Have Your Say In Scheduling

In an effort to bring the community into our development process more, I (ocharles) have built a new little application to help the MusicBrainz community decide exactly what we should focus on. I present to you, the Scheduling Game!

The Scheduling Game
The Scheduling Game

The idea behind this little application is to let the community quickly scan through open issues and decide when they believe they should be fixed. Each editor is presented with 3 options:

  1. Within 3 months. This ticket must absolutely be fixed within 3 months from now.
  2. Within 12 months. This ticket should be fixed within a year from now. This means the ticket should be fixed within the year, but is not critical for the next 3 months
  3. Unscheduled. This issue is not pressing and can be fixed much later.

Later, when issues have been voted on by enough people, the developers will try and decide how to schedule work to best fit the needs of the community.

A few disclaimers… Firstly, this is just an experiment! We don’t know how well it will work, though initial testing has shown it to already be quite useful. Secondly, it’s not really much of a game, but I wanted to give it a cute name (I know how picky everyone can be!). Currently only a subset of open tickets are available for voting on – specifically tickets in the “NGS + 1” and “Post NGS” milestones on JIRA, as these milestones are in need of a sorting.

The scheduling game is currently live on my server at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/. You can have a look at the current (anonymous) votes at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/results. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me in IRC as ocharles or email oliver@musicbrainz.org. Happy voting!

Server update 2011-11-21

A few days behind on this one, but we’ve got this release out. This release has one controversial change, which I want to discuss in this blog post.

Displaying Relationships on Release Pages

A lot of people want this, and we’ve shipped something that adds this functionality. However, a lot of people think this is too verbose, and to a point I agree – there’s a lot of information there that can be displayed better. However, work on this issue has been on and off for almost the past 2 years. We’ve got a solution here that while far from ideal will get this ball rolling.

This is an unpopular move on my half, but I’m asking users to please try and bear with us until the next release (scheduled in for 5th December), which is just over a week away. Hopefully having this fairly messy display so open will raise enough discussion on how exactly to move forward. If you really must see it gone, you can use AdBlock or user styles in your browser to hide the dl.ars element.

Changes in this Release

  • [MBS-2067] – CDStub not displayed in the "Matching CDs" section on CDTOC lookup page
  • [MBS-3668] – all edits including "Auto-edits" are being tallied as "Accepted" edits in editor profile
  • [MBS-3688] – Wrong coverart on all-zeros barcodes
  • [MBS-3718] – Inline search has problems with search terms with " (double quotes) and colons in them (and maybe others)
  • [MBS-3734] – Google indexes MusicBrainz search result (and some other) pages it shouldn’t
  • [MBS-3754] – Splitting an artist shouldn’t be an auto-edit
  • [MBS-3755] – Importing from FreeDB puts the artist name in the wrong field
  • [MBS-3759] – Auto-editor election isn’t showing own vote (instead: private)
  • [MBS-3764] – Typo on artist merge page
  • [MBS-3768] – Error when editing URL into one that already exists
  • [MBS-3777] – Musicbrainz breaks https://secure.wikimedia.org link in edit notes
  • [MBS-3786] – Entities with tag count on top of tag view page is incorrect

Improvement

  • [MBS-2979] – Enable CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)
  • [MBS-3105] – Country/Language/Script statistics should include a statistic for those with none set.
  • [MBS-3752] – Making edit note for "Add release" mandatory
  • [MBS-3767] – Distinguish between Discogs master and release URLs on release pages
  • [MBS-3778] – Separate release group links from release links on release pages

New Feature

  • [MBS-496] – Display recording relationships on a release page
  • [MBS-3761] – Add songfacts to the sideboard

