Server update, 2012-06-25

We’ve just finished pushing out a small set of changes to the web servers. This is mainly a bug fix release. Thanks to hrglgrmpf, Ian McEwen, Nicolás Tamargo and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release! Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-3803] – "Edit barcodes" edit should show the previous value
  • [MBS-4341] – cron scripts don’t account for carton
  • [MBS-4513] – homepage.css included twice on main index
  • [MBS-4526] – Recordings listed on ISRC page are not sorted
  • [MBS-4580] – "Greek" as a locale of German
  • [MBS-4798] – Language statistics should be sortable
  • [MBS-4810] – CC license URLs are not fully normalized in URLCleanup.js
  • [MBS-4841] – update to new Jamendo URL scheme
  • [MBS-4893] – "No edit notes have been added." should not be on edit listing pages.

Improvement

  • [MBS-2547] – Make modbot delete unused core entities
  • [MBS-3120] – Warn when merging recordings with different ISRCs
  • [MBS-4744] – Recognise Spotify URLs
  • [MBS-4900] – Net::CoverArtArchive is not in Makefile.pl

New Feature

  • [MBS-3931] – Report: Discogs pages attached to multiple artists

Task

  • [MBS-4899] – Remove SoundUnwound links from sidebar

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-06-25.

Please Help Us Sanity Check More Removals

ocharles has just finished work on MBS-2547 which will result in empty labels and empty release groups also being deleted as part of our daily clean up jobs, just like empty artists are currently deleted. As we’ve never cleaned up empty labels or release groups in the past, there is quite a bit of data that will be deleted in the first run. Before we run this, we would like to share it with the community in case any of this data is important.

The cleanup algorithm is mostly the same as it is for artists. Labels and release groups will only be deleted if:

  • They have existed for more than 24 hours
  • They have no open edits, or open edits that show up in their edit history
  • They have no relationships
  • They have no releases

Here are the lists of labels and release groups that would be removed, if we were to run the script right now:

If you do not want a label or release group to be deleted, please add relationships, as you would with artists or works.

Server update, 2012-06-12

We’ve just finished pushing out a new set of changes to the MusicBrainz Servers. This release is mostly a bug fix, and importantly fixes a critical bug that could cause recordings to be deleted. Many thanks to Nicolás Tamargo, Ian McEwen, Wieland Hoffmann, hrglgrmpf and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release.

Bug

  • [MBS-3862] – Sending email to an editor reveals their hidden email address when you use the "send a copy to my own email address" option.
  • [MBS-4088] – ISE and data loss (recordings) while trying to split a tracklist into 2 tracklists
  • [MBS-4398] – MySpace https URLs don’t get cleaned up properly
  • [MBS-4750] – Editing an existing artist alias to mark it as ‘primary’ doesn’t take effect.
  • [MBS-4759] – Aliases have not been migrated correctly in the last schema migration
  • [MBS-4789] – Facebook pages with certain URLs are not displayed
  • [MBS-4791] – Can’t add tags
  • [MBS-4799] – Cover art stats don’t add up
  • [MBS-4809] – CC0 1.0 license isn’t recognized by URLCleanup.js
  • [MBS-4824] – URLCleanup.js only strips whitespace from the front of strings
  • [MBS-4829] – Add Label page lies about disambiguation
  • [MBS-4834] – Detect new allmusic IDs in URLCleanup.js

Improvement

  • [MBS-3898] – Release editor should be able to deal with totaltracks in tracknumbers
  • [MBS-4302] – Remove Facebook’s "?sk=whatever" arguments during cleanup
  • [MBS-4795] – Add the Other DBs whitelisted stuff to the sidebar
  • [MBS-4814] – Add autocorrection and automatic type selection for Google Plus artist page URLs

Task

  • [MBS-4794] – Add autoselect for Other Databases

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-06-12.

Picard 1.0 released

Lukáš Lalinský announced the long-awaited release of Picard 1.0 today:

It took us a long time to get here, but I’m very happy to announce the release of Picard 1.0!

This version includes a new UI for viewing tags, some options have been rearranged and a number of bugs fixed. The file naming formats for single and various artist releases have been merged. If you were using a different format for various artist releases, Picard will upgrade the format automatically for you, but you might need to review the result. This version also comes with support for two audio fingerprinting solutions (AcoustID and AmpliFIND), but fingerprint scanning is disabled by default – you have to enable it and choose which one you want to use first.

