Posts related to the MusicBrainz encyclopedia in general: community, data, client, server, etc.
Following yesterday’s release of Picard 2.4 we have a bugfix release that fixes Picard not starting on Windows 7 and Windows 8. Users of those operating systems should upgrade to Picard 2.4.1.
For a full list of changes since Picard 2.3.2 see our release announcement for Picard 2.4.
Changes in the 2.4.1 point release:
[PICARD-1904] – Picard 2.4 does not start on Windows 7 and Windows 8
Thanks a lot to the users reporting the issue and to Gabriel Ferreira for quickly providing a fix.
After a slow summer month, and hot on the heels of the release of Picard 2.4, an update for MusicBrainz Server has finally arrived, fixing ten bugs, converting almost as many templates to React, making small improvements and bringing a few handy new features.
A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.
Thanks to Cyna and loujin for contributing code. Thanks to aerozol, chaban, cyberskull, fabe56, hibiscuskazeneko, ijc, jesus2099, Kid Devine, Nero Apunto, and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to kellnerd and mfmeulenbelt for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2020-08-10.
The Picard team is happy to announce that version 2.4 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.
This releases brings significant performance improvements, improved documentation, new features and many bugfixes.
Picard 2.4 features heavily improved performance and responsiveness of the user interface when loading or saving a large amount of files.
There is a completely new User Guide for MusicBrainz Picard, which replaces the documentation previously available on the Picard website. This documentation is much more complete and easier to update and maintain.
We are also looking for contributors who help to improve the documentation. If you have some ideas for improvements have a look at the Picard Docs project on GitHub.
Picard now finally supports writing tags to WAVE files. This was previously not possible, as there is lack of a proper standard to tagging WAVE files. Now Picard will allow you to write ID3v2 tags to WAVE files. As this is not supported by all players and tagging tools, Picard can optionally fall back to writing RIFF INFO tags to the files. Just be aware that RIFF INFO is very limited in regards to tags available and support for non latin character sets.
As a new file format Picard now supports DSDIFF (also known by their file extension as DFF) files. These can be loaded and saved using ID3v2. Similar to WAVE there is no standard way for tagging DSDIFF files, but many playback tools which support DSDIFF also support the ID3v2 tags.
The script editors in the options dialogue (both for file naming and metadata scripts) now support auto completion for function and variable names. In addition there is a new script documentation dialogue, which shows the documentation for all scripting functions without the need to open the online documentation in your browser.
On Windows 10 Picard now respects your settings for the Windows dark mode. If enabled, Picard will use a dark color theme and optimized syntax highlighting. This work also allows us to further improve Picard for dark themes on other platforms in the future.
With this release a lot of translatable text has been added to Picard, and many translations have been updated.
But not all translations are completed and we always need help maintaining the translations for Picard. Translating is easy and can be done online: Head over to MusicBrainz’s translation page on Transifex and click on “Help Translate MusicBrainz”. Any changes to the translations will be included in the next release.
Picard 2.4 has many more improvements and fixes. See the full changelog for details on all changes since the last stable Picard 2.3.2.
Picard 2.4 is available for download from the download page. For Windows 10 users installing from the Windows Store an update will come automatically as soon as the new release has been approved by Microsoft.
This release contains code changes by Gabriel Ferreira, Laurent Monin, Bob Swift, Philipp Wolfer, RaysDev, Wieland Hoffmann and new contributors Adam James, jcaesar and elvquant.
Special thanks go to Gabriel Ferreira for his excellent work in profiling and improving Picard performance and to Bob Swift, who completely overhauled Picard’s documentation, making it much more complete then it ever has been, and to all the translators who updated their language translations on Transifex.
Following the first Picard 2.4 beta we have released Picard 2.4 beta 2 to address a couple of reported issues. Thanks a lot to everyone who tested the last beta and reported issues. The following bugs have been fixed in beta 2:
See our previous blog post about Picard 2.4 beta 1 for the changes since the last stable release.
Picard 2.4 beta 2 is available for download from the download page.
Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
Please also help translate Picard. There have been many changes to the user interface and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.4 release. Translating is easy and can be done online: Head over to MusicBrainz’s translation page on Transifex and click on “Help Translate MusicBrainz”.
Once you have registered an account on Transifex you can start translating. For Picard the primary resource to translate is “picard“, but there is also the “picard_appstream” resource which is used for providing descriptions for various Linux software-center applications.
Picard 2.4 Beta 1 is now available. There have been some important changes and we would like to gather feedback with this beta release before releasing the final Picard 2.4.
This release contains code changes by Gabriel Ferreira, Laurent Monin, Bob Swift, Philipp Wolfer, RaysDev, Wieland Hoffmann and new contributors Adam James and jcaesar.
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback.
The most notable change in this release are significant performance improvements when handling large amount of files thanks to the excellent work of Gabriel Ferreira.
We would also like to get some feedback on the new scripting auto completion feature and the scripting documentation provided directly inside Picard. Windows 10 users can also try Picard’s new support for Windows 10 dark mode.
Here is the full list of changes:
Picard 2.4 beta 1 is available for download from the download page.
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.4 release is using and testing this release candidate. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
Please also help translate Picard. There have been many changes to the user interface and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.4 release. Translating is easy and can be done online: Head over to MusicBrainz’s translation page on Transifex and click on “Help Translate MusicBrainz”.
Once you have registered an account on Transifex you can start translating. For Picard the primary resource to translate is “picard“, but there is also the “picard_appstream” resource which is used for providing descriptions for various Linux software-center applications.
If you are a software developer you are very welcomed to provide fixes and features. Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub. See Developing on the Picard website to get started.
