MetaBrainz Blog – Page 70 – MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog

MusicBrainz Summit #13

Over the weekend, 17 MusicBrainz fanatics got together at WikiMedia’s German headquarters to discuss the immediate future of MusicBrainz. And in short – we had a blast! A tremendous amount of topics were covered, and we feel this was one of the most productive summits we’ve had so far. From genres to acoustic properties, to internationalization, to artist & label artwork, an incredible amount was discussed.

A summary of all topics covered and points discussed can be found on the wiki, with thanks to diligent note taking by everyone who attended. As you’ll see, a lot of topics are now actionable, so hopefully work will begin to move forward with these. While it remains unclear what the solution is to some topics, the constructive conversations around them is helping us slowly move forward in the right direction.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a MusicBrainz summit if it was work work work – there was plenty of mayhem and play too! On Saturday we had our summit meal at Max & Moritz – complete with a police escort due to some unfortunately timed protests. A novel twist for a group meal… yet oddly consistent with the fresh and unpredictable nature of MusicBrainz.

ruaok takes a hard earned break... on Freso! — ruaok takes a hard earned break… on Freso!

We also want to thank our sponsors who made the summit possible. Thank you to Spotify and Google’s Open Source Programs Office! Your support paid for some airfares, our lodging, summit meals and a large pile U-Bahn tickets. And of course, a big thanks also goes to Wikimedia Germany and in particular to Lydia Pintscher for baby-sitting us all weekend and also for making awesome introductions to other people to help with specific summit topics.

Thanks again to everyone who attended. Until next year!

Server Update 2013-09-16

Hello all. We’ve just pushed out another small little update to MusicBrainz. This release is small while we continue to focus on getting the upcoming schema change ready, so there are a handful of bug fixes and improvements. Thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek and the rest of the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release. Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

[MBS-2521] – Setting fields via query parameters blanks all default values (including auto-editor checkbox)
[MBS-6163] – Following INSTALL does not result in a runnable server
[MBS-6279] – /ws/2/discid/ ignores DB_READ_ONLY
[MBS-6281] – Logged in users can load /register
[MBS-6287] – Adding disc IDs ignores DB_READ_ONLY
[MBS-6291] – Adding releases to your collection via the webservice ignores DB_READ_ONLY
[MBS-6607] – Internal server error after logging in from search results page
[MBS-6689] – Pasting an MBID initiates a search
[MBS-6691] – Inline search for works should include localised name
[MBS-6695] – URL cleanup doesn’t catch/clean iTunes URLs containing +
[MBS-6700] – Internal server error displaying a relationship
[MBS-6707] – Internal server error trying to authenticate via the webservice if password needs resetting
[MBS-6716] – Tagger button doesn’t work when using https in some browsers
[MBS-6721] – beta: Internal server error in /ws/js/work
[MBS-6743] – URL cleanup doesn’t catch/clean iTunes URLs containing *

Improvement

[MBS-6419] – Don’t check any artist credits by default when editing artist names.

Task

[MBS-6702] – Add Rockipedia to the Other Databases whitelist
[MBS-6708] – Turn ISNI number into link

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-09-16.

Changes for upcoming schema change release: 2013-10-14

For our fall schema change release we’re going to fix the issues listed in this Schema change, 2013-10-14 fix version. This schema change, much like our previous fall schema changes, is going to be a little lighter than our spring changes. The two big changes that you should be aware of are:

MBS-6046: Remove PUID support. PUIDs have been deprecated for quite some time in favor of using AcoustID. This change completes our switchover to AcoustID.
MBS-6068: Remove _name tables. With NGS we introduced tables that isolated all of the name strings for a given table, in order to reduce duplicate strings in our database. Sadly, this proved to be more pain that gain, so we’re going to remove them. This will make writing queries for our schema much easier. Sadly, this means that if you use the MusicBrainz database directly, (as opposed to using our Web Service, which we recommend) then you will likely need to update your SQL queries.

The rest of the changes will have a much smaller impact: Adding a disambiguation column for areas, adding places, and adding the ability to mark a relationship as deprecated. We’re also making some minor changes to our non-replicated tables that will not be visible to our Live Data Feed users, but are more convenient to make during a schema change.

The scheduled date for this release is Monday, 14th October, 2013.

Our RDFa dilemma

A few years ago Queen Mary University was awarded a grant to implement modern RDF support in MusicBrainz. The RDFa portion was implemented on our server and has been in our pages for quite some time.

However, the code to implement RDFa is brittle and has not been maintained through a number of schema changes and is quite broken at this point in time. When wondering if we should fix this or remove it, we could find no one or no application that we know of, that makes use of the embedded RDFa in our pages. And no one stepped up to fix it and the author of this code is not responding to emails inquiring about this.

At this point, we’re ready to remove the broken code from our pages in an effort to remove technical debt that has accumulated over the past few years. If you care about RDFa support in our pages, please speak up now. Ideally anyone speaking up would also volunteer to adopt the RDFa code and see it through life as our schema changes.

We’re going to take the HTTPS plunge!

Yesterday in our dev meeting we agreed to take the HTTPS plunge for all of our web site traffic in as little as 2 weeks time. This means that all web site traffic (not the web service) will be served over HTTPS; if you visit any MusicBrainz HTTP URL (e.g. http://musicbrainz.org ) you will be redirected to the equivalent HTTPS URL (e.g. https://musicbrainz.org ). This will not be applied to our web services, you’ll still be able to access those with HTTP. However, we do encourage all of our web service users to make use of HTTPS when possible.

