Category: MusicBrainz

Posts related to the MusicBrainz encyclopedia in general: community, data, client, server, etc.

Picard Ubuntu packages updated

Updated Picard packages for Ubuntu are available over the official MusicBrainz Ubuntu PPAs. For most users it is recommended to use the stable PPA to install the latest stable release of Picard (1.4.2 at the time of writing this):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:musicbrainz-developers/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install picard

Up-to-date stable packages are available for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty, 15.05 Vivid, 16.04 Xenial, 17.04 Zesty and upcoming 17.10 Artful.

For users wanting to try out the latest development release there is also a daily build PPA available. Please note that the current Picard 2.0 development releases are a major update to the codebase and everything is still work in progress, so it might be more unstable then usually. Also due to updated dependencies the Picard 2 daily builds are only available for Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10.

More details can be found in this post on the MetaBrainz Community.

500 Commits of Summer: My story of FOSS and GSoC

This story of summer started in a dull grey winter at home. Bored, I started lingering around IRC channels and much like the Alice of Wonderland, stumbled into the wonderful world of FOSS. Little did I know, it was gonna be one of the best things that happened to me. Below is a story of bugs, PRs , repos, commits, and some more commits. But it is also a story of curiosity, learning, frustrations (a lot of it), resilience (more than you think) and some amazing amazing people of the community. If I have to sum it up for you, I couldn’t think of a way better than this. So here it goes…

Disclaimer: It was a long journey, hence the long blog. Continue reading “500 Commits of Summer: My story of FOSS and GSoC”

Classical Community Cleanup #1: Debussy

The Metabrainz Classical Music Enthusiasts Team has kicked off to a strong start! If you are unaware about the formation and tasks at hand, you can read more about it on the forums.

It’s clear by the number of discussions and engagements in the forum that a community effort on classical music was long overdue! It’s thrilling and we are eager for the first mission: after some discussion and voting we decided that the first community effort would be a clean-up of all our data for Claude Debussy.

As a composer with a huge influence in 20th century music, yet with a relatively low amount of hard to edit compositions like operas, Debussy is a great first choice for the community of classical editors to start actively working together to improve the data. As such, if you’d like to help out, but are new to classical editing or not too active in the community yet, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask any questions. The classical community is active in its own forum category, and we’re hoping to see a lot of activity there with editors both asking and answering questions.

What will we be working on in this first classical cleanup project?

  • We will review the existing works and catalogues to make sure there are no duplicates and the info looks correct (several very active classical editors have already been working on this in preparation for this cleanup).
  • We will check the release list for anything that doesn’t follow the classical guidelines. Those should of course be fixed to follow the guidelines, and that’s usually a good sign of the recording and relationship info being incomplete as well.
  • We will work on the recording list. The only recordings that should be there by the end of the cleanup are of Debussy himself as a performer. Anything else currently there should have performer relationships added to it if missing, then the artist credits for the recording should be changed to list the main performers.
  • And we will add missing Debussy recordings! If you have enough info to add a release we’re missing that includes works by Debussy, that’s always useful. Just make sure to try to add as much info as possible from the get go, so we don’t have to clean that addition up as well!

Don’t know where to begin? Let us know and we can help find a starting point–or just jump in and help out! We can’t wait for Mr. Debussy to be a great example of how much information MusicBrainz can provide!

Schema change release, 2017-05-15 (including upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2017 schema change today! Thanks to all who were patient during today’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers.

This is a fairly minor release as far as schema changes go, but please do report any issues that you come across.

Currently, the only visible change for editors is the ability to add multiple lyrics languages to works. We’ve also modified the schema to support dynamic attributes for entities other than works, but the UI for that won’t be complete for another release or two.

Now, on to the instructions.

Schema Change Upgrade Instructions

Note: Importing the latest data dump is always a valid alternative to running ./upgrade.sh on an existing database, if you’d prefer to also get new data in one go. Just follow the relevant instructions in INSTALL.md. The rest of the instructions here assume an in-place upgrade.

  1. Make sure DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE is set to 23 in lib/DBDefs.pm.
  2. If you’re using the live data feed (your REPLICATION_TYPE is set to RT_SLAVE), ensure you’ve replicated up to the most recent replication packet available with the old schema. If you’re not sure, run ./admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges and see what it tells you; if you’re ready to upgrade, it should say “This replication packet matches schema sequence #24, but the database is currently at #23.”
  3. Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
  4. Turn off cron jobs if you’re automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
  5. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-2017-05-15-schema-change.
  6. Run cpanm --installdeps --notest . (note the dot at the end) to ensure your perl-based dependencies are up to date.
  7. Downgrade DBD::Pg by running cpanm TURNSTEP/DBD-Pg-3.5.3.tar.gz (version 3.6.0 breaks things currently).
  8. Run ./upgrade.sh (it may take a while to vacuum at the end).
  9. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 24 in lib/DBDefs.pm as instructed by the output of ./upgrade.sh.
  10. Turn cron jobs back on, if applicable.
  11. Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if applicable. It’s also recommended you restart redis. If you’re accessing your MusicBrainz server in a web browser, run npm install followed by ./script/compile_resources.sh.