Server update 2011-11-14

It’s been a while, but we’ve finally got a new server release out! This one didn’t go perfectly smoothly, and we had (more, i’m afraid) troubles with the release editor. We’ve got a fix for this out, so editing should be at least as stable as it was before. As always, please do continue to report any bugs you find. Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-761] – Release has ASIN but no cover art ("No cover image available.")
  • [MBS-1169] – Musicbrainz website is missing HTML escaping on user entered data
  • [MBS-2529] – Orphaned release group and recordings after rejecting or cancelling a release/medium
  • [MBS-2590] – Unused URLs not being removed
  • [MBS-2847] – Merging artists moves the comment from the old artist to the new one
  • [MBS-3102] – Changing release artists automatically changes all track artists
  • [MBS-3305] – Artist missing in edit medium edit
  • [MBS-3451] – Unterminated link on CD Stub page causes "Overview" and "Edit" tabs to display incorrectly
  • [MBS-3466] – otherlookup for non-existent MBID throws ISE
  • [MBS-3522] – Bad gateway errors in Add Missing Entities trying to add large VA releases without locking down artists
  • [MBS-3656] – Clicking text (Yes/No/Abstain/None) on the most recent open edit changes votes on all edits in that page.
  • [MBS-3657] – Medium order not allowed when merging releases
  • [MBS-3675] – Modbot failing edit relationship edits with "This relationship has already been deleted"
  • [MBS-3677] – Recording page doesn’t highlight releases with pending edits or show disambiguation comments
  • [MBS-3689] – Tagger button on tag lookup for recordings confusingly leads to "non-album tracks"
  • [MBS-3715] – Fix the wording for YouTube videos on the sidebar
  • [MBS-3719] – Format/display of recording search results is broken for standalone recordings
  • [MBS-3741] – Incorrect artist_credit.name

Improvement

  • [MBS-1766] – Display lyrics and score links in work sidebar (in the External link section)
  • [MBS-2478] – Pages for releases should also show ARs from the release group they are contained within.
  • [MBS-2942] – Warn users that FreeDB indexes are only updated monthly
  • [MBS-3192] – Display release group URLs also on release pages
  • [MBS-3495] – Make IMSLP links look like the Wikipedia ones
  • [MBS-3508] – Indicate if a release group contains only one release in release group
  • [MBS-3713] – Add JS autoselect for the SoundCloud relationships
  • [MBS-3714] – Add cleanup for YouTube video URLs
  • [MBS-3747] – Create script to split arranger relationships

New Feature

  • [MBS-71] – Add auto-editor elections

Task

  • [MBS-3697] – MusicBrainz needs to comply with new changes of Amazon Product Advertising API taking effect on October 25, 2011
  • [MBS-3710] – Tranclude "People" instead of "MusicBrainz_Bio"

Dear python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 application, we need to talk!

An application that uses our python-musicbrainz/0.7.3 client library has been putting undue load on our servers all at once. This application looks up something at MusicBrainz at 03:00UTC causing our servers to be overloaded at that time each day.

To protect our servers from being overloaded we’re going to block this application from 3:00 UTC – 4:00 UTC. We’re hoping that this will alllow us to identify the application and start a dialog with the application authors. Once we have established communication with the authors and worked up a plan to fix this, we’re going to release the block.

We really dislike blocking applications, but if applications are being inconsiderate of our resources, we’re left with few options. We hope to hear from the application authors soon so we can resolve this issue. Also, we’re moving forward with our plans to require User-Agent strings that properly identify applications using our service to fix this problem going forward.

If you are the author of said application, please leave a comment with information on how we can get in touch with you.

Release editor service interruption

In an effort to mitigate/fix MBS-3379 we need to restart the service that keeps the session information for our release editors. We’re going to do that tomorrow Saturday October 28 at Noon PDT, 3PM EDT, 8PM London, 9PM Amsterdam. If at this time you have a release editor open, submitting your edits will fail and you will need to start your edits over again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Looking for sponsors to purchase two development machines

The MusicBrainz community has two very active contributors (navap and reosarevok) who do not have and cannot afford to buy decent development machines/laptops. MusicBrainz is carefully watching its finances currently and can’t really afford to spend money on this right now, so I’m curious to see if the community would come together to support these two awesome contributors.

