Phew: MusicBrainz is unaffected by the Heartbleed fiasco

As you’ve probably heard all over the net, a vulnerability was found in a very popular and critical piece of software that a lot of sites on the net use. While we also use said piece of software, our version is a bit older and therefore we’re not affected by this bug. There is no need to change your password, unless you use a common password on any of these affected sites listed in the link above.

To get an idea of how serious this issue is, take a look at this stunning list of affected sites!

But, don’t take our word for it. Use this link to check to see if musicbrainz.org is affected.

Now go and change your passwords. NOW!

Server update, 2014-03-31

We’re back with another musicbrainz-server release. Thanks this fortnight to contributions from chirlu, JesseW, reosarevok, and nikki, as well as the MetaBrainz team. This release is all bug fixes and small improvements of various sorts, though we’re likely to, in the next few days, release the code to automatically calculate recording times from track times (where applicable). Stay tuned!

The git tag for this release is v-2014-03-31.

Full changes:

Bug

  • [MBS-4706] – Inconsistent state with pending edits: 2 mediums at position 1
  • [MBS-5512] – “Relate to URL…” is missing the returnto= parameter and returns us to another page
  • [MBS-6681] – URL cleanup (social networking, other databases, etc.) overrides correct relationship types
  • [MBS-6897] – Release has multiple “Disc 1” mediums, apparently impossible to change in the editor
  • [MBS-7142] – Missing release artist in “Remove release label” edit
  • [MBS-7247] – Wrong search generated for CDstub
  • [MBS-7328] – Release Add/edit Recording Search is broken
  • [MBS-7340] – Can’t add work after fixing an error
  • [MBS-7342] – Release editor hangs on “Submitting edits…” after certain errors occur
  • [MBS-7343] – Angle brackets disappear on release editor preview
  • [MBS-7369] – Web page no longer has markup hooks for finding catalogue numbers.
  • [MBS-7372] – Release Editor: CD TOC x Track Parser breaks horribly
  • [MBS-7373] – Edit diff for reordering is misleading
  • [MBS-7378] – Inline search returns duplicate results when searching for the same text twice
  • [MBS-7380] – Statistics for work attributes are wrong
  • [MBS-7387] – ISWC in work meta description (web search description) on works is broken
  • [MBS-7388] – Server allows setting gender for choirs/orchestras
  • [MBS-7401] – “Non-group artists” stat shouldn’t count orchestras and choirs

Improvement

  • [MBS-1271] – Some pages say “please log in to…” and some don’t
  • [MBS-2754] – Recording page shows track number but not disc number for occurences
  • [MBS-6806] – Add social network autoselect for Instagram and blog autoselect for Tumblr
  • [MBS-7272] – Create relationship page should show recording artists
  • [MBS-7356] – ISE page should include a timestamp
  • [MBS-7364] – Artist /create and /edit should show Birth Area etc for Person
  • [MBS-7366] – Add padding to the header on edit pages

New Feature

  • [MBS-7341] – Add a button to reset previous recordings in the release editor

Task

  • [MBS-7368] – Add a name attribute to the type select in the links editor
  • [MBS-7382] – Make orchestra and choir behave and show like group
  • [MBS-7383] – Add orchestra and choir to the stats pages

More details for our 2014-05-15 schema change release

As promised last week, here is a more detailed explanation of what is going to be changing during our May 15th schema change release:

  • [MBS-5978] – Replication feed is missing release_tag: This will not change any database tables but will finally include release_tag data in our Live Data Feed.
  • [MBS-6709] – "None" is no longer the last Packaging type after adding Book and Cassette Case: See below for more details.
  • [MBS-2410] – Label types not a tree anymore: This bug and MBS-6709 add “parent”, “child_order” and “description” columns to all of the yellow tables on this diagram except for language, script and script_language.
  • [MBS-2714] – Add support for Series: Details are provided in the ticket itself.
  • [MBS-6144] – Remove the apparently-unused script_language table: Exactly what it says on the tin.
  • [MBS-6602] – Remove sortnames from areas: Removes the sortname column from the area table.
  • [MBS-6603] – Remove sortnames from labels: Removes the sortname column from the label table.
  • [MBS-6651] – Make it possible to disable dates for relationship types: Adds a “has_dates” boolean column to link_type, to indicate whether a particular relationship type allows dates or not. The upgrade will set them all to “can have dates” for now and we will manually disable the appropriate ones later.
  • [MBS-7205] – Link types should track assumed cardinality: Details are provided in the ticket itself.
  • [MBS-3674] – Make instruments entities: This adds the following tables: instrument, instrument_type, instrument_gid_redirect, instrument_alias, instrument_alias_type, instrument_annotation, edit_instrument, l_*_instrument, l_instrument_* (the usual AR tables to other entities).

