Category: musicbrainz

MusicBrainz Server update, 2019-08-08

This summery release brings one main new feature: collaborative collections! As an editor, you can now share your collections with others. This is mainly intended for community projects, but it can also be a good way to, say, have a shared “Music we have at home” collection with your family, or collect artists with funny names with your friends. You decide how to use it!

To add collaborators to your collections, edit the collection and enter the editors you’d want as collaborators in the appropriate section (suggestion: ask first whether they’re interested, then add them!). Once they’ve been added as collaborators, they’ll be able to add and remove entities from the collection in the same way as you, but they won’t be able to change the title / description: that’s still only for the collection owner to change.

CDs collection shared as a cloak for everyone to see

The release also comes with a bunch of small improvements and bug fixes, including a couple about collections, and continues migrating to React.

Thanks to Ge0rg3 and sothotalker for their contributed code. Also, thanks to chaban, chiark, cyberskull, Dmitry, hibiscuskazeneko, jesus2099, Lotheric, mfmeulenbelt, psychoadept and everyone who tested the beta version, reported issues, or updated the website translations.

The git tag is v-2019-08-08.

Bug

  • [MBS-8867] – Guess Case normalizes “C’mon” as “C’Mon”
  • [MBS-9512] – Changing recording name to empty string should not be allowed
  • [MBS-10100] – ISE without “non-required” attributes for admin/attributes/Language/create
  • [MBS-10133] – Error message when sending an empty query to the WS is unclear
  • [MBS-10212] – SoundCloud URL with trailing slash is not displayed with user name in artist sidebar
  • [MBS-10218] – Regression: Cover Art tab not selected / highlit on release page
  • [MBS-10233] – Regression: ISE when trying to cancel a “add release annotation” edit

Improvement

  • [MBS-8569] – Don’t display ended legal names in the overview page for artists
  • [MBS-9381] – Show user’s own private collections in the list of collections for an entity
  • [MBS-10135] – Support WikiaParoles as its own site rather than LyricWiki
  • [MBS-10139] – Clarify why recording lengths can’t be edited when non standalone
  • [MBS-10210] – Only allow allowed frequencies in language admin form
  • [MBS-10215] – Make ISO number required for script admin form
  • [MBS-10217] – Explain what renaming artist credits does when editing artist
  • [MBS-10219] – Add Muziekweb to other DBs whitelist, with sidebar display
  • [MBS-10222] – Pull legal name alias instead of legal name artist for the relationship Artist-Artist “perform as/legal name”
  • [MBS-10224] – Don’t show the same legal name string multiple times in artist overview
  • [MBS-10246] – Don’t assume all event collections are attendance lists
  • [MBS-10272] – Convert the header / navbar to Bootstrap

New Feature

  • [MBS-8915] – Allow editors to choose delimiter in track parser
  • [MBS-9428] – Allow multiple users to share one collection

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-9914] – Convert the area public pages to React
  • [MBS-10047] – Convert /oauth2/ pages to React

Other Task

  • [MBS-10131] – Update LyricWiki domain to lyrics.fandom.com

MusicBrainz Server update, 2019-06-03

This server release mostly fixes bugs and regressions. It also updates the URL cleanup code and continues the conversion of templates to React.

Thanks to CatQuest, cyberskull, hibiscuskazeneko, Jeluang, Lotheric, mfmeulenbelt, tungolcraft, yeeeargh, and everyone who tested the beta version, reported issues, or updated website translations.

The git tag is v-2019-06-03.

