Summer is over!

Well, almost. I’m back from OSCON, Foo Camp, Burning Man and the Future of Music Conference. Traveling was fun, but I’m ready to wait for the not-so-nice weather and cuddle up with a computer and get some serious MusicBrainz work done. The good news is that the data licensing revenue should start rolling in within … Continue reading “Summer is over!”

Well, almost. I’m back from OSCON, Foo Camp, Burning Man and the Future of Music Conference. Traveling was fun, but I’m ready to wait for the not-so-nice weather and cuddle up with a computer and get some serious MusicBrainz work done.

The good news is that the data licensing revenue should start rolling in within a few weeks, which means that I get to keep working on MusicBrainz full time! Full time and paid — at first it won’t be much of a paycheck, but it should pay the bills. Maybe next year we can work towards a full paycheck — we’ll see.

Here is my todo list for the near future:

  1. Whip mirror servers into shape
  2. Sign more license deals
  3. Get the menu server release out the door
  4. Fix AR bugs, improve related artists, hammer out a few new server features.
  5. Release Picard 0.5.0, libtunepimp and libmusicbrainz — all of these desperately need new releases.

Of course there are lots more things on my todo list, but these are the top 5 items. Stay tuned for more info!

June finances posted

I’ve finally posted the MetaBrainz Finances for June. I had to write a script that would take PayPal’s tab seperated format and crank out a QuickBooks compatible iif file. I’d rather spend time hacking on MusicBrainz proper, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do. ( This is one of of times where my programming … Continue reading “June finances posted”

I’ve finally posted the MetaBrainz Finances for June. I had to write a script that would take PayPal’s tab seperated format and crank out a QuickBooks compatible iif file. I’d rather spend time hacking on MusicBrainz proper, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

( This is one of of times where my programming skills saved my bacon. What do people who can’t program do? Lots of tedious work? )

MetaBrainz signs up first customer

I’m proud to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has just signed up the first client for its live data-feed service! This presents a major milestone for the foundation, since it proves that there are companies interested in and willing to pay for this service. The only downside is that I cannot mention who this company … Continue reading “MetaBrainz signs up first customer”

I’m proud to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has just signed up the first client for its live data-feed service! This presents a major milestone for the foundation, since it proves that there are companies interested in and willing to pay for this service.

The only downside is that I cannot mention who this company is. This will have to stay secret until they roll out their product with our service under the hood. So, until then sit tight and stay tuned!

What's up PayPal??

I’m now over two weeks behind in posting the finances for June — please bear with me, while I battle PayPal a bit. I’ve been using their export to QuickBooks feature to download the transactions for all the donations we’ve been receiving. But, for some unknown reason, that option is no longer available — only … Continue reading “What's up PayPal??”

I’m now over two weeks behind in posting the finances for June — please bear with me, while I battle PayPal a bit. I’ve been using their export to QuickBooks feature to download the transactions for all the donations we’ve been receiving. But, for some unknown reason, that option is no longer available — only export to tab/comma delimited files, and QuickBooks can’t import those files.

I’d have to write a converter that takes CSV files and translates them into quickbooks files — something I am trying to avoid. Thus I am waiting for a reply back from PayPal about what’s going on.

If this is not resolved by next week, I’ll go write the script and get our finances back on track.

UPDATE: PayPal permanently removed this feature, with no explanation as to why — I guess we join the ranks of people who have gotten screwed by PayPal. I just wish they would’ve notified me. Grrr.

Picard 0.5.0-test2 released!

With much help from Lukas Lalinsky and Dave Evans, we’ve finally managed to scrape together the next picard release. The highlights for this release are: Full UNICODE support on all supported platforms. Tags and filenames are now read and written with the proper encoding support. ID3v2.3 AND ID3v2.4 support — selectable in the options dialog. … Continue reading “Picard 0.5.0-test2 released!”

With much help from Lukas Lalinsky and Dave Evans, we’ve finally managed to scrape together the next picard release. The highlights for this release are:

  • Full UNICODE support on all supported platforms. Tags and filenames are now read and written with the proper encoding support.
  • ID3v2.3 AND ID3v2.4 support — selectable in the options dialog.
  • Increased stability
  • A more rounded feature set
  • Tons of bug fixes
  • UI improvements
  • Built on top of a release version of wxWidgets, for greater stability
  • New windows installer

Downloads:

Continue reading “Picard 0.5.0-test2 released!”

Picard update

I know that a lot of people have been waiting for the next release of Picard. Fortunately, I’ve been working on it — unfortunately its taking me a bit of time to get to the next release. In order to get end-to-end UNICODE support in Picard, a number of serious changes were required to the … Continue reading “Picard update”

I know that a lot of people have been waiting for the next release of Picard. Fortunately, I’ve been working on it — unfortunately its taking me a bit of time to get to the next release. In order to get end-to-end UNICODE support in Picard, a number of serious changes were required to the underlying libtunepimp library.

The good news is that these massive changes are nearly done. The bad news is that the application will probably no longer run on Win 9x and Me — the UNICODE support in those two OSes is too weak. And the one thing I want to get right with this release is the UNICODE support. It is exciting to see Picard writing Cyrillic filenames — that’s for sure.

I’m trying to finish up the app in the next few days — stay tuned.

MusicBrainz Tagger reviewed in the Washington Post

The Washington Post covered the MusicBrainz Tagger in their weekend edition (reg required): MusicBrainz does this by computing a music file’s digital fingerprint, based on its length and acoustic properties, then seeing if it can find a match in a growing online database of songs. The program will then work its magic, even reporting its … Continue reading “MusicBrainz Tagger reviewed in the Washington Post”

The Washington Post covered the MusicBrainz Tagger in their weekend edition (reg required):

MusicBrainz does this by computing a music file’s digital fingerprint, based on its length and acoustic properties, then seeing if it can find a match in a growing online database of songs. The program will then work its magic, even reporting its confidence in less-than-exact matches. It was right in most of our tests, even when it reported that a song’s fingerprint matched only 55 percent of a title in the database.

Just wait until they see Picard… Speaking of which, I’m supposed to be working on that right now.