We have one bug to address before we make this switch. And if we can find a sufficient fix for this in time, we’re going to make the HTTPS switch on 16 September 2013. If we can’t find an acceptable fix, we’ll have to postpone this switchover.

If for some reason you can see that switching all web site traffic to HTTPS is a bad idea, please leave us a comment ASAP.

Server Update 2013-09-02

We have a tiny release to kick off September, as we’ve been focusing quite heavily on tightening up the reliability and ease-of-maintenance of the servers themselves. However, we still have a few important bug fixes to release. Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

[MBS-4730] – Sort names for artist search hint aliases are displayed, but cannot be edited.
[MBS-6218] – When a Person with a gender is merged into a Group, ModBot ISEs.
[MBS-6561] – End column empty in search results for ended artists with no end date
[MBS-6635] – Several reports not updated since May 15
[MBS-6690] – JSON web service ISE with inc=aliases
[MBS-6698] – Wiki excerpts truncated by mid-sentence initials (eg, of names) that are mistaken for periods ending a sentence.

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-09-02

Server Update, 2013-08-19

Another two weeks, another release! A variety of bug fixes, primarily, and some assorted improvements. For those of you using replication on resource-constrained servers, this release includes code to make ProcessReplicationChanges run in constant memory, which should hopefully be an improvement.

With help from Michael Wiencek and the rest of the MusicBrainz team, here’s what we’ve done in the last fortnight:

Bug

[MBS-1549] – Guess Case: “¿” in sentence mode
[MBS-2151] – Editing Track Times should remove existing value
[MBS-2959] – Release-group XML first release date is using incorrect sorting logic for incomplete dates
[MBS-4389] – Editing artist credits shows “undefined” as disambiguation comment
[MBS-4788] – Editing → Add Release allows user to set release type even when existing release group has been selected
[MBS-5508] – Uploading cover art from https pages causes a warning about insecure pages
[MBS-5965] – Remove relationship edits store translated attributes
[MBS-6192] – Internal server error on ws query if offset is non-numeric
[MBS-6220] – tooltip (title) shows “&” instead of “&”
[MBS-6243] – “In x hours” is only shown for edit expiry times for the same day
[MBS-6418] – Relationship editor allows adding more relationships than the server can handle
[MBS-6546] – When the search server reports an internal server error the client receives a 400 status code
[MBS-6558] – Internal server error logging in with a Unicode username
[MBS-6570] – Removing relationship dates in the relationship editor fails
[MBS-6571] – Filename display in cover art edits is hardcoded to jpg
[MBS-6588] – “Direct database search” returns the same work as 2 different names
[MBS-6591] – JSON: Composer and release lookup
[MBS-6610] – Various Artist Alias and Tags should not be shown unless looking up Various Artist artist endpoint
[MBS-6622] – All log in pages are not served via HTTPS
[MBS-6628] – ModBot is unable to close some merge label edits
[MBS-6630] – Remove button when uploading covers is shown after the image has been submitted
[MBS-6632] – Relationship documentation examples don’t work with release groups
[MBS-6637] – http://musicbrainz.org/release/add doesn’t redirect to beta when desired
[MBS-6638] – ‘use beta site’ on main site will unset preference
[MBS-6650] – Editing a relationship type allows submitting the form with no changes
[MBS-6656] – Relationship editor fails when counting number of selected recordings
[MBS-6657] – Internal server error when using a negative limit
[MBS-6667] – Beta: No edit note field in the relationship editor
[MBS-6677] – Donations from random end users dropped to nearly nil.
[MBS-6679] – beta: ISE displaying artist edits

Improvement

[MBS-193] – Add open edit and cancelled edit stats to users
[MBS-1820] – Release search results should include more information
[MBS-2108] – More detail for works quicksearch
[MBS-3204] – Better name/explanation or warning for type “Pseudo-Release”
[MBS-6644] – ProcessReplicationChanges should be able to run in low memory environments

New MusicBrainz EU download mirror

With the help of Freso and then generous support from Denmark based open source hosting provider dotsrc.org the MusicBrainz downloads (data and apps) are now available in the EU (FTP too!).

This should make data downloads quite a bit faster than trying to download them across a trans-atlantic link.

Thank you very much to the folks at dotsrc.org for setting this up and hosting it and for Freso for making this connection!

Search server release: 2013-08-14

Paul Taylor worked on the latest release of our search server — thanks for fixing these bugs, Paul! The following issues were addressed:

Release Notes – MusicBrainz Search Server – Version 2013-08-14

Bug

[SEARCH-306] – Advanced search can’t find areas by alias
[SEARCH-315] – REGRESSION:Recording index is not outputting Release artist credit when different to recoridng artist credit (i.e. Various Artist)

Google donates another $40,000

We’ve just received our annual sponsorship from Google’s Open Source Programs Office to the tune of $40,000. Thanks so much for continuing to sponsor us, Google!

At the current count we’ve received nearly a quarter million dollars from Google’s Open Source Programs Office, which is truly amazing. Thanks for all your support, it clearly makes a big difference in our operations!