Housecleaning part 2: Moving our mailing lists

Part 2 in our housecleaning series concerns our mailing lists. Hosting mailing lists is quite a pain and we’d rather leave this pain to people who specializein mailing lists. So, we are proposing to do the following things:

  1. Remove the under-utilized list musicbrainz-italian.
  2. Remove the musicbrainz-commits mailing list. Github (and similar sites) have better notification systems, so we don’t really need this list anymore.
  3. Ask the Xiph Foundation to find a new home for the XSPF Playlist mailing list.
  4. Remove the under-utilized musicbrainz-users list since the forums are predominantly used for end-user discussion. We’ll point people to the forums for those.

Finally, we would like to get some suggestions and feedback on where we should host our mailing lists. We’re considering:

  • Nabble: This has gotten mixed reviews from various users.
  • Librelist: This site is quite new and UI reservations have been noted about it.
  • Savannah: This site has many more features than just mailing lists. We’re not certain if we can move only our mailing lists here.
  • Google Groups: We’ve heard complaints about spam and spam fighting tools. Has this improved recently?

If you have any comments on any of these solutions or proposed list consolidation ideas, please let us know. Also, if you know of a cheap/free/good list provider that we didn’t list, please let us know!

Housecleaning part 1: Please help us create a new theme for our blog

We have one aging machine (scooby) that has been in continuous service since 2006. Back then we didn’t have as many options for hosting source code, mailing lists and blogs. Today, we have a lot more choice and we’re opting to host fewer things so that we can focus our energy on hosting MusicBrainz and not a bunch of ancillary stuff. Our goal is to retire scooby soon and move the services that run on that server elsewhere.

Our blog is the first thing to move: We’re moving it to wordpress.com and we’re nearly done with the move. But, we dont have a decent wordpress MusicBrainz theme for our blog. If anyone is interested in taking an existing wordpress theme and making it a custom MusicBrainz theme, we would love your help!

If you’re interested, please leave a comment and we’ll get in touch with you to coordinate this process.

Thanks!

Server update, 2013-02-11 and an important notice regarding edits

We’ve just finished pushing out another two weeks changes to the MusicBrainz web site. While this release is predominantly a bug fix release with a few small improvements, we’ve made a fairly substantial change to the way edits are applied.

As of this release, all subsequent edits entered will have an expiration period of 7 days – a reduction from the previous 14 days. We’ve made this change in order to reduce the time that editors have to wait for changes to be applied, which should lead to an improved user experience; and we’ve also made the change to hopefully try and make the edit queue a little bit more managable. This change is exploratory, so if you find it counterproductive, we’d love to hear your thoughts. IRC, the forums and the mailing lists are all good channels to voice your feedback.

Also, we have finally made the switch to GitHub. While the existing repository URLs will continue to work, they will no longer be updated. If you want to stay up to date with the latest code, make sure to update your checkout information.

Many thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Nicolás Tamargo and the rest of the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release. Here’s what’s new:

