Category: MusicBrainz

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

Our next major challenge: Fixing the MusicBrainz site design for an improved user experience

Back in 1998 when I started playing with Perl and wrote the CD Index (the pre-cursor to MusicBrainz). I was learning web development and had little understanding of web design. The tools I was using were primitive at the time and the results were cringeworthy and have not withstood the test of time.

Fast forward some 18 years and we’ve arrived at the current MusicBrainz site design — there have been minor facelifts over time and a bigger one once we released NGS back in 2011. But really, the site design hasn’t changed much and we’ve kept gluing features and new bits of data onto the crappy design, leaving us with the current mess of a UX experience we know as the modern MusicBrainz.

Our community has been asking us to improve UX for a long time — we need to:
• Empower our community with better tools for developing, editing, viewing the magnificent data that we have.
• Build a stronger foundation for further development, interaction, and extension of our projects in future
• Make our projects more welcoming to newcomers, by lowering the learning curve as well as keeps the workflow of an advanced editor intact.

Fortunately for us, Chhavi [a design student from IIT, India] has become an active contributor to the MetaBrainz projects. She has been studying our sites and how we work as a team and has volunteered to drive the process to fix the UI and the user experience issues on the MusicBrainz site. She has proposed a part of this work as her Google Summer of Code project.

Our overall goal as a team is to create a design system which will help the designers and developers stay in sync, give a more unified theme to our projects, and make it easier for new contributors to join our projects. This will also make it much easier for our developers to address your requests for features/bug fixes faster in the future.

We are not barging into your online lives and trying to make our sites pretty — instead, we are focusing on the real experiences you have with them. We held long detailed conversations during our last summit in Barcelona, where Chhavi was also present and discussed a lot of concerns that might be running in your head while you read this.  As part of this initiative, we have been interviewing a number of key members of our project to understand what we and our users really need from this revamp. We have also kept track of community discussions around this topic. From this we decided that our users fall into three broad categories:

  1. There are those who contribute to code and understand database tech.

  2. Experienced/advanced MusicBrainz editors who don’t understand database tech.

  3. New users, who feel hopelessly lost in the current scenario.

To make all this research/discussion/feedback available for everyone to go through, we have started a Jira issue type Design that tracks all the design related tickets of MusicBrainz. The most notable tickets that show mock-ups of future MusicBrainz pages include:

When you look at these pages, please keep in mind that we’re trying to clean up the clutter and to make things simple and clean. Easier to understand for an experienced editor or a new one. The data that we have should be presented in a way that makes sense. The data should present the gaps and holes that it presently has, for people to be able to improve the data gaps. Data should also be our binding link to exploit the full potential of the projects that we have, such as ListenBrainz or CritiqueBrainz.

We are not trying to fluff things up and make them look pretty. Prettiness might come with the simplicity that we are chasing. Having user flows that do not hamper the speed and makes our life easier, is our utmost goal.

That said, we are happy to receive feedback on the upcoming designs as well as the process– if you have any, please post your comments to the appropriate tickets in Jira that we linked above. We’re currently getting some pressing dev tasks out of the way before we start the actual implementation of the redesigned project. Once our team is ready to work on this, we will public more blog posts about how this project will unfold and how it will impact our users.

 

Picard 2.0 beta announcement

Hello people,

We saw a flurry of updates to Picard these last few months and I am happy to announce that Picard 2.0 is finally in beta. You can find it here – Picard 2.0.0beta1

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependencies a bit. What this means is that Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive.

We also decided to release a new stable version of Picard before the beginning of the summer.

To help us, advanced users, translators and developers are encouraged to:

A simplified list of changes made since 1.4 can be read here.

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

 

 

Expanding our team

As the world comes back to life after the summer break, we’re making some changes and expanding our team. First, Roman Tsukanov has decided to not renew his contract with us. During his tenure with MetaBrainz, Roman adopted and released CritiqueBrainz and also wrote our new MetaBrainz web page, which is helping us bring in new supporters. His contributions have been far from trivial — thank you for your efforts, Roman!