Bug

  • [MBS-8826] – /ws/ requests that 404 should not return HTML
  • [MBS-10141] – Labels from Trois-Rivières should appear 1 layer up in labels from Mauricie
  • [MBS-10147] – Reports break if an entity in them has been removed / merged
  • [MBS-10148] – Can’t change entity type of empty collection
  • [MBS-10153] – Database statistic tables’ headers’ icons are 404s
  • [MBS-10160] – YouTube channel link that uses the https://www.youtube.com/c/username format won’t have the username shown in the sidebar
  • [MBS-10163] – “Javanese” does not show in instrument Alias page
  • [MBS-10167] – “Existing medium” results give medium position, not number
  • [MBS-10171] – ISE when calling ws/js with a wrong ID
  • [MBS-10182] – Some artist /relationships tabs show an internal server error
  • [MBS-10183] – Regression: Display bug in the title of page crediting the artist (Release Group, Release, Recording)
  • [MBS-10184] – Regression: ISE on displaying some edits
  • [MBS-10196] – XSS vulnerability in Knockout for IE <= 7

Improvement

  • [MBS-9762] – Standardize Songkick URLs
  • [MBS-10095] – Provide a better error than an ISE if trying to admin edit non-existing user
  • [MBS-10108] – Allow linking individual tweets to recordings
  • [MBS-10142] – Update URL cleanup for Sina Weibo URLs + add them to the sidebar
  • [MBS-10151] – Update LiveFans URLs to use HTTPS
  • [MBS-10152] – Display artist areas on Artists tab of area entity

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-9849] – Convert the release group public pages to React
  • [MBS-10104] – Convert the area index page to React
  • [MBS-10127] – Convert root/components/relationships-table.tt to React
  • [MBS-10189] – Convert the place performances page to React

MusicBrainz schema change release, 2019-05-13 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2019 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, especially any related to genres and collections.

Visible changes with this release are limited to an indication if a specific artist credit is being edited (MBS-5387). Work on some of the changes to collections and genres is quite advanced, and we’re hoping to release some of the new features onto beta already in a week or so from now, while others might take a while longer.

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 git tag is v-2019-05-13-schema-change. The rest of the instructions here assume an in-place upgrade.

  1. Make sure DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE is set to 24 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 #25, but the database is currently at #24.”
  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-2019-05-13-schema-change.
  6. Install newer dependencies Yarn and NodeJS 8 or later according to install prerequisites.
  7. Run cpanm --installdeps --notest . (note the dot at the end) to ensure your perl-based dependencies are up to date.
  8. Run ./upgrade.sh (it may take a while to vacuum at the end).
  9. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 25 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 ./script/compile_resources.sh.

Here’s the list of resolved tickets:

Bug

  • [MBS-5387] – ACs being edited aren’t marked as having pending edits on the aliases tab
  • [MBS-9365] – event_meta_fk_id was never created as part of any upgrade script
  • [MBS-9462] – Standalone databases created before schema 21 are missing some l_event_url triggers
  • [MBS-10146] – Regression: ISE on Remove DiscID page
  • [MBS-10149] – Swap track titles with artist credits fails to update both fields properly
  • [MBS-10150] – Regression: The link to the release group reviews in the release page is broken

Improvement

  • [MBS-9664] – Add database constraints to disallow loop relationship
  • [MBS-10044] – Add place area to place lists

Database Schema Change Task

  • [MBS-10052] – Add new schema for the event art archive
  • [MBS-10173] – Create a genre table in the DB and populate it with existing genres
  • [MBS-10174] – Create an addition timestamp in the DB for new collection items
  • [MBS-10175] – Create a position integer in the DB for collection items
  • [MBS-10176] – Create a comment text field in the DB for collection items
  • [MBS-10177] – Create an editor_collection_collaborator table for collaborative collections
  • [MBS-10178] – Create a genre_alias table
  • [MBS-10181] – Create filesize for cover art and each thumb in the DB

React Conversion Task

  • [MBS-9925] – Convert collection pages to React
  • [MBS-10179] – Convert all entity list components to React

MusicBrainz Server update, 2019-04-26

We finally have a new release! Some large conversions of the MusicBrainz website templates to React happened during the past three months, leading to a long delay between releases – sorry about that! This release also fixes several bugs and adds some small improvements.