Bug

  • [MBS-3457] – Direct search results incorrectly reports a recording as "standalone"
  • [MBS-3962] – Edit search doesn’t really exclude artists with "is not"
  • [MBS-4522] – Empty annotations are not merged correctly
  • [MBS-5144] – The MusicBrainz logo in the top-left corner has a different background color than the rest of the header
  • [MBS-5395] – "Actions" column on alias page is too narrow for translations
  • [MBS-5432] – Internal server error when editing cover art
  • [MBS-5434] – Inconsistent terminology: primary/secondary types and type/extra types
  • [MBS-5506] – Edit search for "My vote is not" does not work as expected
  • [MBS-5525] – Blank edit relationship type edits
  • [MBS-5566] – No more autoedit mark ?
  • [MBS-5567] – Internal server error entering remove cover art edit
  • [MBS-5617] – "new image goes here" is not translatable
  • [MBS-5650] – ISE when attempting to approve already-closed release group edit
  • [MBS-5655] – It’s possible to "Remove [a] release label" although there’s none
  • [MBS-5696] – ModBot can fail to close ‘edit artist’ edits that violate uniqueness on (name, comment).
  • [MBS-5698] – Some move disc ID edits display nothing for the old release
  • [MBS-5700] – Subscribers aren’t removed when a user deletes their account
  • [MBS-5705] – Rows in the appearances section of the artist relationships tab are sometimes one column too short
  • [MBS-5719] – The track number of the last track on some 2-disc releases is missing
  • [MBS-5724] – Sort/copy name missing for work aliases
  • [MBS-5728] – Possible to enter ‘edit release group’ edits that fail to apply due to spaces in artist credits
  • [MBS-5732] – Empty labels don’t warn for deletion pending
  • [MBS-5740] – Useless "select all" checkbox on Release Duplicates tab
  • [MBS-5742] – Editing a work without JS on will enter a silent remove ISWC edit
  • [MBS-5748] – Not possible to "Approve" an edit where yours is the only "No" vote
  • [MBS-5750] – Subscriptions report filtering ignores labels
  • [MBS-5754] – Editing recordings from tracklist does not work if "Release Duplicate" is chosen
  • [MBS-5762] – "Work Type" and "Work Language" incorrectly left blank for "Merge Works" edits when viewing predefined edit searches
  • [MBS-5763] – Edit release edits not properly translated
  • [MBS-5764] – Work language column in the stats links to releases
  • [MBS-5770] – There is no constraint on release_label that either (or both) the label or catalog number are not null.
  • [MBS-5771] – Add utamap.com （うたまっぷ） in the lyrics URL white list
  • [MBS-5774] – "Vote on all edits" is not translatable
  • [MBS-5776] – Cover art types are not being translated on the cover art tab
  • [MBS-5777] – Users’ work ratings page has no title
  • [MBS-5786] – i18n: secondary RG type labels on overview are untranslatable
  • [MBS-5788] – No edit is created when trying to submit/attach a DiscID
  • [MBS-5791] – ISRCs can’t be removed
  • [MBS-5797] – Internal server error if the Wikipedia link is not really a Wikipedia link

Improvement

  • [MBS-1413] – Make profile bios support WikiFormat
  • [MBS-1774] – Webservice: expose UUID for AR type
  • [MBS-3535] – Stack traces should mention which server was handling the request
  • [MBS-4880] – Add Help/Info about How "Merge mediums and recordings" works
  • [MBS-4902] – Add Google+ links to the sidebar
  • [MBS-5505] – Add j-lyric.net to the lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-5605] – Ratings on collection pages
  • [MBS-5707] – Add autoselect for IMDb URL relationships for labels
  • [MBS-5727] – Disc [medium] title missing from edit relationships page
  • [MBS-5767] – Add an index on (editor, id DESC)
  • [MBS-5775] – Update Facebook URL cleanup to use https
  • [MBS-5779] – Remove useless nbsp on common-macros.tt
  • [MBS-5798] – Normalise wikisource URLs to http
  • [MBS-5803] – Add autoselect for SecondHandSongs artist URL

Task

  • [MBS-5757] – Consider diminishing time edits stay open
  • [MBS-5766] – Open up /release/ and /work/ in robots.txt
  • [MBS-5810] – Add Open Library to the other databases whitelist

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-02-11.

Please welcome AOL Music into the MetaBrainz ecosystem!

The continued economic turmoil persisted in 2012 and thus it was a slow year for adding new customers for MetaBrainz. However, we did add one high profile customer in 2012: AOL Music.

For a number of reasons we felt that it was prudent to get MusicBrainz integrated into AOL before making public news about it. Now the time is finally right to talk about our relationship with AOL and Winamp. I had been talking to Geno Yoham (GM of Winamp) and Lisa Namerow (GM of AOL Music) about MusicBrainz at various conferences for several years. Forging relationships with large companies take a quite a long time and the formation of our relationship was really no different. At the end of 2011 Geno, Lisa and team were ready to take action and surprised me by pledging a sizeable donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation. This donation was received early in 2012 about the same time that we signed the data license contract. And just last week we received another donation for 2012!! Thanks AOL and Winamp!