The React conversion is back with this release. We’ve also fixed a regression that listed unrelated “recording of” relationship edits in history of artists, recordings, and releases, and made a lot of people quite frustrated during the last two weeks (sorry about that!). New edits won’t be wrongly listed anymore, and the existing wrongly-listed edits will be progressively unlisted during the following days. Finally, two new data reports have been created, and small display improvements have been made.
A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.
Thanks to loujin for contributing code. Thanks to DjSlash, hibiscuskazeneko, insolite, jesus2099, and mavit for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Atsushi Nakamura, kellnerd and salorock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2020-06-29.
Today’s release focuses on stability with almost half of changes being bugfixes. It also provides a fair number of small improvements and new features. On a side note, the third party affiliated Magic Tagger is now known as AudioRanger.
A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server and to fix a few issues in both standard setup and development setup. See the release notes for update instructions.
Thanks to Cyna, Freso, loujin for contributing code. Thanks to chaban, chiark, jesus2099, kellnerd, nikki, otringal, navap, wmorg, and yeeeargh for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to kellnerd and salorock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2020-06-15.
Now that PostgreSQL has been upgraded to version 12 (see earlier instructions), regular improvements, bugfixes, and React/JSX template refactoring are back on the menu. The most noticeable improvement is probably that we are now able to display more specific error messages in the URL relationship editor when a link is not allowed, instead of always giving a generic “not good”-style message. There are even new features, for admins only, that will allow them to spot and delete sock-puppets and to temporarily disable edit notes from editors who continue to be disrespectful to others without having to delete their accounts outright.
In news not directly connected to the MusicBrainz website, the public search endpoint has been moved from the old search server to the Solr-based search server. This can be used by slave servers if they do not need, or can not afford, to host their own search indexes.
And while talking about slave servers, a new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available. It follows this update of MusicBrainz Server and fixes a regression that affects servers with live indexing. See the release notes for update instructions.
Thanks to Cyna for converting more edits’ display to React, to KamranMackey and navap for updating external links’ icons. Thanks to alastairp, BestSteve, chaban, chirlu, cyberskull, Freso, hibiscuskazeneko, jesus2099, and Kid Devine for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to eduardomariohs, kellnerd, mfmeulenbelt, salorock, and stich94 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!
The git tag is v-2020-06-02.
Thanks to everyone for your patience during our downtime today. As promised, here are steps to follow to upgrade your own PG instance to v12. (Confused? See the previous blog post on this subject.)
If you’re already running v12, there are still some instructions you must follow!
If you’re running the new MusicBrainz Docker setup, an upgrade script exists for you to use. See the release notes for specific – hopefully brief – instructions.
If you aren’t using Docker but rather set up musicbrainz-server by hand following INSTALL.md, see the steps below.
Know that as an alternative, you can always import new data dumps from scratch (again following the steps in INSTALL.md) into a new PG 12 cluster. Just make sure you’re on the v-2020-05-18-postgres12 tag of musicbrainz-server while doing so.
If on the other hand you don’t mind getting your hands a bit dirty, you can use the quicker method below. Like INSTALL.md, this assumes you’re using Ubuntu/Debian and their postgresql-common cluster management tools.
If you’re already running v12, you should still follow these steps; however, you can skip the ones involving apt-get, pg_dropcluster, and pg_upgradecluster. The main steps you need to follow in this case are running the 20200518-pg12-before-upgrade.sql and 20200518-pg12-after-upgrade.sql scripts in that order.
On distros other than Debian/Ubuntu where the postgresql-common tools aren’t available, you’ll have to manage with initdb and pg_upgrade on your own.
git fetch origin && \
git checkout v-2020-05-18-postgres12
psql -U postgres -d musicbrainz_db \
-f admin/sql/updates/20200518-pg12-before-upgrade.sql
This assumes that “postgres” is the name of your PG superuser, and “musicbrainz_db” is the name of your database. If you see a few messages about things not existing, that’s normal.
apt-get update && \
apt-get install postgresql-12 postgresql-server-dev-12
If you’re installing postgresql-12 for the first time, this will automatically create a new cluster at /var/lib/postgresql/12/main. Remove that empty cluster. Don’t run this if you already had v12 installed and have data there!
pg_dropcluster --stop 12 mainIf you did already have v12 installed with
musicbrainz_db running there, leave the cluster alone and skip the next step involving pg_upgradecluster.In the unlikely event that you already have a v12 cluster, but also have musicbrainz_db running in a separate, older cluster, these instructions won’t work for you. We recommend importing fresh data dumps into the v12 cluster and dropping the old one.
9.5 below with 10 or 11. If you have other databases in your old cluster besides musicbrainz_db, be aware that this will upgrade all of them to PG 12.pg_upgradecluster -v 12 9.5 main
pg_upgradecluster command will tell you how.) Now run the following “post-upgrade” script on the database:psql -U postgres -d musicbrainz_db -f \This may take a bit, as it has to recreate some indexes.
admin/sql/updates/20200518-pg12-after-upgrade.sql
./script/compile_resources.sh again.If you run into any trouble following the above, please let us know and we’ll try to help resolve your issue as soon as possible!
The MusicBrainz virtual machine is dead, long live the MusicBrainz Docker Compose project. In fact, the virtual machine has been running it for years. Mostly because the data loaded with the virtual machine was too soon obsolete, it doesn’t seem worth it anymore. Plus, new search indexes are much larger than before, and using Docker Compose directly is much more versatile.
The MusicBrainz Docker Compose project has been deeply revamped since two years ago and now ships the new search server based on Solr 7. It can be used for mirroring the MusicBrainz website and database, testing your own app with a local MusicBrainz web service, or developing the MusicBrainz Server itself. Check out the release notes!
Thanks to everyone who reported issues and contributed patches for two years!
