Addressing MusicBrainz' growing problems: part 1 of many

I’m finally back from being on the road. I’ve caught up on much needed sleep and am now working regular hours again. This means its time to address the various issues that we left to ponder before I went on vacation and my trip to Europe. While I was in Europe and in IRC while … Continue reading “Addressing MusicBrainz' growing problems: part 1 of many”

I’m finally back from being on the road. I’ve caught up on much needed sleep and am now working regular hours again. This means its time to address the various issues that we left to ponder before I went on vacation and my trip to Europe. While I was in Europe and in IRC while I was rebooting our database server, inhouseuk said the following:

inhouseuk: you need to start behaving more like a sort of CEO rather than a one man band 🙂

I agree. But then, what exactly is this sort of CEO (or rather sort of Executive Director) supposed to do? And what isn’t he supposed to do? Thats a really tough question that I would like to pose to the community at large. If you have any thoughts on this, please speak up.

The first thing that I want to do is to describe the job I have been performing for the last two years since the non-profit has been running. Then, with help from the community I would like to come up with my job description going forward. That way we can all be on the same page about I should and should not be doing.

Things that I should probably not be doing any longer are in bold.

Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation

Server maintenance

  • Hardware purchasing/acquistion of used hardware
  • Colocation issues/contracts/maintenance
  • Managing hardware costs and future planning
  • Manage off-site servers (nl., test.)

Business Development

  • Conferences/tradeshows/schmoozing/maintaining contacts for MusicBrainz
  • Meetings with potential partners/licensees
  • New licenses sales
  • Managing and soliciting sponsors
  • Raise funds for further server development

Development

  • mb_server (and too little of it)
  • lucene searching

Legal Department

  • Licenses for data/software/web services
  • Contracts for data/licenses/web services
  • Interacting with lawyers
  • Find pro bono lawyers

Community Relations

  • Answering questions in IRC/mail/blog/mailing lists
  • Conflict resolution
  • Managing developers

Foundation Issues

  • metabrainz.org web site/donation tracking
  • State/federal filing requirements
  • Board of directors management/meetings

Accounting

  • Keep general books, manage invoices, pay bills
  • File tax reports/manage accountants
  • Post monthly financial results
  • Manage bank accounts/investments

Support

  • Answer support@ emails, with help from Wolfsong
  • Help partners/licensees (at least have support@ team help

Please note that not all of these tasks are things I do every week. But should something come up, I have to rise to the task. If a server tips over, I go to fix it. If a customer has a question I ask it. I may just go for weeks without dealing with a tipping server.

Do you agree or disagree with the items I’ve identified as things that I should not handle any more?

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python-musicbrainz2-0.4.0 released

The official python bindings for MusicBrainz, python-musicbrainz2 have been released. Starting with this version, the API is stable and the package is considered ready for general use.

Links:

* Download page
* API documentation

Thanks go to everyone who participated in the development, most notably Lukáš Lalinský who ported picard-0.7 to python-musicbrainz2, created binary packages and has contributed bug reports and patches.

Matthias Friedrich

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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