Early in 2012 AOL launched updated services underpinned by MusicBrainz data:

  • The Now Playing feature in Winamp allows a user to find out more about the artist that is currently playing in Winamp.
  • The AOL Music Artist pages also use MusicBrainz data to display discography information and to provide some of the links for the other content shown on those pages.

Our relationship with AOL follows a similar pattern to our relationship to the BBC. The BBC has done wonders for highlighting and lending credibility to MusicBrainz and I expect that our relationship with AOL will bring about similar benefits for MusicBrainz.

Thank you team AOL and especially to Geno Yoham and Lisa Namerow for believing in us!

We have a new community calendar

We’ve been scheduling more meetings for discussing various complex topics, but communication about those dates has not been clear. In order to fix this, we’ve created a community curated calendar:

http://calendar.musicbrainz.org

reosarevok, nikki, ian, ollie, warp and myself can put things onto the calendar. If you have something you’d like to have added to the calendar, please ask one of these folks.

Preparing for the May 15th schema change release

It it time for us to start the process towards the next schema change release. Starting today and for the next two weeks, we’re going to seek people to be the champion (sponsor) of a ticket. If you feel strongly about a schema change ticket getting taken care of, you should consider championing this ticket. Once you’ve decided to do adopt a ticket, you should assign the ticket to yourself.

Then, over the next two weeks it will be up to you to do the following:

  1. Drive consensus around the core concept of the ticket. If you go through the process of working up a ticket, but no one agrees with what you’re proposing, you’ve wasted your time. Make sure that you get buy in from others in the community. For instance, if Nikki doesn’t like it, chances are its not going to fly. 🙂
  2. Each schema change feature requires two tickets: 1) An SQL ticket that implements the actual changes to the database and defines the queries used to fetch the data. 2) A UI change ticket that implements the UI portions of the schema change ticket.
  3. Ensure that the ticket clearly states what needs to be done to implement the ticket. The ticket should essentially become or link to a requirements document. This requirements document should explain what the new feature should do. It should not explain how it should be done — we should leave the how to our developers who are going to implement the feature.
  4. Provide as much supporting documentation as you can. Mock-ups for UIs are deeply appreciated (even if they delve into the how realm of things) and very useful for meaningfully discussing these tickets.
  5. Have the ticket reviewed by a developer for clarity and completeness, then address any issues said developer may raise.

On 15 February, we’re going to look at the list of tickets that people have taken on and choose the ones that are clear enough to move forward. If you’ve done all the work outlined above, the chances are good that your ticket will be chosen to move forward. If your ticket is chosen to move forward, there will be more questions that the developers will raise — hopefully those can be tackled in the space of a week. After that we will take all of the well defined tickets and schedule them for implementation. All the other tickets that are not clear to implement will be rejected and will have to make another pass though this process in the autumn.

If you’re still interested, here is the list of schema change tickets that should be considered for this.

We’re going to follow the this schedule:

  • 1 Feb: Schema change ticket selection starts
  • 15 Feb: Select schema change tickets for implementation, start making tickets fully actionable
  • 1 March: Tickets must be fully actionable. Tickets that are not actionable will be dropped from the 15 May release.
  • 15 March: SQL tickets must be fully implemented.
  • 1 May: UI tickets must be fully implemented, start final ticket testing phase
  • 15 May: Release day

All of these dates have been added to our new community calendar.

IMPORTANT: Proposed changes to the data returned by our web service

Our current web service at the /ws/2 endpoint returns too much data in a lot of cases and in many cases we suspect that the programs making the calls to the service don’t actually consume all of that data. We’d like to reduce the amount of unused data our web service returns, in order to reduce our bandwidth costs. We propose that:

  • The web service will no longer includes aliases and tags in relation elements. Regardless of what entity you may request, if the results of your request includes a relation element, any alias or tag elements that are currently returned will no longer be returned.
  • The web service no longer includes aliases and tags in for the Various Artists artist anywhere, unless you specifically request the Various Artist from the /ws/2/artist endpoint.

