Edit of the Week: Crediting featuring artists

And yet another edit that caused a little controversy: Edit 5607659 The voting is a bit one-sided at the moment but it seems that working practice has outpaced guidelines again. The FeaturingArtistStyle has always been the bone of contention (see SG5DisasterRelief for example) – now the question is if AdvancedRelationships as a mean of crediting … Continue reading “Edit of the Week: Crediting featuring artists”

And yet another edit that caused a little controversy:

Edit 5607659

The voting is a bit one-sided at the moment but it seems that working practice has outpaced guidelines again. The FeaturingArtistStyle has always been the bone of contention (see SG5DisasterRelief for example) – now the question is if AdvancedRelationships as a mean of crediting of what an artist has actually done on a release (in NextGenerationSchema-talk: “what it is”) are shifting the “feat.” in track titles to a role where it only credits “what it says”, that is when the artist intended to credit guest appearances prominently on the cover.
The con is that the presence or non-presence of “feat.” on covers barely expresses artist intent because it is done by cover designers and mostly the artist doesn’t have a say in the design.

Temporary MusicBrainz outage

MusicBrainz will not be reachable for about 5 minutes starting tomorrow Sept 20th at midnight, PDT. Digital West is reconfiguring their network during this time. Sorry for the inconvenience. Technorati Tags: musicbrainz

MusicBrainz will not be reachable for about 5 minutes starting tomorrow Sept 20th at midnight, PDT. Digital West is reconfiguring their network during this time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Magic MP3 Tagger: Results from the first month

Matthias the author of Magic MP3 Tagger suggested that I post about the first month’s take, since it exceeded both of our expectations. With the new links to his tagger added to the MusicBrainz site, his registrations increased significantly so that he paid us 401.02 Euro (514.75 Dollars) for the month of August alone! This … Continue reading “Magic MP3 Tagger: Results from the first month”

Matthias the author of Magic MP3 Tagger suggested that I post about the first month’s take, since it exceeded both of our expectations.

With the new links to his tagger added to the MusicBrainz site, his registrations increased significantly so that he paid us 401.02 Euro (514.75 Dollars) for the month of August alone! This is far from spare change — this nearly covers the cost of our bandwidth bill!

As our costs for hosting are increasing, I’m quite pleased to see that more money is coming in to keep our costs covered. Thanks much for pestering me about this Matthias! Three cheers to many more months of cooperation!

Returning to the land of MusicBrainz

After a much needed break and an extensive camping trip, I’ve finally returned to the land of MusicBrainz. However, instead of returning to San Luis Obispo to tackle new challenges, I’m in London this week. The BBC invited me for a few days to explore the possibilities how MusicBrainz and the BBC can work together. … Continue reading “Returning to the land of MusicBrainz”

After a much needed break and an extensive camping trip, I’ve finally returned to the land of MusicBrainz. However, instead of returning to San Luis Obispo to tackle new challenges, I’m in London this week. The BBC invited me for a few days to explore the possibilities how MusicBrainz and the BBC can work together.

While I am in London I am checking mail and catching up on the happenings of the past couple of weeks. I am also starting to think about how to solve the various growing pains that MusicBrainz is experiencing at the moment. After my break I have a much clearer view of the world and a much better head space.

Stay tuned for some thoughts on how to tackle our current set of challenges!

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Edit of the Week: Previews of Upcoming Releases

I always wanted to revive this column but never found a controversial edit that was interesting enough / didn’t have too much flame notes.

I always wanted to revive this column but never found a controversial edit that was interesting enough / didn’t have too much flame notes. So, here we go:

http://musicbrainz.org/show/edit/?editid=5467441

What’s it about? Well, in short: if an artist releases a song on their website that is likely or said to appear on a release in the future, then is this a legal non-album track or not? Of course it’s also possible that it will definitely appear on a release but in another version.

So, shall we wait until the release is out and then only add it as a NAT if it’s a different version or should we just add it and later delete it if necessary (the guidelines state this)?

TRM server outage

The TRM server hardware has been giving us some issues in the last week. We’re having to reboot the TRM server a lot more frequently than I care for, so I will take the TRM server down tomorrow and have a look to see what the issue might be. The TRM server will be offline … Continue reading “TRM server outage”

The TRM server hardware has been giving us some issues in the last week. We’re having to reboot the TRM server a lot more frequently than I care for, so I will take the TRM server down tomorrow and have a look to see what the issue might be.

The TRM server will be offline for about 1-2 hours tomorrow Wednesday August 23rd, at Noon PST/2000 BST/2100 CEST.

UPDATE: The outage is now over — I could not find any problems with the server, so the random lock-ups go unexplained. 🙁

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Final call for testing

After passing on the release last weekend, I think we’re ready to try again. This is the last call for bugs for this release! If you find a serious bug, please enter it into trac and I’ll see about getting it fixed. Please don’t enter any enhancements requests for this release — I’m only fixing … Continue reading “Final call for testing”

After passing on the release last weekend, I think we’re ready to try again. This is the last call for bugs for this release! If you find a serious bug, please enter it into trac and I’ll see about getting it fixed. Please don’t enter any enhancements requests for this release — I’m only fixing bugs at this point and will do no enhancements right now.

The bug fix update release is scheduled for this Sunday. Go test on the staging server and report bugs or look at the list of closed bugs.

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New staging server up!

Over the past few weeks I’ve taken our venerable first server zim and given him a bit of an overhaul. A new motherboard, with 2GBs of RAM and a RAID SATA controller have given Zim a new lease on life as our test server. Now that the test server is no longer at my house, … Continue reading “New staging server up!”

Over the past few weeks I’ve taken our venerable first server zim and given him a bit of an overhaul. A new motherboard, with 2GBs of RAM and a RAID SATA controller have given Zim a new lease on life as our test server. Now that the test server is no longer at my house, I can stop paying for the expensive net connection with the static IPs. Yay!

The staging server is currently called zim2.musicbrainz.org, but this should be fixed some time tomorrow.

I would like to give a big-fat thanks to Cliff Skolnick, Apache contributor and the leading force behing RightRound. Cliff is hosting our new staging server in his personal hosting setup as a favor to MusicBrainz. Thanks Cliff and the team at RightRound — we appreciate your support!

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Developer changes

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve had a number of conflicts surrounding the development of the MusicBrainz server source code. Open source developers must work to foster the community of their projects and work towards creating a consensus towards new/improved features. After an increasing number of conflicts with the community Stefan was warned … Continue reading “Developer changes”

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve had a number of conflicts surrounding the development of the MusicBrainz server source code. Open source developers must work to foster the community of their projects and work towards creating a consensus towards new/improved features.

After an increasing number of conflicts with the community Stefan was warned that his actions as a developer were not acceptable. After countless emails and a number of Skype calls I warned Stefan that the next time he participated in an escalation with one of the community members that I would remove his developer privileges.

Today another one of these escalations took place and I removed Stefan’s developer privileges.

As of right now, I will assume all duties of the MusicBrainz server developer. I will fix any remaining bugs, settle remaining conflicts and work to get the next bug update done as soon as possible. Fortunately now that I can devote all my time to MusicBrainz, I will have more time to devote to getting new server features coded.

With a heavy heart,

Evil Overlord

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