Navap has done a lot of editing and web site improvements (a series of 8 or so nitpick patches that greatly improved the look/feel of NGS) and countless other tasks to improve MusicBrainz. Reosarevok is a very active editor and has recently become our wiki god; he is also wishing to help out more with the development. Both of these two awesome contributors could be more productive with decent machines.

We’re looking to buy two $500 Linux capable machines that have a couple of cores and about 4GB of RAM each. Would you please consider chipping in to help our contributors? You can make a cash donation (please let us know your donation should go towards laptops) or even send a laptop to our contributors. If you’d like to help out with a donation of an actual machine, please leave a comment in the blog and I’ll get in touch with you.

Thanks!

Web service user-agent string blocking reminder

I would like to remind Web Service users that on 16 November we’re going to block generic User-Agent strings from accessing our web service. Earlier we said:

The User-Agent string needs to identify the application and the version of the application that is making the request; having a generic User-Agent string like “Java/1.6.0_24″ or “PHP/5.3.4″ does not allow us to properly identify the application making the requests.

IMPORTANT: 6 Months after we release NGS (Nov 16th) we’re going to start blocking common generic User-Agents strings, so please make sure that you send us a proper User-Agent header as part of your request.

You have been warned. 🙂

Picard 0.16 released with AcoustID support

Lukáš Lalinský announced here:

Hello,

We released a new version of Picard today. This new release includes a number of bug fixes. Unicode punctuation is now replaced by default for new users. Title standardization has been removed, as track titles now follow the same style guidelines as recording titles.

One larger change that is hidden by default is support for AcoustID fingerprinting. AcoustID is a new, completely open source, audio fingerprinting project, started by me last year. I’m really glad to finally integrate it with Picard. Integration with the MusicBranz website is planned for later. Configuring Picard to use AcoustID instead of AmpliFIND should be completely transparent, there are no visual differences in the scanning process. Note that this feature requires downloading an extra application, see the AcoustID wiki page for details.

Changes since version 0.15.1:

  • Added AcoustID support.
  • Fixed track metadata plugins.
  • Added new internal %_totalalbumtracks% tag field. (PICARD-16)
  • Track metadata plugins now run also on non-album tracks. (PICARD-7)
  • Fixed custom Various Artists name on the %albumartist% field. (PICARD-5)
  • Album artist is now correctly “translated”. (PICARD-1)
  • Unicode punctuation is now converted to ASCII by default.
  • WavPack correction files are moved together with the main files. (PICARD-15)
  • Unicode filename normalization on OS X.
  • Original release date is now saved into %originaldate%.
  • Allow tagging with localized artist aliases (PICARD-17)
  • Added a quit confirmation dialog. (PICARD-46)
  • Standalone recordings can be tagged with relationships now. (PICARD-10)
  • Refreshing an album will refresh its “other versions” listing. (PICARD-8)
  • “Unicode punctuation to ASCII” now works on album-level metadata. (PICARD-50)
  • DJ-mix tags should only be written to the medium where they apply. (PICARD-20)
  • Support URL redirects in web service/network request module (PICARD-54)
  • Jamendo and Archive.org cover art is displayed on web page, but not loaded by Picard plugin (PICARD-52)
  • Edits to metadata in “Details…” menu not reflected in UI (PICARD-13)
  • The status bar/new metadata box is updated when a selected file/track is changed. (PICARD-14)

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

MusicBrainz Summit 11: Rotterdam

Hello everyone,

The 11th MusicBrainz summit was held this past weekend in Rotterdam, NL.

It was a very productive weekend with lots of discussions and plenty of social time. We had 17 people in attendance, 5 of which were from our sponsors/partners. The complete summit notes are now available on the wiki.

For those who didn’t attend, here are some of the things you missed out on:

  • 3 lbs of chocolate
  • banana pizza
  • stroopwafels
  • generic beer and energy drinks
  • overloading the wifi and having to rely on tethered cell phones for wifi access
  • an extremely high density of Google phones
  • 3 hours of discussion about works
  • information about BookBrainz
  • very large traffic lights

Thanks to everyone who came and to warp for being our local contact.

