Google steps up its support of MusicBrainz!

I’m pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $30,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! This doubles the amount that Google gave us last year and reinforces Google’s commitment to supporting MusicBrainz. Combined with Google’s Summer of Code Project, Google is supporting MusicBrainz to the tune of $45,000 for 2007! This donation will allow us to: … Continue reading “Google steps up its support of MusicBrainz!”

I’m pleased to announce that Google has just pledged $30,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! This doubles the amount that Google gave us last year and reinforces Google’s commitment to supporting MusicBrainz. Combined with Google’s Summer of Code Project, Google is supporting MusicBrainz to the tune of $45,000 for 2007!

This donation will allow us to:

  • Hold Summit 8 that will build on and review the work done in Summit 7 and lay out a concrete roadmap for implementing the Next Generation Schema. MetaBrainz will pay for key players to attend this upcoming summit.
  • Increase the salary for Robert Kaye to more competitive rate.
  • Hire a part time developer to work on MusicBrainz and drive the implementation of the Next Generation Schema.

Thank you very much Google! Thank you to Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn and Tiffany Griffith at Google’s Open Source group.

Creative Commons license for MusicBrainz Wiki

Previously we had not set a license for text/data in our Wiki. In order to make things explicit dmppanda has added a new MusicBrainzWikiLicense page that explictly sets the license to be the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This makes the content in our wiki consistent with the data in our database. If you have … Continue reading “Creative Commons license for MusicBrainz Wiki”

Previously we had not set a license for text/data in our Wiki. In order to make things explicit dmppanda has added a new MusicBrainzWikiLicense page that explictly sets the license to be the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This makes the content in our wiki consistent with the data in our database.

If you have contributed to the Wiki and object to this license being set, please Contact Us and we will work out the conflict.

Classic Tagger degraded

All the usual tricks to massage our database server aren’t helping. 🙁 The problem appears to be the ever growing table of TRMs that the Classic Tagger uses. The table has gotten too big with dead TRMs and its really hard to remove all the dead TRMs. So, in order to get things back to … Continue reading “Classic Tagger degraded”

All the usual tricks to massage our database server aren’t helping. 🙁

The problem appears to be the ever growing table of TRMs that the Classic Tagger uses. The table has gotten too big with dead TRMs and its really hard to remove all the dead TRMs. So, in order to get things back to a sane state, we’ve disabled TRM functionality and our database is now working fairly well again.

Classic Tagger users: While we figure out how to proceed, the tagger will stop working. The classic tagger will not recognize any tracks right now — we apologize for the inconvenience. At this point, please check out the Picard and PicardQT as alternatives!

Stay tuned for more details!

Scheduled downtime: Friday 2000 UTC, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT

We need to dump the database and re-import it in order to get off this crazy load spike the database has been on. We will be down for about 90 minutes starting today (Friday) at 2000 UTC, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT. Sorry for the inconvenience and late notice! UPDATE: The import/export is taking longer than … Continue reading “Scheduled downtime: Friday 2000 UTC, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT”

We need to dump the database and re-import it in order to get off this crazy load spike the database has been on. We will be down for about 90 minutes starting today (Friday) at 2000 UTC, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT.

Sorry for the inconvenience and late notice!

UPDATE: The import/export is taking longer than we care for. We hope to be done soon. Sorry for the hassle.

Overloaded database server

The load on our database server has been growing over the last few days causing slow downs. Since our overall traffic is not going up right now, this suggests that our last update caused some performance issues. In order to analyze our traffic, I will be doing some performance tuning and query logging to attempt … Continue reading “Overloaded database server”

The load on our database server has been growing over the last few days causing slow downs. Since our overall traffic is not going up right now, this suggests that our last update caused some performance issues.