Thanks to Cyna, Ge0rg3, and spellew for their contributed code, mostly written during GCI. Also, thanks to alpinetux, amCap1712, chirlu, culinko, cyberskull, derobert, Griomo, hibiscuskazeneko, Jeluang, jessew, kepstin, Kid Devine, ListMyCDs.com, Lotheric, mfmeulenbelt, rafwuk, RavenWorks, samj1912, yindesu, yurim, and everyone who tested beta version, reported issues, or updated website translations.

The git tag is v-2019-04-26.

Bug

  • [MBS-6895] – Cannot inc=tags when browsing releases
  • [MBS-8634] – Privileged user accounts page still mentions the style council
  • [MBS-9013] – Removing specific ordering of relationships doesn’t create an edit
  • [MBS-9276] – Transient test failure in Edit::Instrument::Merge
  • [MBS-9297] – “Set track lengths” from Disc ID with no change should not be allowed
  • [MBS-9309] – Mediums fail to merge when two recording positions are swapped
  • [MBS-9400] – Tags are missing from artist nodes in /ws/2/release JSON requests
  • [MBS-9413] – Older “Remove relationship” edits can’t be loaded
  • [MBS-9669] – UI language menu not available in Spanish and Greek
  • [MBS-9845] – country.null stats not being collected
  • [MBS-9893] – Batch voting check boxes disappeared
  • [MBS-9899] – Recording and recording artist tags/genres missing in JSON WS
  • [MBS-9943] – Autocomplete.js is pretty much untranslatable
  • [MBS-9975] – Clicking the “A-a” button (guess sort name) to add a release alias sort name does not work.
  • [MBS-9983] – Non-group artists statistics does not include characters
  • [MBS-9985] – “Last updated on Invalid date” on release sidebar
  • [MBS-9986] – RG types not translated on sidebar
  • [MBS-9991] – Relationship names are not translatable
  • [MBS-9993] – MusicBrainz server should allow CORS requests to /oauth/token
  • [MBS-9995] – Space missing in autoeditor election text
  • [MBS-10009] – Some sidebar types are not translated
  • [MBS-10021] – ArtistRoles is not translatable
  • [MBS-10027] – t::MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::Admin::EditBanner fails randomly
  • [MBS-10031] – Tooltip says ‘null’ for artist names in ‘writer’ column of ‘work’ search results
  • [MBS-10033] – Missing space after Wikipedia blurb
  • [MBS-10045] – Regression: External links to Anison Generation in the sidebar appends https
  • [MBS-10075] – Release with no mediums disappears from release collection when sorting on format/no. of tracks
  • [MBS-10081] – Invalid last updated date on search result pages
  • [MBS-10084] – Unable to add CDBaby URL containing “ï”
  • [MBS-10085] – Long URL fails to wrap on release page in Chrome
  • [MBS-10088] – Example search for relationships breaks with cardinality
  • [MBS-10090] – Loading a doc page containing %3F loads full wikipage html
  • [MBS-10099] – Lyrics URL relationship uses the wrong link phrase on work edit page

Improvement

  • [MBS-6574] – Recursive area tabs
  • [MBS-7463] – Add redirect from /tag to /tags
  • [MBS-8782] – Show artist name on “Edit Note” tab of “Edit Release” page
  • [MBS-8922] – User reporting: Remove “Reveal my email address” option (or default it to on)
  • [MBS-9340] – Don’t allow more languages if [No lyrics] is selected
  • [MBS-9656] – [Change release quality] → [Change data quality]
  • [MBS-9935] – Indicate what to do with annotation reports
  • [MBS-9936] – Move from CJS style to ES6 (imports, exports)
  • [MBS-9988] – On /tags page, allow to go back to not showing downvoted tags
  • [MBS-9989] – Add new “Not applicable” gender option to stats
  • [MBS-9990] – Make formatUserDate error rather than return wrong date if given object
  • [MBS-9998] – Improve cleanup of Facebook URLs
  • [MBS-10008] – Generalize and localize CPDL link’s title in the sidebar
  • [MBS-10010] – Simplify sidebar_name methods for URLs
  • [MBS-10029] – When viewing edits by editor X, include editor X in the page title
  • [MBS-10032] – Detect and clean iTunes “author” URLs for artists
  • [MBS-10063] – “No linguistic content” → “[No lyrics]” in work edits display
  • [MBS-10074] – Display – on release search results for format/tracks if no medium exists
  • [MBS-10094] – Right-justify barcode on release group page
  • [MBS-10101] – Allow SecondHandSongs performance URLs for Recordings
  • [MBS-10102] – Use the containing country area of artists and labels for country statistics
  • [MBS-10103] – Update Bandsintown URL cleanup to strip languages