Server update, 2014-03-17

Another fortnight and another release with a small crop of bugs and then some! The biggest changes this week:

  • Work attributes support, originally part of last May’s schema change, is finally done and released!
  • PDF support for the Cover Art Archive. PDFs won’t appear as the front cover, since they can’t generally be displayed in a browser and the Internet Archive doesn’t currently create thumbnail images for them.
  • Removing RDFa. Most of you probably never used it anyway, but as we’ve been talking about for a while now, and especially with the great work LinkedBrainz has been doing, it was time to stop poorly half-maintaining rapidly-disintegrating RDFa support on musicbrainz.org itself.

Aside from that, we have the usual crop of fixes, primarily cleanup from the fixes above, the new release editor, and the new URL relationships.

The git tag for this release is v-2014-03-17.

Bug

  • [MBS-5244] – Remove bits of RDFa which were commented out because of invalid HTML.
  • [MBS-6067] – Internal server error when using query parameter with a lookup in the webservice
  • [MBS-7267] – Country column is blank when looking up a FreeDB ID
  • [MBS-7299] – Place types and alias types are not translatable
  • [MBS-7300] – Existing image URLs always link to .jpg when adding an image
  • [MBS-7311] – RE: Guess case dropdown doesn’t update when changed on the other tab
  • [MBS-7319] – Not possible to enter Facebook URLs by typing
  • [MBS-7322] – URL are not added when creating work with ISWC
  • [MBS-7323] – Can’t edit artist because of badly retrieved URL
  • [MBS-7324] – ISE: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::AutoEditorElections->nominate “Can’t call method “name” on an undefined value at lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Controller/AutoEditorElections.pm line 34, line 3
  • [MBS-7325] – ISE: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::AutoEditorElections->nominate “Can’t call method “is_auto_editor” on an undefined value at lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Controller/AutoEditorElections.pm line 29, line 3.”
  • [MBS-7326] – ISE: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::AutoEditorElections->nominate “Forbidden at lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Data/AutoEditorElection.pm line 53, line 3.”
  • [MBS-7329] – Importing a multiple artist freedb release gives a seeding error for the “artist” field
  • [MBS-7332] – ISE trying to see release merge
  • [MBS-7333] – beta: ISRC code missing from heading on ISRC page
  • [MBS-7334] – Beta: IPI codes no longer shown in artist and label sidebars
  • [MBS-7335] – Deprecated relationships are no longer prevented from being added
  • [MBS-7336] – URL error messages don’t always get shown

Improvement

  • [MBS-4116] – Cover art archive: Support .pdf
  • [MBS-7318] – Label bubble should appear when focusing the catalogue number input field

New Feature

  • [MBS-5863] – Dynamic work attributes (UI)

Task

  • [MBS-1263] – RDFa code is too separate from main MB code and is starting to bit rot
  • [MBS-7330] – Add Wikimedia Commons and CPDL to the score whitelist

Next schema change release: May 15, 2014

As per our twice a year schedule of making schema changes that impact our Live Data Feed users, I’d like to announce the set of tickets that we’re going to implement for the next release.

We have quite a few clean-up tickets in this batch and a handful of improvements — some of the improvements are a lot of work, but won’t seem that way on the surface. However, the one major new feature we’re going to add are Series. Series will allow us to mark a set of releases as belonging to a series (e.g. Now this is what I call crappy music!). This has been a long long requested feature and we’re finally at a point where we can implement this.

