Category: MusicBrainz

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

Search: Why is it so important?

After many days of tinkering, the new search server has passed its tests and is nearly ready for deployment next week. After my last post on the search services, there were lots of questions, so I’ll give some more history on why I’m working on this now:

  1. The old Lucene based search services worked well, but installing them was a major pain. Installing compilers by hand, sacrificing chickens and hoping that things would work wasn’t my idea of fun.
  2. Lucene has a philosophy of working out of the box without significant tweaks. That’s great if you’re indexing a bunch of text, but indexing music metadata from an SQL database is a bit of a different beast. The usual Lucene tricks didn’t work so well for us, so we couldn’t tweak it to work better for us. Xapian requires a little more tuning out of the box, but our search results are much better now than they were before.
  3. Sending metadata lookup traffic to a service like Xapian is generally a good idea, as a single Xapian server can handle lookup traffic more elegantly than a Postgres database. And adding more search servers is easier than adding more database servers.
  4. Our traffic is growing — I expect us to handle twice as much traffic in July as we did the July before. A lot of this traffic growth is coming from people using our web-service to look up music. If the web-service slows down, the rest of the site slows down as well. So I’m trying to stay ahead of the curve an anticipate when we reach capacity and be able to add more machines as necessary

As of next week, MusicBrainz will have twice as much rack-space (20U’s of space!) and we can finally rack the two new servers that were donated a few months ago. Fortunately due to dropping bandwidth costs, this new space doesn’t really come at a greater expense to us — I expect our hosting costs to stay nearly the same as they are now. (about $1000/mo, btw)

This will allow us to have 3 times the search capacity we have now, which should keep the site working for a while longer. In fall I hope to start moving our web-service to Amazon’s EC2 service, which should allow us to get as much capacity as we need.

As soon as I get the new search services deployed I’m putting my head down and coding the next server update. So, keep your fingers crossed that this process goes smoothly.

Mac OS X Developer for Picard releases wanted

Its clear that I won’t find the time to package up Picard for OS X anytime soon. I’ve put out one Intel based DMG, but haven’t found the time to create a Universal Binary package of Picard. 😦

If you have the following:

  • Knowledge of building Mac OS X Application Bundles
  • Python knowledge
  • Love for Picard
  • Access to Intel and PPC Macs

We would very much like to talk to you. The last item isn’t crucial — I suppose we can get people in the community to test your builds for platforms you have no access to. Please leave a comment if you’re interested in helping out.

Good news for Classic Tagger users

What started out as a joking suggestion has actually extended the life of the Classic Tagger! 🙂

One jokester at the recent summit suggested that we return random TRM values (as opposed to matched acoustic fingerprint ids) and just switch the TRM server off. Turns out, that suggestion was actually brilliant!

Doing this essentially makes every TRM lookup return “I don’t know this one”. But in that case the MusicBrainz server falls back to doing a metadata match (without the acoustic fingerprint). And it turns out that works pretty well all around! And I think some people may prefer this method, since you won’t have to clear up TRM collisions anymore.

So, what does mean for when we switch off the TRM server? The Classic Tagger lives on and may match fewer files than before — life may actually be better once we shut it off! But I think that many people will find it useful still.

Huzzah!

Testing Picard on OS X (Intel)

If you have an intel Mac and would like to try out the first test of a PUID enabled Picard on OS X, please download this DMG and post a comment to let me know if it works.

This DMG:

  • Is for INTEL only
  • Only runs on OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
  • Probably does not have working CD Lookup
  • Might be buggy
  • Is based on the 0.9.0 Picard tarball
  • Is NOT a Universal Binary

If this DMG works for people then I will proceed to try to get 10.4/PPC/disc lookup support working.

Working With Picard, Episode 1

Hi! The first episode in my series of “Working with Picard” screencasts has now been recorded, and is available for public consumption 🙂 A YouTube link to the video is available, and a higher resolution Ogg Theora file is also also available. You’ll probably find the Ogg Theora easier to read due to the higher … Continue reading “Working With Picard, Episode 1”

Hi!

The first episode in my series of “Working with Picard” screencasts has now been recorded, and is available for public consumption 🙂 A YouTube link to the video is available, and a higher resolution Ogg Theora file is also also available. You’ll probably find the Ogg Theora easier to read due to the higher resolution.

In this first screencast I go through the basics of Picard – how to load files, how the interface works, and basic usage with clusters.