We’ve mocked up these changes in the following XML files:

We think that this will have a minimal impact on our web service users. If you use our web service, please tell us what you think about this. If you know someone who is using our web service, but may not read this blog, please forward a link to this post to them.

For more background on our research into this topic, please take a look at this document.

Server Update, 2012-01-28

We’ve just finished releasing the last release for January, 2013. This release is a combination of bug fixes and improvements to existing features, and was worked on by Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Nicolás Tamargo, Pavan Chander and the rest of the MusicBrainz team. Thanks for your hard work, everyone! Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-5022] – Release Editor: Missing entities page doesn’t handle 0 or only 1 result
  • [MBS-5453] – Bad redirect(s) https→http
  • [MBS-5540] – Release editor eats tracklists
  • [MBS-5586] – ISE when trying to submit an “Edit artist” edit with no changes
  • [MBS-5609] – JSON webservice doesn’t send relationship attributes
  • [MBS-5614] – Links to edit notes to other edit notes always use http
  • [MBS-5691] – Artists’ recording lists show ISRCs but don’t link to them
  • [MBS-5699] – CD stubs use “disambiguation” instead of “comment”
  • [MBS-5711] – IPIs missing from IPI element in JSON webservice
  • [MBS-5712] – JSON webservice handles missing values inconsistently
  • [MBS-5713] – Alias types missing from the JSON webservice

Improvement

  • [MBS-4536] – Include the presence of cover art in the webservice
  • [MBS-5304] – “Other Databases” whitelist: “Trove” ammendment
  • [MBS-5447] – Bandwidth performance: revert MBS-4764 now that thumbnail quality has improved
  • [MBS-5606] – Implement STYLE-160 (The Session) in code
  • [MBS-5651] – Clicking link for packaging types loses all entered information
  • [MBS-5652] – Release Label sorting makes no sense on Release Group page
  • [MBS-5702] – Change the text on the “Read more…” link under wikipedia extracts
  • [MBS-5739] – Disconnect database handle on page timeout
  • [MBS-5741] – Time out edit searches in 45 seconds, rather than 30.
  • [MBS-5749] – 401 error: Add link to profile edit page

Task

  • [MBS-5758] – Remove schwag/store links from musicbrainz.org pages

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-01-28.

Privacy policy inconsistencies

Recently we’ve received two bug reports that point out two inconsistencies in our privacy policy:

  • MBS-5708: It’s not possible to disable the display of cover art but the privacy policy claims it is. There are two possible options for fixing this; fix the privacy policy or make a new preference. Which would you prefer?
  • MBS-5709: Inclusion of Google Analytics is in violation of the privacy policy. This one is more tricky, since we link to other third parties (archive.org, gravatar, captcha) that are also not mentioned in the policy. And changing the policy for each time we add a new third party becomes cumbersome. No clear solutions have formed around this issue, so we would like your feedback on this.

If you care about our privacy policy, please take a moment to read these bugs and comment on them. Thanks!

7digital & The Echo Nest have become MusicBrainz customers

I’m pleased to announce that 7digital and The Echo Nest have become our latest customers!

7digital enables a lot of digital music stores and provides a lot of services for mobile operators. 7digital has relationships with many labels and thus faces complex metadata issues. I’m quite pleased that 7digital has chosen to partner with MusicBrainz to fix these metadata issues.

The Echo Nest provides tons of digital music services and is a driving force behind Music Hack Days here in the States. The Echo Nest also created project Rosetta Stone, a service that translates to/from MusicBrainz IDs from/to other ID spaces like the Echo Nest IDs or Rdio IDs.

Welcome to the MusicBrainz ecosystem!