See you all at the next summit!

Server update, 2011-10-10

With the summit arrangements this release has become delayed, but we’re happy to announce that we have just finished releasing this version (live from the summit!). Here’s what’s been fixed in this release:

Bug

  • [MBS-1868] – Historic move disc id appears oddly
  • [MBS-2001] – Some AddReleaseLabel edits have no entity_id
  • [MBS-2196] – Can’t delete unused relationship type
  • [MBS-2429] – External links don’t appear for last.fm URLs
  • [MBS-2467] – RE: Add Missing Entities problems with caps
  • [MBS-2539] – Inline tag edit : forbidden characters are not removed form the edit box
  • [MBS-2682] – [ws/1] track-list offset is incorrect
  • [MBS-2699] – Merging works always add titles of merged works as aliases of target work
  • [MBS-2938] – Cannot import/seed 99-track releases from FreeDB
  • [MBS-3034] – Immediately remove PUID
  • [MBS-3070] – Release editor cannot be seeded with >99 for array-like elements
  • [MBS-3223] – Work relationships not available in web service recording requests
  • [MBS-3336] – NGS /ws/1 doesn’t include some relationships
  • [MBS-3350] – ws/2 browsing release by track artist
  • [MBS-3372] – Add relationship not linking to the URL entity
  • [MBS-3442] – WS/2: Can’t browse work by artist (ws/2/work?artist=MBID)
  • [MBS-3456] – Selecting recording from search results in work "Relate to…" doesn’t close results
  • [MBS-3463] – Remove ISRC edits are not shown pending on recording page
  • [MBS-3477] – Crash when trying to edit a release to create a new release group
  • [MBS-3483] – Release editor > Importing a Various Artists CDStub doesn’t import track artists
  • [MBS-3509] – Change release group via release editor doesn’t show up in edit history / open edits of target release group
  • [MBS-3523] – Entity not being selected for relationship
  • [MBS-3528] – Internal Server Error – Couldn’t render template "undef error – Can’t call method "value" on an undefined value at /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/HTML/FormHandler/Field.pm line 89. "
  • [MBS-3564] – Cover arts from ozon.ru are not diplayed
  • [MBS-3570] – change direction not working when no relationship type was selected first.
  • [MBS-3573] – Got Internal Server Error while updating info for ‘Mob Hits [Disc 2]’
  • [MBS-3577] – Release editor converts unicode characters to HTML quotations
  • [MBS-3584] – amazon.es is not recognized as ASIN in "Add URL Reference"
  • [MBS-3591] – Finding some labels in AJAX search is impossible
  • [MBS-3592] – Artist aliases have extremely low priority when doing a simple search
  • [MBS-3622] – Internal Server Error during import of freedb release that cannot be found
  • [MBS-3623] – Edit relationship fails with internal error when attempting to move credits between recordings
  • [MBS-3625] – The FreeDB page throws an exception if you try and view it when the disc doesn’t exist

Improvement

  • [MBS-962] – Allow more characters in tags
  • [MBS-2276] – Report: released before 1982 but has DiscID attached or CD medium
  • [MBS-3234] – Report: deprecated use of "(feat."
  • [MBS-3295] – Report: releases with an ASIN as catalogue number
  • [MBS-3382] – Report: releases with only some mediums with format
  • [MBS-3582] – Amazon-Links should state country like Wikipedia links do
  • [MBS-3620] – Improve the search results for autocompleted editor searches

New Feature

  • [MBS-3363] – Report: same ASINs attached to multiple releases
  • [MBS-3364] – Report: Discogs pages attached to multiple releases

Sub-task

  • [MBS-3315] – Add the ‘Possibly duplicate artists’ report
  • [MBS-3316] – Add the ‘Release Groups that might need to be merged’ report
  • [MBS-3317] – Add the ‘Releases with duplicated or missing track numbers’ report
  • [MBS-3318] – Add the ‘Releases with superfluous data tracks’ report
  • [MBS-3319] – Add the ‘Tracks whose names include their sequence numbers’ report