In order to analyze our traffic, I will be doing some performance tuning and query logging to attempt to get to the bottom of this problem. To that affect, MusicBrainz will have a couple of short downtimes today as I tinker with our database server.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Rachel Segal of MusicIP becomes the MetaBrainz Treasurer/Secretary

I’m proud to announce that Rachel Segal has just been voted to take the Treasurer/Secretary slot on the MetaBrainz Board of Directors. Rachel is the Marketing and Artist Relations manager for MusicIP and is already quite familiar with MusicBrainz and the MetaBrainz Foundation. Rachel Segal will be taking over the duties of the outgoing secretary/treasurer … Continue reading “Rachel Segal of MusicIP becomes the MetaBrainz Treasurer/Secretary”

I’m proud to announce that Rachel Segal has just been voted to take the Treasurer/Secretary slot on the MetaBrainz Board of Directors. Rachel is the Marketing and Artist Relations manager for MusicIP and is already quite familiar with MusicBrainz and the MetaBrainz Foundation.

Rachel Segal will be taking over the duties of the outgoing secretary/treasurer Rachel Soffa. Rachel Soffa has recently landed a big promotion which will make her life even more busy than before, thus necessitating this change.

Thank you very much Rachel Soffa and congratulations on your promotion! Thank you to Rachel Segal for joining our organization and helping out with our operations!

Google Summer of Code Projects have been accepted

I’m pleased to announce that we have accepted three Google Summer of Code projects: Using Collaborative Filtering to generate Relationships between artists for MusicBrainz by Sharon Myrtle Paradesi Working on implementing simplified NGS by Erik Dalén Improved Statistics and Trivia by Guelson Fostine Lukáš will mentor Erik and Guelson and I will be mentoring Sharon. … Continue reading “Google Summer of Code Projects have been accepted”

I’m pleased to announce that we have accepted three Google Summer of Code projects:

  1. Using Collaborative Filtering to generate Relationships between artists for MusicBrainz by Sharon Myrtle Paradesi
  2. Working on implementing simplified NGS by Erik Dalén
  3. Improved Statistics and Trivia by Guelson Fostine

Lukáš will mentor Erik and Guelson and I will be mentoring Sharon. By accepting three of our proposals Google is indirectly sponsoring MusicBrainz with another $15,000! (Each student gets $4,500 and each mentor gets $500 per student)

Thank you very much Google and good luck to Sharon, Erik and Guelson!

Our servers are overloaded!

This weekend we’ve seen a rise in tagger traffic to the MusicBrainz site. This extra traffic is causing load spikes that give us the dreaded 502 proxy error messages. Now that the release is done I can focus more time on getting our various hardware issues solved and bring a new database server online before … Continue reading “Our servers are overloaded!”

This weekend we’ve seen a rise in tagger traffic to the MusicBrainz site. This extra traffic is causing load spikes that give us the dreaded 502 proxy error messages. Now that the release is done I can focus more time on getting our various hardware issues solved and bring a new database server online before the load spikes return next weekend.

What can you do? There are three concrete things:

  1. Make a donation to help us cover our costs.
  2. Stop tagging for today and spend some time with your friends and family for Easter. 🙂
  3. If you must continue tagging, please use our UK mirror: http://www.uk.musicbrainz.org In the options dialog of your favorite tagging application, look for the tab that lets you set the server you’re using to tag. Enter www.uk.musicbrainz.org in that field and you should be good to go.

Sorry for the inconvenience, we’ll work on this as soon as possible!

Server update has been completed!

After much work by Lukáš, Dave, Age (Prodoc) and myself, I’m pleased to announce that the main server has been updated! We now have support for DataQuality, Labels, improved cover art, track annotations and a whole host of bug reports. To see the detailed list of what things have been included in this release, please … Continue reading “Server update has been completed!”

After much work by Lukáš, Dave, Age (Prodoc) and myself, I’m pleased to announce that the main server has been updated! We now have support for DataQuality, Labels, improved cover art, track annotations and a whole host of bug reports. To see the detailed list of what things have been included in this release, please see our release milestone.

This release is significant in a number of ways:

  1. The labels feature is our first major schema extension in quite some time.
  2. Its our first schema change release in over a year!
  3. Age Bosma (Prodoc) has submitted a number of patches that were included in this release. Its great to see another aspiring developer getting code included in the main server. Well done and thanks much, Age!

Huge thanks go to Lukáš, Dave, Age for working on this release. Thank you!