253]

This is a huge step for MusicBrainz — in the past the labels didn’t even acknowledge our existence and now they are using our data.

Thanks James Cowdery & crew over at Universal in London!

Please tell us what you think about our proposed "no waiting" access to our Web Service

We’re working to add a paid option to our Web Service for commercial users and for end users who would like to have faster access. We’re finally getting close to being able to offer this service and we would like to get some feedback from our users about this.

We are proposing to add “no waiting” access to our web service — this proposed service would:

  1. Allow continuous sequential access to our version 2 web service without delays between calls. You would not be required to have any delays between calls to the web service (our current service requires a 1 second delay between calls)
  2. Still have a global rate limit that may temporarily deny callers access to our web service (with 503 responses) if our service gets overloaded. We would work hard to ensure that our service would not reach this limit, since its a paid service, but we cannot guarantee that.
  3. Not allow concurrent (more than one call at a time) calls to our web service per user. We reserve the right to terminate your service if we find that you are making concurrent calls to our “no waiting” service.

Our existing web service will not be affected by this new service — the existing service will remain free and limited to one request per second as it is now. Initially the new service is intended for end-users who wish to have faster access to our web service. Once we’ve ironed out the kinks in this new service we will offer this service for commercial customers as well.

Finally, we’ve set up a very short survey (3 questions only!) to gather some feedback from you about this service. We’re mainly trying to establish a reasonable price for this service. Please take our survey and let us know what you think and how much you’d pay for our service.

All of your responses will be private and the survey does not ask for any information about you. Thanks, we appreciate your thoughts!