If you’re interested in Niklas’ Summer of Code project to implement Discography support in MusicBrainz, I would suggest that you follow his blog and read his latest entry: “Database design and a question to users“. Niklas and I have been working on the design of the database tables that will enable his SoC project. We think we’re collecting the right information, but I’m nearly always wrong. So, if you have database design experience, please take a look at this latest post has tell us just how wrong we are. 🙂
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.
Blog moved to WordPress
I’ve finally moved our blog to the WordPress blogging system. This should alleviate all of the problems with blog comments that people were experiencing.
If you had a blog account on the old blog and would like to continue using it, please comment below and I will coordinate creating a password for you in this new blog.
If you have trouble using the new blog or find important links that are not redirecting, please create a new bug report.
Come play with a new search engine
Do you have a search bug that really annoys you? If so, please come help me test a new search engine!
I’ve ported our search services to a new text search engine called Xapian. While the indexes are bigger on disk, it is easier to install, much faster to index and probably also faster to search. And, over Lucene it has vastly fewer problems. And you can perform stop word searches!
Come play with it on my dev server! (Never mind the connection being slow and indexes being a few weeks old) Report issues to the usual place please!
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!
Personal email troubles
The heat wave in California over this past weekend fried the disks in my community mail server and I lost all the email from over the weekend. If you sent me mail over the weekend, (either to rob [fat] eorbit [dork] net or rob [fat] musicbrainz [dork] org) please re-send it so I can respond to it.
Sorry for the hassle and thanks for your understanding.
UK Mirror downtime
The UK mirror will be down from now (8pm BST, Noon PDT, 13 May) until about Noon BST, 4am PDT, 14 May due to scheduled power outage at last.fm where the server is hosted. Sorry for the invconvenience!
The UK mirror will be down from now (8pm BST, Noon PDT, 13 May) until about Noon BST, 4am PDT, 14 May due to scheduled power outage at last.fm where the server is hosted.
Sorry for the invconvenience!
Are you attending the MusicBrainz Summit 9?
If so, please re-read the Wiki page and follow the instructions at the top of the page. I’m looking forward to meeting up with everyone on Friday!
If so, please re-read the Wiki page and follow the instructions at the top of the page. I’m looking forward to meeting up with everyone on Friday!
MusicBrainz Summit #9: 10 May, London UK
After last year’s invite-only summit, its time to have another summit with a more informal agenda and an open invite: What: MusicBrainz Summit #9 Where: London, England (exact details will be posted later) When: 10 May Who: You! The rough plan is to have a general socializing evening on Friday as people trickle in from … Continue reading “MusicBrainz Summit #9: 10 May, London UK”
After last year’s invite-only summit, its time to have another summit with a more informal agenda and an open invite:
What: MusicBrainz Summit #9
Where: London, England (exact details will be posted later)
When: 10 May
Who: You!
The rough plan is to have a general socializing evening on Friday as people trickle in from all corners of Europe (UK, Sweden and Germany). Then on Saturday May 10 we will find a quiet place to sit and discuss some of the following issues:
- Google Summer of Code — All three students and two mentors will be present.
- MusicBrainz server development over the summer. Perl, python, Template::Toolkit
- Picard and Alexander’s SoC project to improve usability
- Niklas Berglund’s Music Collection project for SoC
- Next Generation Schema (NGS) and how that is impacted by the summer coding sprint
- The BBC’s efforts to help MusicBrainz with NGS.
- Your favorite topics as time allows
We’ve asked last.fm to allow us to hold the daytime events at the last.fm office. Personally, I want to play in the last.fm ball pit — who doesn’t? After the day-time activities we’ll find a pub and a have some drinks as we wind the day down. Then sunday morning everyone will scatter back to their respective corners of Europe.
We’re currently working to find crash spaces on couches and floors in various Londoner’s flats — if you live in London and can put up a brainzer on your couch, please speak up!
We’re coordinating arrivals times and summit details on the Summit #9 wiki page. Please add yourself if you plan to come — at time of writing, we’re up to 11 people! Watch the wiki page for details as we get closer to the event.
Amazon ASIN cleanup
Back in prehistoric times, MusicBrainz used to use an automated script for matching releases to Amazon’s ASINs. But quickly people interjected and demanded to be able to use ARs to associate ASINs to releases. So, we added support for using ARs, but we never got rid of the old system and that has caused a … Continue reading “Amazon ASIN cleanup”
Back in prehistoric times, MusicBrainz used to use an automated script for matching releases to Amazon’s ASINs. But quickly people interjected and demanded to be able to use ARs to associate ASINs to releases. So, we added support for using ARs, but we never got rid of the old system and that has caused a few bugs over time.
I’ve written a script that takes the first step in removing the old amazon ASINs and converts them to AR links. I’ve run this script on my test server musicbrainz.homeip.net — please go to that server and pick your favorite ASIN screw up and let me know if its working.
If this script turns out to work well, I can run it on the main server later this week in order to remove these pesky ASIN issues.
Thanks!
UPDATE: This script has been run on the main server and all Amazon ASINs should now be user editable. No new links have been generated — we’ve only converted old style ASIN matches to ARs so that our editors can make changes.