Introducing our latest acronym: NES — New Edit System

Long after we finally delivered our much anticipated Next Generation Schema, we’re finally ready to dive in and get to work on our New Edit System. You may recall that during the NGS re-write we opted to not tackle the re-write of our edit system. Instead, we decided to do the edit system overhaul once NGS became stable.

We finally reached this point when Ollie, Warp and I met in London last month to discuss this new project. We had a productive meeting reviewing all of the research that Ollie had done over the past months. We improved the terminology here and then, but in general approved for Ollie to continue his work. Part of his work was to write about it so that our users can get familiar with the concepts that will come about in NES.

Ollie had started blogging about that on his own blog:

If you’re interested in the New Edit System, please take a moment to read these posts and consider following Ollie’s blog.

Announcing the first MusicBrainz Hack Weekend

Hi everyone!

It’s with a lot of excitement that I can announce that the first MusicBrainz Worldwide/Remote Hack Weekend has been confirmed! We will spend from 2012-08-17 until 2012-08-19 getting as many people together as we can to hack on some fun new features for MusicBrainz, or use MusicBrainz data in interesting ways.

You can find all the details including proposed ideas at:

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Hack_Weekend

When

The first official MusicBrainz hack weekend will take place between 2012-08-17 and 2012-08-19.

Where

The main event will be taking place in the #musicbrainz-devel IRC channel on irc.freenode.org. We also encourage local people to get together and work on things in person if possible. If you’re interested in that, check the wiki page for information about people who are local to you.

Who

Everyone! The hack weekend is not just for programmers, we’ll be sure to need testers, people to help brainstorm, people to help with documentation and writing, people to help with HTML, and inevitably more on the day.

Ideas

We’ve already got a few ideas on the wiki page, but the more the merrier! Even if you don’t think you can make the hack weekend, put your ideas down and maybe someone will pick them up.

I’m really looking forward to this, and I hope you’ll join us!

Matthew Hawn from Last.fm joins the MetaBrainz board of directors

I’m pleased to announce that Matthew Hawn from Last.fm has joined our board of directors. Matthew is a veteran of the music industry who has worked for big music labels in the past and today fills the role of VP of Product at Last.fm. Matthew joining our board of directors reflects our shared history and the closer collaboration between MusicBrainz and Last.fm

Welcome on board Matthew!

Matthew replaces outgoing director Derek Sivers. Derek, the founder of CD Baby, has been with MetaBrainz since its beginning of the organization and has looked out for us many times. We really appreciate everything you’ve done for us Derek!

UPDATE: Fixed Matthew’s title.

Server Update, 2012-07-09

We’ve just finished pushing out another update to the MusicBrainz web servers. This release is mainly a bug fix release, though it does see some of Alastair’s Google Summer of Code work on collections, and more of Ian’s work on translations. Also, there is finally a top editors once again.

Many thanks to Ian McEwan, Alastair Porter, Nicolás Tamargo, and the rest of the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release, and the beta team for helping us make sure everything is working nicely! Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-2765] – Artist/Label guess case breaks if a different mode is set in the cookie
  • [MBS-2903] – WS/2: Can’t browse artist by work (ws/2/artist?work=MBID)
  • [MBS-3156] – Slaves should use the READONLY database settings from DBDefs.pm
  • [MBS-3904] – It is possible to vote for own edits
  • [MBS-4241] – msgids for translation should not use anything but ASCII
  • [MBS-4595] – Not all relationships are shown translated
  • [MBS-4613] – Language/script dropdowns are not translated in the release editor
  • [MBS-4731] – ISE: Edit Search for My Vote != None && Status = Open
  • [MBS-4738] – script/create_test_db.sh does not create a test database.
  • [MBS-4796] – "Other release groups" have slipped to the very bottom of the page
  • [MBS-4857] – Statistics timeline does not respond to window resizes
  • [MBS-4871] – When making a new collection, UUID in url is all uppercase
  • [MBS-4873] – Can’t go from a collection back to collections list
  • [MBS-4875] – Statistics tabs are untranslatable
  • [MBS-4878] – Dropdown lists on add artist/label/etc not translated
  • [MBS-4905] – Missing "lyrics language" in "work information" section of works tabs
  • [MBS-4926] – musicbrainz.org/release-group/{mbid} template is including an extra th
  • [MBS-4934] – robots.txt is blocking *
  • [MBS-4935] – count.recording.Nreleases statistics are calculated incorrectly and inefficiently
  • [MBS-4938] – Statistics: No. of IPIs is wrong
  • [MBS-4954] – Internal server error when checking donation status.

Improvement

  • [MBS-2387] – Better release label merging
  • [MBS-3208] – Trim leading/trailing whitespace in release editor prior to Add Missing Entities check
  • [MBS-4741] – Bring back voting icons in the edit search/edit view
  • [MBS-4855] – Split translation domains to ease translation and aid reuse of musicbrainz-server translations
  • [MBS-4856] – l() and ln() in templates should be implemented as a TT plugin, not relying on c.gettext
  • [MBS-4933] – Remove extraneous references to READWRITE in Data::Statistics

New Feature

  • [MBS-1715] – No page to view top editors

Task

  • [MBS-4845] – Update the Twitter logo
  • [MBS-4888] – Add "Trove" to "Other Databases" whitelist

Sub-task

  • [MBS-4223] – .po files with country codes don’t seem to work
  • [MBS-4224] – Interface not switching languages properly
  • [MBS-4259] – Make timeline events translatable
  • [MBS-4338] – country, language, script strings should not share identical msgid
  • [MBS-4340] – edit details template is wrongly retrieved from translated edit name

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-07-09.

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.