New Feature

  • [MBS-10011] – Congratulate/thank users on their birthdays
  • [MBS-10022] – Event tab for areas

React conversion task

  • [MBS-9632] – Convert statistics to React
  • [MBS-9699] – Convert the user account pages to React
  • [MBS-9904] – Convert the list of privileged users to React
  • [MBS-9909] – Convert report templates to React
  • [MBS-9926] – Convert entity subscribers pages to React
  • [MBS-10005] – Convert “Details” and ”Tags” tabs, for each entity, to React
  • [MBS-10007] – Convert “Add annotation” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10014] – Convert “Add area” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10015] – Convert “Add artist” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10016] – Convert “Add event” edit display to React
  • [MBS-10017] – Convert artist/cannot_split.tt to React
  • [MBS-10018] – Convert artist/special_purpose.tt to React
  • [MBS-10019] – Convert the artist and place event pages to React
  • [MBS-10026] – Convert the Labels page for Area to React
  • [MBS-10042] – Convert “Aliases” tab, for each entity, to React
  • [MBS-10046] – Convert /admin/banner/edit to React
  • [MBS-10049] – Convert user/report to React
  • [MBS-10086] – Convert attributes admin lists to React
  • [MBS-10091] – Convert root/components/relationships.tt to React

Other task

  • [MBS-8360] – Show BookBrainz relationships in the sidebar
  • [MBS-9082] – Standardize SecondHandSongs URLs
  • [MBS-9932] – Remove or update “Releases with superfluous data tracks” report
  • [MBS-9999] – Allow setting custom redirect URI while registering applications to be installed
  • [MBS-10035] – Add text to the “Report editor” page asking for links
  • [MBS-10036] – Add ccMixter.org to other database whitelist
  • [MBS-10037] – Send editor reports to MB user admin mailing list
  • [MBS-10080] – Relabel “MusicBrainz Blog” link as “MetaBrainz Blog” on MusicBrainz frontpage

Automating the voting system

MetaMetaData

For the last several years, one of the things our community has struggled with is a lack of active voters. We’ve tried to implement various measures to decrease the need for voters and load for the wonderful ones that actually do actively look through edits and help vote on them—e.g., making more edits auto‐edits and decreasing amount of time edits stay open. However, the edit queue is still quite unwieldy and as such we’ve kept trying to come up with other ways to decrease the load on our contributors.

Over the past few months since our last summit, we’ve been working on training AIs, both for recommendation engines and data analytics, and for helping out with spam, but it soon appeared that we had another valuable dataset: our history of 15,693,824 votes from 16,336 voters and 56,374,198 edits from 2,007,134 editors. It turns out that this is an unintended side-effects of the editing and voting system in that it creates a paper trail of our habits as a community and our collective mind.

A paper trail that you could, say, train a neural network on. And that’s just what we did.

By feeding data from our top voters, we’ve been able to train our network to replicate with 96.4% accuracy the personality when using the other half as test data. That figure is the average for 300 bots each based on our top 300 voters.
We were really impressed with the results but the story doesn’t stop there…

Meet BrainzVoter

The next logical step was to create our own Frankenstein’s monster. By training on 70% of our entire set of votes, we gave birth to a voting bot that represents the essence of our community. “BrainzVoter”, as we dubbed it, is precise and scores a staggering 98.9% accuracy on test data and comparing with the other 30% of our dataset.