Due in part to the new MetaBrainz web site, we’ve got more financial support than ever, and this allows us to replace Roman with two engineers! I’m please to announce that we’re hiring two of our Summer of Code students who just completed the program:

Sambhav Kothari AKA samj1912: Sambhav started hacking on Picard earlier this year and knocked Picard out of dormancy, working towards a new release and then making Picard his Summer of Code project. He completed his project with flying colors and is working towards a major upgrade of Picard. On the MetaBrainz team he is going to look after the new search infrastructure and the maintenance and bug fixing of our Web Service in addition to hacking on Picard. A full plate, for sure!

Param Singh AKA iliekcomputers: About the same time that samj1912 arrived, Param arrived. He expressed interest in working on ListenBrainz — he too dove right in and started making improvements. ListenBrainz had quite a ways to go before he could aim to make a Summer of Code project out of it. Param and I embarked on a journey to revamp and improve the stability of ListenBrainz, which culminated in us releasing the new ListenBrainz beta a few weeks ago. Since then he’s been focusing on his Summer of Code project, which is also now complete. On the MetaBrainz team Param will be looking after ListenBrainz and also the new MetaBrainz web site.

Both Param and Sambhav will officially start working on the MetaBrainz team starting October 1, but I strongly suspect we’ll see them around and hacking on the projects as has become the norm this year.

Welcome aboard Sambhav and Param!

 

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!

Instruments part two: tamburica, hybrids, community links, and growing pains!

Continuing our story from last time…

tamburica instrument family tree
tamburica instrument family tree
By now I was starting to get a bit more comfortable in my role as Instrument Inserter. I went about doing a bit more in-depth research, especially for the tamburica, and I made a post on the forum where I asked for input researching these instruments.
Eventually I mean to come back to this group of instruments (and in fact this is what I am doing currently), expanding the family tree I’ve been working on, which is why this “fix” version is still open.

Tamburica: 2017 January 6th to the 25th:

New Feature

    • [INST-64] – add the instruments of the Balkan tamburica orchestra; was: Contratambura
    • [INST-455] – (Indian) tanpura
    • [INST-529] – samica/dangubica/kutrevka
    • [INST-457] – clean out and clarify “tambura”   (still open)

Initially, what I found to be the hardest part of adding instruments was actually the addition of aliases. It was a cumbersome, time consuming and annoying part, and I often clamoured for someone to write some sort of Batch Alias script. Then, in March, loujine came in like a superhero with a batch alias script! Now thanks to this script I can add aliases en masse, which has helped me tremendously!

After reosarevok fixed INST-723, I could link hybrids with the instruments they were hybrids of, therefore a batch of “hybrid” instruments came next.

Hybrids: 2017 February to March:

New Feature

Task

  • [INST-461] – Add the Wikidata link for the mirliton
  • [INST-462] – Add ヴァイオリン alias to violin
  • [INST-463] – Add コントラバス alias to double bass

Improvement

  • [INST-458] – English Horn – Cor anglais
  • [INST-459] – Correct Wikidata link for the three-hole pipe

By this time a community discussion came out about the use of disambiguations and descriptions (instrument exclusive fields, which, unlike disambiguations, are translatable), with some users suggesting they were too long, some pointing out issues with translating and yet others suggesting the description field should be dropped altogether. While this discussion didn’t reach a clear resolution, it’s definitely something we should revisit later.

Stay tuned for part three!

What’s going on with instruments anyway? (part 1)

Hi everyone! I’m CatQuest, the Endeavouring MusicBrainz Instrument Inserter. I’ve been meaning to write a post or two about this for a while, but now finally everything is in order!

As some of you may know, I have “officially” taken over instrument additions from reosarevok. I suggested this way back in June 2016 because a) reo was already overworked enough between doing Style, handling support, dealing with social media, and other things, and b) as a consequence of this, the Instrument Requests queue had grown unmanageably large.

Initially I started without grouping, components, or “fix versions”, but later I’ve been allowed to organise everything to my liking and so, I’ve gone back and retroactively added tickets for initial batches, modelled on freso’s ORG tickets.

So without further ado: Here is a list of the instrument tickets I solved from my initiate appointment in July 2016 to roughly October:

Very first batch:

New Feature

It felt natural to separate this at Pipe and Tabor, so the next batch got a different “fix” version, from October to (taking a Christmas break) January 2017:

Second batch:

Bug

New Feature

Improvement

Stay tuned for part two!

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 !