For those curious, here’s the list of resolved tickets (excluding MBS-8393):

Bug

New Feature

  • [MBS-9271] – Prevent usernames from being reused

Task

  • [MBS-9273] – Fix the a_ins_edit_note function in older setups to not populate edit_note_recipient for own notes
  • [MBS-9274] – Fix the edit_note_idx_post_time_edit index in older setups to handle NULL post_time

Improvement

  • [MBS-5452] – Support multiple lyric language values for works

Picard 2.0 dev available via PyPi

Sambhav’s GSoC project is all about Picard 2.0, and among progress made the devel version is now installable via PyPi: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/picard_dev

To install the dev builds you need to have a Python 3.5 or greater. At the moment it is mainly a port of 1.4.x to Python 3 and Qt5, with support for HiDPI and new icons !

Please note that Picard Dev version uses a different config file than your stable Picard installation. As such the settings and plugins will be on their default configuration.

To use your stable config with the dev version, simple copy your “Picard.ini” file from your MusicBrainz user folder to “Picard Dev.ini” which can be found in the same folder.

Since testers may want to run a stable 1.4.x version along the 2.0 dev one, the executable is named “picard_dev”.

Of course, we encourage people to test this version on every platform they can, and report any issue.

Thanks to Sambhav Kothari for the fantastic job he did on this ! And stay tuned, more to come !

Picard 1.4.2 released

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 1.4.2 is now out.

This is mainly a bugfix release, the only notable improvement is related to TOPE/TOAL tags.

Users can get Windows and MacOSx packages from Picard website downloads section.

Bug

  • [PICARD-1053] – Picard does not stop analyzer while moving
  • [PICARD-1055] – picard hangs with: RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded in cmp
  • [PICARD-1070] – The “Convert Unicode punctuation characters to ASCII” function only works in certain tags
  • [PICARD-1077] – ID3v2.4 text encoding settings are not saved correctly

Improvement

  • [PICARD-969] – Search dialog webservices get queued behind matched album requests
  • [PICARD-1034] – Picard not seeing TOPE and TOAL

Picard 1.4.1 released

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 1.4.1 is now out, it contains few fixes and enhancements, plus few extra features that didn’t make it to 1.4.

As usual you can get Windows and MacOSx packages from Picard website downloads section.

Most notable changes are the fix of a regression concerning drag-n-drop on MacOSx and improved cover art box, with better visual feedback about changes in cover art images.Capture du 2017-04-01 14:40:58

Thanks to all contributors who helped on this release: Antonio Larrosa, Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Laurent Monin, Lukáš Lalinský, Sambhav Kothari, Sophist, tungol, Ville Skyttä, Wieland Hoffmann.

And to all of our translators!

To report any issue about this release, please use our bug tracker. As usual you can also get help on the forum or on IRC (freenode, #musicbrainz).

We’ll now focus on 2.0, which will be mostly a port of 1.4.x to Python 3 and Qt5.
It will open the way to UI improvements, and improved overall performance.

Bug

  • [PICARD-953] – Album shown matched even if extra unmatched files
  • [PICARD-972] – Removing album with saves pending does not remove pending saves
  • [PICARD-973] – Pending log messages not flushed to stderr on quit
  • [PICARD-988] – Drag & Drop not working
  • [PICARD-990] – Picard violating ID3 standard for TXXX frames
  • [PICARD-996] – Disabling the cover art box and enabling it again doesn’t bring it back
  • [PICARD-998] – Disabling the action toolbar sometimes doesn’t work
  • [PICARD-1005] – If a cluster is moved to the album side of the main window it gets moved to unmatched files
  • [PICARD-1006] – Drag and drop for cover arts doesnt work on OSX
  • [PICARD-1010] – Unsetting View/Cover Art doesn’t work permanently
  • [PICARD-1011] – Toolbar tab order incorrect after PICARD-908
  • [PICARD-1014] – Number of images in release info is calculated incorrectly
  • [PICARD-1015] – Artwork tab of the Track Info DIalog doesn’t show changes anymore
  • [PICARD-1018] – CoverArtBox doesn’t show new/removed images after unmatched files are added/removed to the album
  • [PICARD-1023] – Directory persistence for Add Directory needs tweaking
  • [PICARD-1029] – Fix ~artists_sort metadata variable
  • [PICARD-1042] – Missing import for PICARD_APP_NAME

New Feature

  • [PICARD-258] – Visual feedback for changes to artwork in before-after pane.
  • [PICARD-1000] – Implement artwork diff for albums

Task

  • [PICARD-943] – Remove monkey patching of file write methods in picard formats
  • [PICARD-1041] – Replace Ok button text by Make It So! in Options dialog