Many thanks to Robert Kaye (ruaok), Phillipp Wolfer (outsidecontext), Michael Wiencek (bitmap), Chad Wilson (voiceinsideyou) and many many others who helped the project along the way from 2003 when it was started!

You can download the new version at:
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard.

If you notice any problems, please report them at:
http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/

Complete list of changes since version 0.16:

  • New UI: Extended comparison of existing vs. MB metadata & tags (PICARD-43)
  • Merged the renaming and moving options pages
  • Removed the VA file naming format option (there is now a single format option) (PICARD-159)
  • Add %license% tag
  • Made %writer% available to tagger scripts and plugins with contents of songwriter (PICARD-21)
  • Allow two multi-valued variables to be merged in tagger scripting (PICARD-139)
  • Allow multi-valued variables to be transformed in tagger script and then set back in tags as multi-valued (PICARD-147)
  • Fix $copy not preserving multi-value variables as documented (PICARD-138)
  • Load/save free-text tags for ID3 as TXXX frames (PICARD-148)
  • Fix writing of MusicBrainz Work Id / musicbrainz_workid to tags (PICARD-88)
  • Handle mimetype for embedding cover art from EXIF jpegs (PICARD-27)
  • Change cover art box to open MusicBrainz release rather than Amazon
  • Support manual drag-and-drop of cover art onto a release via cover art box
  • Only open browser on left-click of cover art box (PICARD-190)
  • Fix Lookup in Browser (previously ‘tag lookup’) for clusters (PICARD-186)
  • Lookup in Browser will now not use MBIDs to lookup unmatched files/clusters
  • Add Date/Country to CD Lookup results dialog (PICARD-198)
  • Fix/reset album folksonomy tag counts while refreshing releases (PICARD-4)
  • Plugins actions can now create sub-menus using the MENU class attribute
  • New plugin hook register_clusterlist_action
  • Display the port Picard is listening on at bottom right status bar (PICARD-191)
  • Make album drops from right hand pane to left default to “unmatched files” again (PICARD-33)
  • Remove .DS_Store, desktop.ini, and Thumbs.db from otherwise empty directories (PICARD-75)
  • Update artist translation to use new alias features (primary flag, sort names) (PICARD-200)
  • Deleted tags aren’t indicated as changes (PICARD-165)
  • Picard log entries have inaccurate timestamp (PICARD-45)
  • Interface doesn’t allow keyboard only management (PICARD-103)
  • Added option to preserve timestamps of tagged files (PICARD-31)
  • Added keyboard shortcut to reload release (PICARD-99)
  • Medium formats weren’t listed in order in the “Other versions” menu (PICARD-91)
  • Couldn’t select multiple directories in “Add Folder” window on OS X (PICARD-74)

We've just launched our new MetaBrainz site!

In an effort to retire some old power-hungry servers, we’ve moved MusicBrainz Classic to a new server and also created a new MetaBrainz Foundation web site. The new MetaBrainz site looks like the MusicBrainz NGS site and shares a bit of the same code.

Please open a bug if you find problems with either of these two sites.

Thanks to Ollie for hacking together the metabrainz site!

Summer of Code log analysis project: May we share our data with our GSoC student?

UPDATE: This clearly going to be a major hassle, so we’ll spend the extra time coding a program that will sanitize the data before it goes into splunk.

Last week Google’s Summer of Code program started and my student Dániel Bali is ready to get busy combing through our massive logs and see what sorts of information he can mine from our logs.

We only have one minor problem — our logs contain the IP addresses of our users and some requests contain the user names of the person making the request. Removing this private information from the logs before Dániel sees them is quite a pain to do well.

I would like to propose that we:

  1. Consider Dániel part of our core team for the summer and allow him to see IP addresses and all the requests in full.
  2. Have Dániel sign a short statement stating that he will not divulge any private information.
  3. Will fail him in his GSoC project if he does divulge any private information.

If this is not acceptable to you, please speak up soon. I would like to make this happen early next week so Dániel can continue his GSoc work.

UPDATE: The final output of Dániel’s work will not contain any private information. If we end up using any private data as input, we will sanitize it and remove private information before we publish the output.

