I’m pleased to announce that the FreeDB gateway, which lets you fetch MusicBrainz data via FreeDB enabled applications, has been updated to use the NGS database. As of now, its updating with new data from the main MusicBrainz server and you should be able to look up new CDs.
To use the FreeDB gateway, set the FreeDB server in your application to freedb.musicbrainz.org on port 80. For more information, please take a look at our wiki page for the gateway.
Apologies for being a few days late here, but we’ve just finished updating the servers with the latest set of bug fixes and new features. This release brings a new feature that people have been asking for since NGS – the ability to “split” an artist into artist credits.
Split Artist
With NGS, we had the ability to link multiple artists to recordings/releases/etc. While our migration script handled most cases, there are some cases when it was unclear how to automatically split artists, and we opted to leave that artist unchanged. While it was possible to manually edit references to this artist, it was painful. We now have a convenient way to make this process easier. In the sidebar of artists there is now a “split into separate artists” link:
The new "split into separate artists" feature
Clicking this link will present you with a form where you can choose the new set of artists. For example, here’s me splitting the single “Alix Perez & SpetraSoul” artist into the correct separate artists:
The "split artists" form
As with the other types of editing in MusicBrainz, this edit has to be voted on by other editors before it is applied.
The split artists edit type can only be used on artists that have no relationships, other than “collaboration” relationships. If the artist does have collaboration relationships, edits to remove all collaboration relationships will be entered at the same time. Note also that this will not remove the now empty artist entirely – that will happen when ModBot does its daily cleanup.
Bugs
We’ve continued working through the bugs as well, and here are the tickets that have been closed in this release.
[MBS-1133] – Don’t try to delete relationship types that are still in use
[MBS-1343] – Add AR instrument search function has problems with accented letters
[MBS-1380] – An URL ending in closing parenthesis gets broken when listed in edit notes
[MBS-3453] – “Related works” on recordings page shows same work and AR set twice if there are two work<->recording ARs for the same work/recording pair
Things in MusicBrainz land are finally starting to return to normal, with a succession of holidays all final over and everyone getting back to work. We sadly missed the last release of August entirely, but have combined it with the latest release, which was deployed onto servers yesterday. Here’s what’s changed:
Bug
[MBS-987] – Database import doesn’t work without editor data
[MBS-1543] – Add credits to the images in the release editor
[MBS-1670] – UX, Can’t add new artist if an artist is already selected in artist credit
[MBS-2256] – UX, the current artist credit interface does not discourage changing the credit for various artists
[MBS-2839] – Artist work list > Better design: don’t split by "categories" (composer, lyricist, …) and indicates artist role for each artist related to work
[MBS-2899] – Release editor’s "Release Duplicates" tab does not suggest any releases if the release title has been translated away from the actual title
[MBS-3211] – allmusic and secondhandsongs not auto-detected
New Feature
[MBS-3261] – Add support for "deleting" user accounts
The tag for this version is v-2011-09-12-ngs-bug-fixes.
[MBS-3265] – Webservice not escaping "<<" properly
Improvement
[MBS-2232] – Auto-approve Add Medium and Add Release Label edits for new releases
[MBS-2839] – Artist work list > Better design: don’t split by "categories" (composer, lyricist, …) and indicates artist role for each artist related to work
Mostly another week of bug fixes, with a few improvements. Currently the timeline is experiencing some known problems, we hope to have this fixed by tomorrow, but we didn’t want to hold up this release.
Bug
[MBS-1231] – Age information for a person looks weird
[MBS-1393] – Artist lookup won’t search for 1 char artist names
[MBS-1394] – Enable autocomplete for 1 char when the character is cjk
[MBS-1409] – RunReports should apply a time limit to each report
[MBS-1414] – Preferences -> Regional Settings -> Date/time format has duplicates and wrong timezone
[MBS-1483] – tmp-dir option doesn’t work in InitDB.pl
Today we released our first schema change update since NGS. This change is quite a radical one, as it merges both of our databases (“READWRITE” and “RAWDATA”) into a single database. For most users of the database, this probably won’t affect you, but you’re encouraged to run the upgrade process anyway. Here’s what you need to do:
Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 13 in lib/DBDefs.pm
Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-20110711-schema-change
Run ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
Install the perl modules Algorithm::Merge and Algorithm::Diff
Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.
This process may take a while, as it has to dump one database into another, and download a few extra changes to ensure slaves aren’t missing any data. The RAWDATA database should no longer be in use and you should be able to drop it, but waiting to see that everything is working well might be a good idea.
This schema change does not introduce any new data. For everyone else, here’s a list of what got fixed since the last release!
MetaBrainz Blog 