General update: Things are hoppin'!

A belated Happy New Year to all MusicBrainzers out there!

If things seem quiet in MusicBrainz land, don’t be fooled! The style mailing list is quite busy with activity as the style process has been rebooted. Development is happening at a frenzied pace as most developers are focusing on the server rewrite that has been in progress since summer last year. In a sense its already fulfilling one of its goals: More developers are taking a look at the improved, easier to understand and easier to install codebase. I don’t think we’ve ever had this many developers tinkering with the server source code!

We’re now in the process of coordinating a growing team of developers and charting the course for future releases. Its still too early to really tell what the next release will include exactly, but once a concrete plan starts shaping up, I’ll post an update here. Also, another team of people is hard at work at creating a new binary install of Picard for OS X. You can follow all the happenings on the developers mailing list.

Finally, the MetaBrainz Foundation, the legal entity that pays the bills for MusicBrainz made it through another year of being self sufficient! In 2008 the non-profit earned $126,442.26 and spent $94,717.79. Now we have $30,000 more in the bank than we did this time last year. This finally gives us money to spend on development to move MusicBrainz along! For all the details on how we earned/spent our money, check out our finances page and our 2008 Profit and Loss statement.

Finally, the BBC continues to tout the virtues of MusicBrainz: BBC Music talking semantics

Onward into an exciting 2009 we go!

Connectivity problems resolved

A few of you have reported problems with connectivity to the MusicBrainz site in the last week. With help from various people in Canada and Europe we’ve been able to provide information for Digital West (our provider) to fix the problem. As of 11:38 PST the problem was fixed.

If you are still experiencing problems, please post a comment here or open a bug in our bug tracker.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!

New customer: Cloudspeakers in Utrecht

I’m pleased to announce that I signed a new customer in the Netherlands yesterday! I met the Cloudspeakers team in Utrecht and spent a day discussing their business and how Cloudspeakers can work with MusicBrainz in the future.

After many conversations during the day, we ceremoniously signed the data license contract over an elegant and extremely tasty Indonesian meal. A day well spent!

A big thanks to Chris, Stan, Adriaan, Charlie and Francis! Thanks for inviting me, paying for meals and even my flight to the Netherlands. I look forward to working with you!

Calling all guinea pigs!

I come bringing good news! With the latest version of the server now out in the wild, we’re ready to move on to the next stage of MusicBrainz development. But first a quick refresher…

You may recall, many moons ago I (Oliver Charles aka aCiD2) began work on moving the mb_server codebase from our own in-house framework, to the tried and tested Catalyst framework – along with separating out the HTML into separate Template Toolkit templates. Well, after what seems like an age, it’s finally got to the time where I can start getting some critical feedback from the most important people – you!

As from now, test.musicbrainz.org is now running the development branch of this work. It’s important to realise that this new codebase currently has no javascript support. This decision was made because it’s very important we get the website fully functional, and then add bells and whistles on later. We’re starting from a mostly clean slate, so there’s a lot of chance of things breaking, and JavaScript was likely to be just one more headache.

Oh, and I’ve never deployed a server like this before, so please bare with me while I work out any problems running the server. I’m going to London tomorrow and coming back Saturday evening (slightly bad timing, I’m aware) – but I’ll do my best to check any messages that come my way!

However, before you jump straight in and overload us with work – I’d like to lay down some guidelines for providing us with feedback. This will (hopefully) ensure that we can see to these bugs as fast as possible.

Where to report:

Standard practice- report at our bugtracker – bugs.musicbrainz.org

What should you report?

The most important things to report are actions that cause errors to occur, invalid behaviour or features that are simply not available, but are from the main server. You should also report typos and other visual problems – but I will be encouraging people to help fix these themselves (more on this later!).

What information should you provide?

The most critical information is that you can provide us with as much context as possible. Please let us know:

  • Any steps to reproduce the problem
  • Whether you are logged in or not
  • The address of the page that caused the problem
  • As much information as possible from the top of the error page

The last point relates somewhat to Catalyst. Catalyst features improved error handling and can provide us with a stack trace. You should try and include this stack trace, and the errors at the top. Chances are, we’ll be able to reproduce this from the information you provide – but if not, the stack trace gives us one more pointer to where the problem is 🙂

How should you organise the report?

