Google ups its sponsorship of MusicBrainz in 2010!

I’m proud to announce that Google has decided to sponsor MusicBrainz once again in 2010! Google has pledged to donate $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation this year! Tons of thanks to Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn and Carol Smith (yes, the Carol Smith who is our treasurer/secretary!) of the Google Open Source Programs Office for your generous donation!

The extra $10k above the donation from last year aims to help us pay for the Kuno (Warp)’s paycheck as we work to finish NGS. However, Google isn’t likely to increase the yearly amount donated to MusicBrainz unless MusicBrainz can come up with some sort of way of giving some value back to Google.

I would like to finally allow Google to crawl the MusicBrainz web pages so that the rich information we have on our site finally gets exposed to Google’s search. But, that doesn’t really provide much value to Google — the value in doing this is ours.

In what ways can we do something that gives value back to Google for their continued support? Please post your ideas in the comments!

mb_server is now hosted on Git

Today we are officially marking the transition of mb_server (that’s the code name for the MusicBrainz Server – the website) from Subversion to Git. This is now hosted at git.musicbrainz.org, and the “musicbrainz-server/core.git” repository contains the stable and unstable development branches (named master and next, respectively).

If you are just interested in setting up MusicBrainz locally, and not interested in development, the same instructions apply as before – use the latest RELEASE branch from Subversion. The git changes should only be of interest to those who were running the “trunk” branch from Subversion, and wish to test or contribute to the upcoming NGS server.

For more information about Git & MusicBrainz, see the Git wiki page

Testing the NGS live data feed

If anyone would like to test out the NGS replication, which I’ve setup from the test server, follow these instructions:

  • Download and install the mb_server source code from SVN trunk. Follow these instructions.
  • Set your server type in DBDefs.pm to RT_SLAVE
  • Download and import this dataset.
  • Insert this required row into the database, using our psql program: 
    cd /admin
./psql READWRITE
insert into replication_control values (1, 12, 36169, '2010-01-23 00:00:02.604674+00');
  • Now run admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges a few minutes after the hour to keep up to date with the data on the test server. Please note that this system may not be stable yet and that we will occaisionally load new data on our test server, which will require you to reload the data on your server.

Good luck!

Database on test server updated

The database on the test server has been updated with the latest data and search indexes to match the latest work that ijabz’ has done. This update was in preparation for testing the replication system, which I’ll invite the general public to try in a few hours.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The passwords on the test server are now the same as the passwords from the main server as of January 23.

Announcing NGS Beta 1!

After many years of discussion, planning and hard work, we’ve finally reached the much anticipated Next Generation Schema Beta 1 release!

For all the information on this release, please take a look at our release notes. Then head over to the test server and play with it!

Most important of all, please note that we are using Jira to keep track of bug for the MusicBrainz server now. Please do not enter bugs for Beta 1 into the old (trac) bug tracker!

Many thanks to the countless people who have helped make NGS a reality!

NGS Beta 1 is coming: Monday January 18

I’m pleased to announce that we’re almost ready to release beta 1 of the much anticipated Next Generation Schema. All of the important core functions are complete and we’ve even done a first round of sanity checking to make sure what what we release will be useful. We won’t have all of the features for NGS done — there will be some things that we simply won’t have finished by then.

But, this release is important since we feel that we want the community to help us take a look at NGS and help us flush out problems before we polish NGS for release.

We’ll have loads of more details and even some documentation for you by next monday. Stay tuned!

MetaBrainz hires Kuno Woudt (warp) as a full time developer!

I’m pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has hired its first full time developer! On Februrary 1, 2010, Kuno Woudt will join Oliver Charles on the MusicBrainz development team and both of them will focus to finish NGS as soon as possible. With Kuno we are effectively tripling the engineering capacity we have dedicated to writing code for NGS. This will free me up to focus more on managing the development process as well as focusing on more business development issues. An increased focus on business should allow me to find the extra income to pay Kuno and to keep us in the black!

I’m excited by this development — having dedicated developers working on finishing NGS is what has been needed for several years now. I’m very much looking forward to releasing NGS and then having a number of smaller releases in 2010!

Privacy policy page re-written for clarity, policy remains unchanged

Navap undertook a re-write of our privacy policy page to make the page more consistent and better organized. However, the actual policy did not change — just the wording/formatting of the page has changed.

Please take a look at the diff of the changes and the new page.

(This post is mostly only for full disclosure — seeing Facebook being shredded for its new policy is making me overly cautious right now.)

MusicBrainz Summit 10 Wrapup

We’ve just finished our 10th MusicBrainz Summit, this time held in Nürnberg, Germany. It was a great success, with a number of participants and a lot of discussion! This time, we’ve managed to note all the discussions. So, if you missed the summit and want to catch up on what we talked about, head over to our wiki page with the summit notes, which contains a summary of just about everything we mentioned.

Thanks to everyone who came, and bring on the next summit!