If there’s something that’s unclear, or you have future ideas for screencasts – let me know! Other wise, enjoy the screencast – and show you’re friends and convince why MusicBrainz is so cool (if you haven’t already 🙂

In case you didn't catch it: Picard != Picard QT

Given the number of clueless/negative comments on the TRM announcement, I feel it necessary to clue people in to the fact that Picard QT’s interface has been revamped. The workflow has been greatly improved, the user interface is more stable and it does an amazing amount of work for you before you need to use … Continue reading “In case you didn't catch it: Picard != Picard QT”

Given the number of clueless/negative comments on the TRM announcement, I feel it necessary to clue people in to the fact that Picard QT’s interface has been revamped. The workflow has been greatly improved, the user interface is more stable and it does an amazing amount of work for you before you need to use acoustic fingerprinting.

If you feel the need to trash months of hard work that Lukas has done, please at least download it and try it before you make an idiot of yourself.

Picard QT enters beta testing

I’m pleased to announce that Lukáš has released Picard QT version 0.9.0 beta1! Picard QT is the port of Picard away from the troublesome wxWidgets toolkit and over to the much more stable QT toolkit. Along the way Lukas reworked the UI to be more intuitive and added the much anticipated TaggerScript language that gives … Continue reading “Picard QT enters beta testing”

I’m pleased to announce that Lukáš has released Picard QT version 0.9.0 beta1!

Picard QT is the port of Picard away from the troublesome wxWidgets toolkit and over to the much more stable QT toolkit. Along the way Lukas reworked the UI to be more intuitive and added the much anticipated TaggerScript language that gives the user total control over how to tag their music collection. The great news amidst all this is that with QT Picard now runs well on OS X — something that we could never achieve with the wxWidgets toolkit!

We have installers for Windows and Mac OS X and a tarball for our Linux users — grab them from the Picard download page. We’re hoping to have a final release of Picard QT in about a month. In the meantime, please report any bugs you may find.

Picard usage increasing

Wendell from MusicIP just showed me the PUID lookup rate for Picard over the last few months: Looks like more people are using Picard as time goes on. Yay! Now, who is responsible for those two spikes? Bueller?? Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, picard

Wendell from MusicIP just showed me the PUID lookup rate for Picard over the last few months:

picard_puid_lookups.png

Looks like more people are using Picard as time goes on. Yay! Now, who is responsible for those two spikes? Bueller??

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TRM, Picard and Picard on OS X

As the TRM server is getting close to another pruning round it flaked out for a few hours today — its back up and running now. I had hoped that we would’ve come along further in moving Classic Tagger users over to Picard, but instability problems of the wxWindows toolkit continue to plague Picard users. … Continue reading “TRM, Picard and Picard on OS X”

As the TRM server is getting close to another pruning round it flaked out for a few hours today — its back up and running now.

I had hoped that we would’ve come along further in moving Classic Tagger users over to Picard, but instability problems of the wxWindows toolkit continue to plague Picard users. For some users it works great, for others it crashes every 30 seconds, and yet its stable for Lukas who is working on Picard the most. This makes using Picard very difficult and even harder to convince our users who love the track based Classic Tagger to move to Picard.

Given this, we plan to do the following:

  1. Extend the end-of-life deadline for TRM until the end of 2006.
  2. Migrate Picard away from wxWindows and start using the Python bindings for the QT toolkit.
  3. Revamp the user interface in Picard to support both track based tagging and album based tagging.
  4. Make the Picard user interface easier to use for new users and offer methods other than drag and drop to tag files.

We hope to complete all of this before the end of the year. But, should we not make that deadline, we’ll extend it again until most everyone feels that Picard has replaced the Classic Tagger. The key metric for turning off the TRM server is to watch the traffic to the TRM server slow to a near crawl so that when we do turn it off that only stragglers will be affected.

Tobias Rundström has volunteered to work on a UI mock-up of the new Picard UI that will be based on our Picard user interface brainstorming. Once he has done that we’ll post screenshots or maybe even an application for people to look at and give us feedback on.

Finally, the switch to QT will also have positive benefits for Picard on Mac OS X. The QT toolkit is considerably more stable on the Mac than wxWindows and that will enable us to finally roll out a Mac OS X version of the tagger. I understand that there is frustration about the lack of a tagger on OS X — Geof Morris has now even offered up a bounty for someone to develop a new UI for Picard for the Mac. But, there isn’t anything we can do for a few months — please sit tight. We’re aware of the situation and are as unhappy about it as you are!

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