Generally speaking, just try to fill in as many of the fields as possible. I’ll be reading every single report that comes in, and re-filing it myself where necessary. Ideally, set the component to ‘MusicBrainz’, the milestone to ‘Server: TemplateToolkit’ and assign the bug to me 🙂

So…

Let the bug crunching begin!

Main server updated

We just completed pushing the latest changes out to the main servers! We had a bit of a bumpy ride to roll out the upgrade — we’re noticing quite a few problems with collections right now and the Last Update feature brought our database server to its knees. As a result, we’ve disabled the Dashboard — we’ll re-enable it once we figure out what the problem is.

If you encounter a problem with the server, please file a bug report and select the 2008-11-23 version. Also, please check the open bug list to see if your problem has been reported before.

For a complete list of things that changed for this release, please see the release page on the wiki.

This massive release was brought to you by the tireless efforts of: Luks, Murdos, Djce, Jugdish, Acid2, Niklas and myself. Loads and loads of good testing came from Voiceinsideyou and Nikki. Thanks to everyone who helped with this release!

Also, if you’ve used Jugdish’s enhanced voting GreaseMonkey script, please disable it as it may cause problems since that functionality was included in this server release.

Reminder: Server update is coming this Sunday. And TRM are going away!

I’d like to remind everyone that the next server release is scheduled for this Sunday November 23. We’re still working on scheduling for the release, but it will happen on Sunday. Expect the MusicBrainz to be unavailable for at least 1 hour.

Also, please be aware that with this release the TRM server will be decommissioned — the Classic Tagger will then be officially deprecated, but it should continue to work — even without TRM support.

The BBC has hired a full time MusicBrainz server developer!

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Wood, the BBC has officially hired Jason Emmett to work full time on the MusicBrainz server!

Jason, who will be working in the BBC offices in London will be working with Oliver to finish the port to Template Toolkit branch. After that both of them will tackle the Release Groups that we’ve deemed to be a worthy intermediary step. A few weeks ago the MusicBrainz server had only table scraps of love, moving it along quite slowly. Today we have nearly 1.5 full time people working on the server source code. This gives me tons of hope that we can shoot for doing 3-4 releases in 2009.

Thank you so much for all of your efforts, Matthew Wood. Thank you for all of your support BBC! Welcome on board Jason!

Call for testing: November 23 server release

Murdos, Niklas, Luks, Dave Evans and I have all been working on the upcoming server release and we would like to invite you to help us test this massive release. Most of the features for this release have been debugged, but a few bugs are still outstanding.

The test server has been updated with all of the latest features and is ready for you to log in with your normal user account with the password ‘mb’. The list of features in this release is described in this blog post and this post.

Submit new bug reports to our bug tracker. Also see, the milestone for this release to see which bugs have been fixed and which bugs are still open. Please check the open bug list before reporting a new bug.

Thanks to everyone who helped take part in the development for this release!

One more feature from good measure: CD Stubs

The final feature to be included in the upcoming release are CD Stubs. From the documentation page:

Many times people would like to contribute CD data to MusicBrainz, but would prefer to not learn to be part of MusicBrainz. These people would rather just toss some data into a pile and go on with their lives to listen to their music or rip their CDs. CD Stubs enable users to do just that.

With this release people who come to look up a CD, but MusicBrainz does not know about that CD, will be given a choice to either enter the CD as a CD Stub or to join MusicBrainz and to enter the CD into MusicBrainz proper. (This is the red pill/blue pill decision point). Note that users who are logged in to MusicBrainz when looking up a CD will not be given the option to enter a CD Stub.

To submit a CD Stub to the test server, use any MusicBrainz enabled CD lookup application to submit a CD to MusicBrainz. You must not be logged into the test server, otherwise you will never be given the option to submit a CD Stub. Then follow the instructions for how to submit a CD Stub.

To retrieve the CD Stub you must use the XML Webservice. CD Stubs are not available via the old RDF web service. Use this URL to fetch data for CDs that will also return CD Stubs if no CDs are available in the main DB:

http://[test.]musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release?type=xml&discid=[discid]&toc=[toc]

This URL is also available via libdiscid and its example program discid.