Improvement

  • [PICARD-223] – Remove should work when Unmatched Files is selected
  • [PICARD-666] – Drop MP3 tagging support
  • [PICARD-951] – Always use HTTPS for musicbrainz.org
  • [PICARD-952] – Use Cover Art Archive over HTTPS
  • [PICARD-961] – Mention AcoustID on Scan button too
  • [PICARD-980] – Drag&drop cover art doesn’t work for images from amazon/google images/https links
  • [PICARD-1012] – Buttons on the “User Interface” and “Scripting” pages are smaller than buttons in other places
  • [PICARD-1016] – Multiple images in related tracks confusing
  • [PICARD-1021] – Picard loads all pending files before quitting
  • [PICARD-1024] – Allow specifying a configuration file path
  • [PICARD-1030] – Allow to add/replace cover art images and keep existing cover art

Picard 1.4 released

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 1.4 is now out, containing many fixes and new features!
The last time we put out a stable release was more than 2 years ago, so a lot of changes have made it into this new release. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

Picard 1.4

picard-1-4-screenshot
A brand new Picard 1.4 install, fresh from the oven. Get it while it’s hot!

2 years is a long time for software, and Picard has been the subject of a couple of Google Summer of Code projects and plenty of developments required by changes in dependencies and the MusicBrainz project itself. Overall, the changes would be too numerous to list. If you’re curious to read it all, a complete list of changes can be seen on the website. Here are at least a few of the highlights: Continue reading “Picard 1.4 released”

Google is awesome: How should we spend $5000?

The Google Open Source Programs office is amazing!

In the past few years Google has sponsored our summit where we gather a pile of MusicBrainzers into one room and talk shop (and a bit of play) for a whole weekend. But, due to extenuating circumstances and our move to NewHost, we opted for a much smaller and lower key developer gathering in Barcelona. As a result we didn’t spend much money and I opted to not pester Google to support our summit as they have in the years past.

Then yesterday the lovely Cat Allman from OSPO send us a PO for $5000 and a stern reminder to send an invoice soon. After explaining the situation to Cat, she still felt it was appropriate to collect the money and to “use the money as best serves the project.” 

Wow, thank you!

The question I have, for all of our readers, contributors, editors, hackers and advocates: How do you think we should spend $5000 to best serve MusicBrainz and its sister projects?

I’ll leave it wide open to everyone to chime in — feel free to put suggest anything reasonable and meaningful in the comments. Please do the skip the “send it to me!” type comments. 🙂

Finally, I want to thank Google for its continued support of our projects. Through its annual support of $40,000, Summer of Code, Code-In, the paid data license for its Knowledge Graph and the support of our summit, Google is the biggest supporter of the MetaBrainz Foundation. By far: Google has donated more than $366,000!

THANK YOU GOOGLE. Your support really helps us along!

Summer of Code ’16 with Picard

Hi! I’m Rahul Raturi, GSoC participant for Picard. This was my first GSoC, and it’s been a pretty awesome experience. Following is the overview of my project.

About the project

The outline of the project is to allow searching for albums, artists and tracks from within Picard. This avoids switching back and forth between web browser and Picard for searching, say release. If Picard fails to auto tag a file usual flow to tag the file with correct metadata is to first select the file, then click on “Lookup in Browser”, then search correct release, and load it into Picard by clicking the green “Tagger” button. In some systems, the “Tagger” button wouldn’t show, which was also a nuisance. With this patch, the entities can be searched and optionally loaded into Picard using built-in search dialogs, so no application switching.

Search dialogs

Picard already provides search options (through a web browser) for three entities; namely track, artist, and album. So I’ve built search dialogs for these three.

  1. Track Search Dialog — Searches for tracks and allows optionally loading corresponding album back into Picard. track_dialog
  2. Album Search Dialog — Searches albums and optionally allows loading the selected one into Picard. Screenshot from 2016-08-15 17-08-09
  3. Artist Search Dialog —  Displays basic information about the artists. To get more information about the selected artist, there’s an option to lookup him/her in browser. Screenshot from 2016-08-20 15-55-42

Searching similar tracks/releases

This is another important part of the project. Sometimes Picard fails to auto tag a file (or a cluster), or incorrectly tag it. These dialogs may prove useful here. To get expected data, right click on the file (should be in “Unmatched Files” cluster), and select “Search for similar tracks…”. The track search dialog would pop up, and expected release can be looked up there. Same procedure is for searching clusters.

Links to my work

Each PR is based on the previous one. A new dialog in each, plus some improvements to existing dialog. For trying the dialog, clone the artist search branch, until it gets merged into master. It has the most recent changes.

Note: To use these dialog for searching, an option in User Interface setting about built-in search needs to be enabled.

Conclusion

It was quite fun doing this project. Thanks to Michael Wiencek (mentor) for the guidance and leniency :). Also the Picard team for the reviews. I look forward to contribute more to Picard, now that I’ve a better understanding of the code. Also for another Summer of Code.