MetaBrainz Blog

MusicBrainzSummit7
is over. It was fun, and it was a lot of work. Here is what we’ve worked out:
From the whole range of patchy fix to complete rewrite, we have chosen both
extremes:

1. FeaturingArtistStyle will be patched very soon.
2. Then work will start on MusicBrainz 2.0: a complete rewrite of the
   database schema, the moderation system and the user interfaces. This will
   take a long time.
3. In the meantime small improvements and fixes to old nuisances will be
   made every 1-2 months.

Continue reading “Record of the 7th MusicBrainz Summit”

Ever since my post about TRM hitting its limits, I’ve been in discussions with a reputable company who has offered to let the MusicBrainz community use their fingerprint server in exchange to a free license to the MusicBrainz live-data feed. While I am not ready to reveal who this company is, I do feel that I can trust these folks — this is not the first time we’ve chatted.

The straw-man deal that we’ve put together makes sense for MusicBrainz and this company. Unlike MusicBrainz’ relationship with Relatable, this relationship would be more balanced. Plus, we would not have to maintain the server ourselves. All around I feel good about this proposed deal. There is just one little snag.

They are uncomfortable with open sourcing their client.

While I am not an open source license Nazi, I have received tons of complaints about MusicBrainz using a technology that is not fully open. As a matter of fact, my most unpleasant dealings with the general public have been on this point (that the TRM server is closed source). And I’ve had unreasonable people shout unreasonable things at me over this point. Quite frankly I am not really interested in having to defend my position on this any further, but I fear that not having a working fingerprint solution may be more of a hassle than having to defend a closed source solution.

So, my question to you is this:

1. Do you value having access to a fingerprint solution as part of MusicBrainz more than MusicBrainz being an end-to-end open solution?
2. What arguments can we make for having this company open source their client, as Relatable did? I’ve argued the standard open source arguments and I think that there is still a small chance that we can persuade this company to open up. I need to construct a better argument and perhaps meet with them in person to hash this out further. What things should I argue?

Please keep your idealistic everything needs to be open arguments to yourself. I simply won’t bother reading them or responding to them. I really care to see if we can find a balance where we can maximize the value that MusicBrainz presents, even if it means compromising our values slightly. If you’re not ready to make a balanced argument, then please don’t.

NOTE: If we were to start using a closed source fingerprint solution, nothing else would change. None of the existing licenses for MusicBrainz would change. So, keep your pants on and stop frothing at the mouth.

My last post on current state of the TRM fingerprinting solution got quite a bit of response — I was quite amazed by it really. Personally, I think people still put too much emphasis on TRM and what role it plays within MusicBrainz, but without me providing a new tagging solution there aren’t any concrete points to discuss.

Given the feedback I’ve gotten, I’d like to state a reformulated vision with regards to acoustic fingerprinting and tagging here at MusicBrainz. The two points that have received the most feedback concern acoustic fingerprinting and downloading large index files in order to use the tagger.

Acoustic fingerprinting: Since so many people professed their love for TRM and acoustic fingerprinting in general, we will do the following things:

1. Keep TRM alive.
2. Work to create an open replacement for TRM. See the musicbrainz-devel mailing list for discussion on this topic and if you would like to help out. The founder of Tuneprint has recently volunteered to help build this new solution and I expect that his presence in this project should stir things up a bit.
3. When #2 is operational, we will start a gradual migration to the new server. TRM is not going away tomorrow! Got it?

The obvious problem is if #2 does not come to fruition — if you care about TRM and acoustic fingerprinting here at MusicBrainz, you should go check out the discussion on the devel mailing list and lend your hand. If it doesn’t come about and the TRM server stops being useful, then we’ll eventually turn the TRM server off.

Picard & large indexes: The Picard tagger with Lucene support will progress as planned — the only change so far will be that I will provide one machine for use as a centralized lookup server that will not require you to download the massive text index. However, I expect that Picard with Lucene will be a popular tagging tool, and that the server will get overloaded and slow in the space of a few months. Given that, we’ll have complete indexes available for people to download.

I predict loads of people will opt to download the text index since a 250Mb download will be a lot faster than trying to tag their 10,000 file collection on an overloaded server that performs 10 lookups per minute for them.

Thanks for all the feedback!

UPDATE: PLEASE stop telling me how much the large index would cramp your style and how much the fingerprinting has saved you. I know!