To quote the late Terry Pratchet:

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

Edit filters

In view of the recent developments on net neutrality taken by the European Union with articles 11 & 13/17, MusicBrainz is taking measures to protect against copyright infringement: we’re implementing automatic edit filters. BrainzVoter will use the latest in NLP technology to understand what you, the editors, write in your edit notes, and use this understanding to vote on your edit. It will also inspect any URLs included in the edit note to cross-reference the data. The aggregate data will not be available to the public.

Edits with better and clearer notes will become more likely to pass. Consider this a good opportunity to (re‐)read How to Write Edit Notes!

How will this affect me as an editor?

Not much will change, and you can continue doing what you were doing before! We recommend that you take the time to make clear statements in your edit notes.
You will also be able to use a system of tags to express intent, using for example #typo #correction in the content of your edit text. Syntax highlighting and shortcuts will be available in the text editor.

In the end, by removing the need for humans to look over edits, the bot should give you, the editor, more time to add and edit and fix data in MusicBrainz, without having to spend time checking everyone else’s edits or worry about other editors disagreeing with yours!

After a brief trial period on MusicBrainz, this system will be adapted and also rolled out to BookBrainz.

We hope you will share our excitement for the benefits of automation and help us improve our training models over time. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.

Picard 2.1.3 released

Picard Team is proud to announce MusicBrainz Picard 2.1.3 is now officially released.

It includes a lot of bug fixes, and few improvements, but no major feature.

Thanks to all developers, translators, testers and users who contributed to this version, and especially Philip Wolfer (phw/outsidecontext).
Here is the complete changelog:

Bug

  • [PICARD-323] – Only the discid of the first disc in a release is written to tags
  • [PICARD-455] – Picard setting cover art height, width and depth to 0 for FLAC files –> breaks libFLAC
  • [PICARD-729] – Tracks get stuck at “[loading track information]” on Bad Gateway errors
  • [PICARD-938] – Need two left-arrow key presses to go from track with file to album
  • [PICARD-1178] – Images tagged with extra types that the user has chosen to ignore should not be shown as ‘modified’
  • [PICARD-1288] – Folskonomy tags / genre fallback on album artists tags not working
  • [PICARD-1422] – Windows: Uninstall 32 bit Picard before upgrade
  • [PICARD-1447] – When releasing a new version, appdata should also be updated
  • [PICARD-1460] – Windows installer does not detect running instance
  • [PICARD-1461] – Crash when running with Spanish language
  • [PICARD-1463] – Picard crashes on startup on Windows
  • [PICARD-1469] – Force close when adding songs to larger albums
  • [PICARD-1471] – Artist searches do not show begin and end area
  • [PICARD-1473] – AcoustId lookup fails if fingerprint already in tags
  • [PICARD-1474] – Windows installer shows outdated version string in file properties
  • [PICARD-1475] – Cover art sources do not support HTTPS
  • [PICARD-1476] – Filled up thread pool prevents metadata box updates
  • [PICARD-1478] – Changing MB server requires a restart
  • [PICARD-1480] – Search line input clear button icon is too small

Task

  • [PICARD-1459] – Remove OptionsPage.info method
  • [PICARD-1472] – macOS code signing on Travis CI fails for xcode7.3 image

Improvement

  • [PICARD-1242] – Consider the number of AcoustID sources for linked recordings
  • [PICARD-1457] – “Check for Update” should be in the Picard menu
  • [PICARD-1458] – “Check for Update” should have an ellipsis at the end
  • [PICARD-1470] – Make warning about Qt locale loading less prominent

As usual, packages will be available from Picard website and from GitHub release pages

Bugs can be reported on Picard bug tracker.