MetaBrainz Blog – Page 25 – MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog

Schema change release: May 16, 2022

Today we’re announcing a MusicBrainz database schema change release planned for May 16, 2022. The majority of these changes follow the theme of improving data integrity and consistency, performance, or just cleaning up old cruft. Others relate to new features for genres and artist credits. We’re also introducing a new entity based on tags, like genres that came before it: Mood. See below for more details, including information on how these changes affect the schema or existing data. We expect people will encounter zero breaking changes, but it doesn’t hurt to double check, especially if you have a specific or non-standard use of the database!

Here’s our list of tickets for the Spring 2022 schema change:

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-03-14

This release, aside from fixing a few more small bugs, adds a lot of new features to the filtering options available on artist pages. You can now filter works (including by whether the artist was a writer or a performer), filter release groups by secondary type, specify you want only cases with no types set at all. Additionally, pages with lists of edits have just been converted to React, so do let us know if you see any strange behaviour there.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to rinsuki for updating the cleanup for niconico external links. Thanks to chaban and jesus2099 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, mfmeulenbelt and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-03-14.

Planned downtime for Wednesday, March 2, 16:00 UTC

We’ll be performing some critical maintenance on our database server starting at 16:00 UTC on March 2. Some brief downtime (hopefully less than 15 minutes) will be required to transfer services from our primary database server to our standby, which will allow us to upgrade the primary’s system and perform hardware checks. Thanks for your patience during this time.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-02-28

This release includes a fair amount of small improvements and bugfixes, including many changes to the edit list headers. It also allows editors to set their gender to the recently-added “non-binary” option.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to atj, CatQuest, chaban, HibiscusKazeneko, jesus2099, Lotheric, ocharles, PierPiero for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, grafi_tt, mfmeulenbelt, outsidecontext and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-02-28.

Stepping up on our UX: Welcoming Simon Hartman to the team

Hello!

I am pleased to announce that long time contributor and complainer about our UI/UX, Simon Hartman, AKA aerozol has joined our team as a part time designer!

While we are starting with a very modest 3 hours of his time per week, we feel that this marks a rather important step forward for our team. While we now have two team members who have UX/design skills (Monkey and Akshat), they also carry a significant load of engineering tasks working on their respective projects.

Having Simon as part of our team will allow us to carve out concrete design tasks for him to focus on. Simon and Akshat will also revive our long dormant design system, which lets us create UI components that are intuitive and consistent. Our engineering team will be able to re-use these components across our sites, simplifying the future development of new pages. We hope that this shared design system will improve the user interface across all of our sites, with a strong focus on bringing the MusicBrainz UI into the modern age.

Having concrete help on the design front has been needed badly for a long time, which makes me very excited to welcome Simon to our team. Welcome!

AcousticBrainz: Making a hard decision to end the project

We created AcousticBrainz 7 years ago and started to collect data with the goal of using that data down the road once we had collected enough. We finally got around to doing this recenty, and realised that the data simply isn’t of high enough quality to be useful for much at all.

We spent quite a bit of time trying to brainstorm on how to remedy this, but all of the solutions we found require a significant amount of money for both new developers and new hardware. We lack the resources to commit to properly rebooting AcousticBrainz, so we’ve taken the hard decision to end the project.

Read on for an explanation of why we decided to do this, how we will do it, and what we’re planning to do in the future.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-02-14

This is a small release of bugfixes and improvements, since a lot of the team’s focus recently has been on improving code documentation and tests and other behind the scenes tasks. It does fix a couple bugs that had been reported multiple times though (the release editor entering bogus empty annotation edits, and the area selection dropdown sometimes failing to work properly) so hopefully it will still make some of your editing a bit better!

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to yyoung for updating the cleanup for Lantis external links. Thanks to bsammon, jesus2099, kellnerd, Lotheric, mr_maxis, nikki, yindesu and yyoung for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to mfmeulenbelt and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-02-14.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-01-31

We took a break for the holidays and we really needed it, it seems, because we took a while to get back in action. But we’re back now, with a release that fixes a bunch of small bugs and gets rid of some annoyances. It also makes it easier to mark spammers as such, making them unable to edit and leave notes and also blocking their profile to hide any spammy links in one click. If you’re wondering why we don’t just delete the accounts, it’s because we want to keep them as fodder to train the still-in-development automatic spam-detecting SpamBrainz project.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to chaban, culinko, Cyberskull, outsidecontext, PierPiero, rdswift, sammyrayy, tigerman325 and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to mfmeulenbelt, RepaNation Distributors and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-01-31.

Picard 2.7.3 fixes macOS packages

Picard 2.7.3 fixes a packaging regression for macOS, which caused the app to be reported as damaged when trying to launch it. This affected especially users of macOS 10.13, see PICARD-2395 for details.

There are no other changes in this release. If you are running Picard on a different operating system or if you are using macOS but could start Picard without an error message than you don’t need to upgrade.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

Picard 2.7.2 released

Picard 2.7.2 is a maintenance release for the recently release Picard 2.7, with fixes for reported issues and updated translations, but also a few small improvements.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.6 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.7 and for Picard 2.7.1.

This release contains code contributions by rdswift, zas and outsidecontext. Thanks a lot to the translators and everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.