MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
We’ve just finished rolling out our latest release to support Release Groups, ISRCs and CD Stub searching!
For all the details on this release, check out the release notes.
I would like to thank Luks, Dave Evans, Navap, Outsidecontext, Voiceinsideyou, Murdos, Pronik, Prodoc and everyone else who has helped put this release together! Thank you for all your hard work!
P.S. Happy Birthday to Matt Wood!
Welcome all Lifehacker users!
Unfortunately you picked a bad day to come inundate MusicBrainz, because today is our next server update. This will start very soon, within about half an hour of me posting this entry. We expect to be down for at least 30 minutes today.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Wolfram Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” that has been the buzz the last few days uses MusicBrainz data! Click on the source information link on their example search for music:
When was Like a Rolling Stone released?
They use our data, but unfortunately they are not our customer. 🙁
We’ve hammered out many of the rough edges from the upcoming release and now we need your help to test the release to spot any problems that may have slipped past our new code review process.
New in this release:
– Release groups: This allows us to group same titled releases from one artist that have slightly different track lists into release groups. For instance, here is a Weezer release group that has many separate releases in it. We have converted as many batches of releases to release groups as we automatically could, but there are tons left to do. We’ll need your help!
– ISRC support: We can now track ISRC codes. While this is less useful to end users, our commercial customers have been asking for this for eons.
– WikiDocs: Our WikiDocs system now uses our new Mediawiki to pull documentation from.
– Bug fixes from our last release.
Aside from a good chunk of the bug fixes, all of these things are now live on our test server. Please report bugs to our bug tracker and make sure to select the “Server: ReleaseGroups, ISRCs, Bug Fixes” milestone so we can spot your bugs fast. Also take a look at the bugs we’ve already closed for this release and which ones are still outstanding.
We have one major known issue, where some release groups may be found in the search engine, but will give a “release group not found error” (example). This is a known bug.
Finally, do the release groups as we have them now make sense to you? There are a few things that may not be entirely clear, so we’re looking for feedback how to make things more clear before we release this on May 24th.
The next update of the MusicBrainz server will happen on May 24th. For this update we will have the following new features:
No later than this weekend I will post a call for testing with details on what has changed and what bugs were fixed. Stay tuned!
I’m pleased to announce that Google’s Summer of Code has announced which projects have been accepted. I’m pleased to let you know that our own Oliver Chalres and Lukáš Lalinský have been accepted to both work on our Next Generation Schema. Congratulations to both of you — this should be an exciting summer!
As the first act of getting ourselves organized for Summer of Code, the three of us have agreed to the following milestone schedule over the summer:
May 25: Object model and read-only user interface in place. This is essentially equivalent to Lukáš’ NGS-p implemented in Catalyst/Template Toolkit based on Oliver’s work from the last year. With this milestone users will be able to convert an existing database to the NGS schema and be able to browse the data in the new schema via the read-only user interface. No editing will be possible at this point in time.
June 29: The basic types are in place for editing artists, labels, and release-groups. Release and track level edits will not be complete.
July 27: Release and release related edit-types will be in place, but without a complete UI. The release edits will take a lot of work to get right so, we’ll have these edits in place, but may not be able to finish a working UI for them.
Aug 31: All remaining edit types are in place and the NGS enabled server enters a final beta phase.
Note that SoC doesn’t officially start until May 23 — we’re not wasting any time — in face our first milestone is due 2 days after SoC starts. Can you tell we’re serious this year?
In the past month there has been a ton of activity behind the scenes here at MusicBrainz and I can finally give a cohesive update on our plans for the next few months.
The much anticipated Release Groups release has been coded by Lukas in a weekend code sprint based on the old Mason codebase. Even though we had declared the old codebase as end-of-life, we have decided to push release groups out using the older code in order to satisfy the needs of the BBC and other customers. As part of this release, I will also add ISRC support and include a handful of bug fixes. Expect this release in May — I’ll post again when the date is firmly set.
And what is even more exciting is that we’re about to start work on our much anticipated Next Generation Schema (NGS). Discussed and planned over and over again, we’ve finally settled on an approach that appears to make everyone happy. As part of SoC, we’re likely going to accept Oliver and Lukas’ proposals to work on NGS over the summer. The goal is to implement all of the new schema in one release based on the TemplateToolkit/Catalyst work that Oliver has been working on since last summer. We’re going to take a step back and create a new object model/schema and then glue the TT UI onto the new object model.
The schedule puts the TT/Catalyst/NGS release into final beta test on August 31, with a release following in 15-30 days after that date. Please note, however, that there will be no other release based on Oliver’s TT work before NGS is release in September. We had to skip that release in order to pull in the schedule to make the target date of August 31.
I am quite excited by the work that is being done in the server area right now — we’re on our way to get past some significant hurdles. Just yesterday I got a first glimpse at the MusicBrainz site partially translated to Dutch — startling at first, but quite exciting when you think about it.
Many thanks to Matt Wood at the BBC for having the patience and dedication to work with MusicBrainz. Many thanks to Lukas for the coding sprint to get Release Groups off our collective plate. And of course many thanks to Oliver, Nikolai, Brian for your continuing hard work on TT. And thanks to everyone who has been supporting this team over the past few months.
Great news! Google has accepted us for another round of Summer of code!
Today’s the day – our wiki is being migrated to MediaWiki. The old “moin” wiki is now read-only (and will remain so, at least for a few months), and is available on oldwiki.musicbrainz.org. The new wiki, once all the data has been migrated across, will be at the usual address.
As soon as the migration is complete, I’ll switch wiki.musicbrainz.org over to point to MediaWiki.
Unfortunately it won’t be possible to also migrate the user accounts from moin to mediawiki, so regrettably this means that once mediawiki us up, you’ll have to re-create your accounts. Sorry about that.
Update: the switch has been made – if you have any questions to ask or problems to report about this, please see the WikiMigration page. Thanks!
Google has announced that Summer of Code will be happening again. We’re in the process of applying to participate again and I could use your help in coming up with some ideas for Summer of Code. Please take a look at our as of yet blank ideas page and add new ideas of your own.
Thanks!