Category: General

The EchoNest releases Echoprints: The open source fingerprint era has begun

Amplifind, the company that operates the MusicDNS/PUID service, recently sold its intellectual property and the PUID service will be going away eventually. It is exactly this reason why we’ve been uncomfortable relying on closed source fingerprinting software to make MusicBrainz tick.

Fortunately, I’m pleased to announce that the open source fingerprint era has begun!

Lukáš Lalinský has been working on acoustid for months now and today the EchoNest, in conjunction with 7Digital and MusicBrainz, has issued a press release that announces Echoprint, their fully open source fingerprinting solution.

The source code has already been released on github: echoprint-server and echoprint-codegen.

We’re pleased to announce preliminary support for Echoprint in MusicBrainz on our echoprint test server. The Echoprint system works similarly to how PUIDs work in MusicBrainz right now. You can use echoprints anywhere you can use PUIDs on the Echoprint test server. The version 2 of our XML web service (on the echoprint test server) now supports submitting and fetching Echoprints. To submit an Echoprint, refer to our web service documentation and example page and use echoprint wherever you’d use puid. For instance, to submit an Echoprint to the test server, POST an XML document like the one below to the /ws/2/recording resource:

<metadata xmlns="http://musicbrainz.org/ns/mmd-2.0#">
    <recording-list>
        <recording id="e97f805a-ab48-4c52-855e-07049142113d">
            <echoprint-list>
                 <echoprint id="TRN5NGX1187AB4F786"/>
            <echoprint-list>
        <recording>
    <recording-list>
<metadata>

Although it remains to be seen when the Echoprint system will be mature enough for inclusion on the live MusicBrainz servers, going forward MusicBrainz will only support fully open source fingerprint solutions, starting with Echoprint and acoustid. We are saying no to more closed source solutions, which have never worked out well for us. MusicDNS/PUID is now officially end of life and should not be used anymore in new development.

We look forward to working with the EchoNest closely to finish up the development of the Echoprint system and to fully integrate it into MusicBrainz when it matures.

Dear Anonymous web service user: We're seeing too much of you!

If you’ve installed an application and you’re getting an excessive number of 503 errors for this application, its because the application author was not a good citizen. We’ve throttled your traffic until you can behave better. Please contact the author of the application and let them know about this blog post!

If you are the author of this application, please post a comment so we can start a dialog!

Fundraiser for NGS Hardware

Rolling out NGS (Next Generation Schema) onto the main servers is going to be hard if we have to do it with our current hardware. If we can raise $15,000 to purchase new servers we will make this process much easier and with much less down time. Also, our current hardware is starting to get old and more failure prone. By purchasing newer hardware we can serve more users using less power, which will make MusicBrainz be responsible for less pollution!

Please make a donation today to help MusicBrainz raise money to cover the costs for a much needed hardware upgrade:

Our Next Generation Schema, improves MusicBrainz on many fronts. Its a complete re-write of our 11 year old codebase using modern tools (Catalyst, Moose, Template Toolkit) and a drastic improvement of our schema. The new schema fixes many of the problems of the old schema and introduces many new concepts that allow us to model music data better.

For instance, instead of having conflated artist names like “Queen & David Bowie” we will now have Artist Credits, which will link to the artists “Queen” and “David Bowie” individually. Releases will now have mediums and tracklists which will allow us to re-use tracklists in different releases, which makes release more accurate and removes duplication from the database. Tracks have been changed to recordings and if the same recording is used in two different releases the same recording (with the same MBID) will be used in both releases. NGS also introduces new concepts like musical Works, that can represent Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as an abstract Work, which then has been recorded into recordings and releases after his death. The goal is to remove artists like Beethoven and Bach from the list of releases and recordings since they never actually recorded anything while they were alive.

The overall goal is to allow MusicBrainz to grow into a complete music encyclopedia, rather than a CD lookup service that it started out as. This new codebase and schema allows us to grow and add many more features that we’ve not been able to add to the old code base. If you’d like a preview, please take a look at our test server.

All donations are tax deductible since MetaBrainz is a 501(c)3 non-profit! Thank you for your support!

Layer42 supports MusicBrainz!

Our old test server, which is being used for some special projects currently, is now generously hosted free of charge by Internet service provider Layer42 in Mountain View.

Layer42 Logo

We really appreciate your support of MusicBrainz! Thanks Michael and Dan at Layer42 for getting us set up so fast. Also, thanks to Cliff Skolnick for hosting this machine in the past. Thanks for your support!

MusicBrainz data used in recent music piracy paper

The MusicBrainz data has been used in a very interesting MIT paper that discusses illegal music downloading, Napster and the sharp rise of people attending music concerts. ARS Technica writes:

For album sales, the researchers accessed Nielsen SoundScan, the music sales data service, and looked at aggregate receipts from 1993 through 2002. The paper also examined data provided by MusicBrainz, a site that allows users to create relational databases about their favorite artists or music genres.

Since file sharing technologies made millions of songs freely downloadable over the internet, they were naturally expected to displace legal sales. Most empirical studies have found evidence of this displacement. However, while file-sharing decreased legal sales, it almost certainly increased the overall consumption of recorded music.

It is nice to have some of these things I suspected confirmed — especially with the use of our data. 🙂

Downtime: Adding more RAM to our DB server

As a band-aid measure we’re going to add another 4GB of ram to our database server. This should hold us over until we migrate to NGS, when this problem should go away. In order to add more RAM to the DB server, I’m expecting a down time of about 10 minutes starting at 14:00 PDT, 17:00EDT, 22:00UK, 23:00 Europe this Friday July 30.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: Server has been fed an additional 4GB ram and everything is back to normal. Let’s hope this helps the load on the database server.