The good news about this release is that a large number of the tickets are already implemented! The big tickets are still in progress, but the smaller ones are already in review. We’re hoping that we’ll have a less hasty push to the finish line this year with lots of time for testing. And we’re hoping for ponies too! 🙂

LinkedBrainz: Alive and well!

Barry Norton has been a star and has created and hosted RDF dumps of the MusicBrainz data and also established a permanent SPARQL endpoint for our data on linkedbrainz.org.

The timing of this is perfect, because our next release will remove the RDFa from our pages. Proper RDF data and a SPARQL end-point are the best ways to move forward with MusicBrainz data in the context of linked open data.

This gives the MusicBrainz development team the freedom to focus on making MusicBrainz better while leaving the nitty gritty parts of making our data friendly to the linked open data hackers to experts like Barry.

Thanks so much for making this happen, Barry!

Server update, 2014-03-03

Here we are with a fresh server release! Following up on the recent release of the new release editor, this week we’re releasing a revamped way to edit URL relationships directly from entity editing pages. Other than that, a variety of bug fixes and small improvements, as you can read below! Thanks to chirlu and mineo for supplementing the MetaBrainz team’s work this release.

The git tag for this release is v-2014-03-03.

Bug

  • [MBS-4154] – Search error when doing tag lookup with exclamation marks
  • [MBS-5411] – insert or update on table “cover_art” violates foreign key constraint “cover_art_fk_edit”
  • [MBS-7043] – Moving a DiscID from its present medium to the same medium causes the DiscID to be removed
  • [MBS-7080] – Can’t click on results in inline search after multiple lookups
  • [MBS-7110] – URLs with square brackets broken in edit notes
  • [MBS-7118] – Server allows “reorder cover art” edit that does nothing
  • [MBS-7240] – remember_login token is not allocated if the username casing used when logging in does not match the database
  • [MBS-7255] – Reusing the tracklist for a release with a discID blocks track times
  • [MBS-7259] – Release countries are missing from the duplicates tab
  • [MBS-7261] – The “Plus” button for track additions is out of layout after the recent update
  • [MBS-7262] – The date field of the “release event” start taking 2 rows after the recent update
  • [MBS-7263] – Edit of recordings in track list when adding new release does not work
  • [MBS-7265] – It’s possible to enter release merges without an edit note
  • [MBS-7274] – RE submitted apparently empty recording edits
  • [MBS-7275] – Two places with empty addresses fail to merge.
  • [MBS-7281] – editor page. “Last 24 hours” link contains strangely encoded characters &
  • [MBS-7287] – Clearing both the label and catalog number of an existing release label throws an ISE
  • [MBS-7288] – beta: cdbaby kills the external links editor
  • [MBS-7289] – URLCleanup doesn’t remove non-encoded left-to-right mark
  • [MBS-7290] – Hybrid SACD doesn’t allow discIDs

Improvement

  • [MBS-1397] – When the same editor adds and removes the same object at the same time, the original edit should get cancelled
  • [MBS-3130] – Make it possible to edit the URL of a specific relationship
  • [MBS-3583] – “Add Release” form should assist adding ASIN, discogs and wikipedia relations
  • [MBS-3662] – Ability to add/relate to multiple URLs at once
  • [MBS-5734] – Make it possible for url|text substitutions to also have arbitrary attributes
  • [MBS-7226] – Require email address to sign up
  • [MBS-7292] – release editor. “edit note” wiki page link is not target=”_blank”
  • [MBS-7293] – Release merges: With “merge releases and recordings” strategy, show recordings that will be merged in the edit display

New Feature

  • [MBS-7159] – Allow adding/editing external links/url relationships to an entity from its edit page

Our embedded RDFa will be going away in two weeks

We’ve been trying to find anyone making use of the RDFa embedded in our pages, but we’ve been unable to find anyone.

Given that the RDFa makes our templates much harder and cumbersome to edit, we’ve decided to go ahead and remove our RDFa support in two weeks time.

Since we could not find anyone who actually uses our RDFa, this shouldn’t be a problem. But we suspect that someone, somewhere will be angry with us for removing the RDFa support without any warning or without being asked for feedback. :-/