MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
I’m pleased to announce that Google has pledged another $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation for our annual support!
The Google Open Source Programs Office and all of its awesome people have been supporting us for five years now. Their generous support has allowed us to keep two full time engineers working on our server software. Without Google, MusicBrainz would not be where it is today.
Thank you again, Google!
Mostly another week of bug fixes, with a few improvements. Currently the timeline is experiencing some known problems, we hope to have this fixed by tomorrow, but we didn’t want to hold up this release.
Andy Hawkins has continued to make great work on the 4th version of libmusicbrainz, and has just announced the second beta release. Andy writes:
I am pleased to announce the second Beta release of libmusicbrainz4, a client library for retrieving data from the MusicBrainz service using the latest /ws/2 web service.
This is a significant rewrite of the code since Beta 1, but this should mean it is much easier to maintain going forward. Unfortunately it is not ABI compatible with Beta 1, which will mean all client applications will need to be recompiled (and are likely to require some code changes).
The main changes are in the areas of list handling, with a cleaner internal implementation of lists. Additionally, the C interface is now generated automatically from an XML description file, and there is correct handling for some XML schema changes that have been made since the first release. Finally, the ownership of items in the C interface has changed slightly, please check the documentation for each method in the C interface for full details.
Note that some include files have been removed. I would recommend that you clean out the ‘include/musicbrainz4’ directory in your install location before installing this newer version.
The library is available to download here:
ftp://ftp.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/libmusicbrainz-4.0.0beta2.tar.gz
Documentation is generated from the source (make docs), an online copy is available here:
http://users.musicbrainz.org/~luks/docs/libmusicbrainz4/
Please also check the sample programs (under ‘examples’) for details on how to use the library.
If you find any issues, please report them using JIRA (under the project ‘libmusicbrainz’) here:
http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/
As ever, please feel free to ask any questions about the library either here or via the #musicbrainz-devel channel on IRC (when I’m around).
Apologies for the day late release, but here’s the latest installment of bug fixes and improvements now live on the main website:
Jamie McDonald has continued his Summer of Code work and has submitted the first version of the MusicBrainz app to the Android Market! If you would like to be able to look up releases by barcode, search for artists and rate/tag data in MusicBrainz, this app is for you:
MusicBrainz App in the Android Market!
I’ve already used this application in a number of social situations where someone wanted to know some music info and I was able to look it up very quickly. Its quite handy! Also, an iPhone version is still in the works.
Thanks very much for your continued work on this project, Jamie!
Apologies for being a day later than planned, but here’s what we got fixed in the last release.
This is a minor release to correct some bugs that were present in 0.15. Additionally, the Mac OS X build should now run fine on 10.4 (i386) and 10.5. Here’s the changelog:
Version 0.15.1 – 2011-07-31
You can download 0.15.1 here.
Here’s the last release for July:
Earlier this week I met with Shawn Simister, who works on Google’s Freebase project (former from MetaWeb) to touch base about how MusicBrainz is being utilized inside of Google. MusicBrainz represents a large chunk of the music data in Freebase and in turn the Freebase data is used as one of the sources of data for Google’s search.
Shawn explains this in more detail:
You can actually see a couple areas where we’re using the Freebase music data publicly. First, in the structured refinements in search. If you search for lady gaga albums and scroll to the bottom to see “Album searches for Lady Gaga”. Also you can see videos clustered by topic in YouTube Topics and many of the topics are music-related.
It’s important to keep in mind that Musicbrainz is just part of the solution. It’s a pretty big part of Freebase music data and therefore its likely to be a pretty big component in these results but as you know the search results team at Google is pretty secretive about what all goes into the results page so even I can’t tell for certain when they’re using Freebase/Musicbrainz data for any given result.
I think it’s important that people don’t mistake this as a one-to-one relationship between Musicbrainz data and Google results because there are quite a few steps in between but there’s definitely a strong connection there and we really appreciate everything that the Musicbrainz community is doing and hope that Musicbrainz community continues to grow.
I find this tremendously exciting to hear, since I proposed a very similar thing to Google many years ago. While this idea was rejected back in the day, I’m excited to see that Google is now using our data for it searches. Every person who has ever contributed to MusicBrainz should be proud!
Thank you to everyone and thank you Shawn for shedding some light on this!
The 0.15 stable version was finally released today, with some new features and bug fixes since beta2. There were too many small changes to list, but here’s a partial changelog with the most user-visible ones:
Version 0.15 – 2011-07-17:
You can download the new version and report bugs for it 🙂