Our forums are back!

Our forums were compromised a while ago and we had to undergo massive yak shaving in order to set up a new home for our forums. Hosting many different types of software on one server makes that server hard to administer — we felt that the proper solution was to create a Virtual server host and give each type of software a new Linux instance to live in. We started with the forums, but we’re going to be moving a lot more stuff over to this virtual host in the coming weeks/months. Hopefully we can update our blog and our wiki in this process.

In any case, the forums are back online and running with the old posts, but the latest version of PunBB. In the move we lost our customized MusicBrainz theme for PunBB — if someone feels strongly about having the theme, please take a look at the PunBB docs and create a new theme. I’ll be glad to install that new theme on our server.

Thanks and sorry the forums were offline for so long!

Server update, 2012-05-28

We’ve just finished pushing an update to our web servers. This is our first release since the schema change, and we’ve tried to address the problem of artist landing pages. As a temporary solution, we’ve split the page up by type a bit more now, which we hope is a step in the right direction. We’re currently discussing this at User:Reosarevok/Overview Options on the wiki, and your feedback is important. If you feel strongly about this, please have a read at the ideas on that page and feel free to comment/add your own.

This release features work from Ian McEwen, nikki, Joachim LeBlanc, Nicolás Tamargo and the rest of the MusicBrainz team. Thanks everyone for your hard work!

Bug

  • [MBS-1121] – Disabled submit buttons have no distinctive style
  • [MBS-3861] – IMDb links not fully normalized
  • [MBS-4278] – Copy changes to recordings edits the wrong recordings if recording associations were changed
  • [MBS-4336] – Release editor > removing a track resets manually changed track positions
  • [MBS-4520] – Deleting tracks does not update track numbers
  • [MBS-4569] – Full page titles aren’t shown in /doc
  • [MBS-4621] – Don’t use empty <img> tags on pages with no images
  • [MBS-4649] – YouTube channel autoselect is broken
  • [MBS-4656] – “Video” option for “can be streamed for free at” relationship is listed under the “License” subheading.
  • [MBS-4662] – ISE: Can’t edit a relationship attribute
  • [MBS-4664] – Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at lib/DBDefs.pm line 314.
  • [MBS-4681] – Edit maked as Applied, but it isn’t
  • [MBS-4687] – Link to create new relationship types doesn’t work
  • [MBS-4697] – Approve votes missing from edit search
  • [MBS-4720] – Audiobook is a primary release-group type
  • [MBS-4733] – Merging release groups fails if release groups have secondary types
  • [MBS-4752] – Musicbrainz webservice <iswc-list> changes break compatibility with existing applications.
  • [MBS-4757] – Edit artist alias (sort name) is auto-edit
  • [MBS-4760] – Release groups with secondary types cannot be deleted
  • [MBS-4765] – DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE hasn’t been updated to 15 in DBDefs.pm.default
  • [MBS-4767] – Cannot accept edit release group edits that change the primary type to a type that no longer exists
  • [MBS-4769] – Bad description row in statistic_event
  • [MBS-4770] – ISE: Error when requesting non-existent relationship types on /relationships
  • [MBS-4772] – ModBot cannot apply old edit work edits that add ISWCs

Improvement

  • [MBS-684] – TOC lookup displays too little release info
  • [MBS-1874] – Search for the documentation
  • [MBS-3748] – Adding new instruments is a pain
  • [MBS-4298] – Confusing text when merging releases+recordings
  • [MBS-4561] – Make disambiguation on tracklist credits smaller
  • [MBS-4568] – Add <bdi> tags to help with rendering of RTL text
  • [MBS-4657] – Add cover art to timeline
  • [MBS-4700] – Fix inline buttons
  • [MBS-4742] – Add a mention to the “Split Into Separate Artists” page that aliases prevent a split (or automatic removal)
  • [MBS-4762] – Cover art statistics should be displayed on the tabular pages.

Task

  • [MBS-4686] – Add wikisource.org to the lyrics whitelist

In other news, Oliver will be on holiday for one week (yipee!), and will be back in a week. Reachable via email if need be.

The commit sha for this release is 8fbbc36, a Git tag will follow when Rob is back tomorrow. and the git tag is v-2012-05-28