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

Google Hangout coverage for our Summit

The MusicBrainz summit is going to get started later today and we’re going to have a Google Hangout as our low-budget webcasting solution. You should friend musicbrainz.summit at gmail dot com in Google Plus and then join our Hangout to join in our conversation.

See you online later tonight!

UPDATE: We failed to get the hang out started today. We’ll start our hang-our tomorrow morning at 10am Rotterdam time.

The FreeDB gateway has been updated to NGS!

I’m pleased to announce that the FreeDB gateway, which lets you fetch MusicBrainz data via FreeDB enabled applications, has been updated to use the NGS database. As of now, its updating with new data from the main MusicBrainz server and you should be able to look up new CDs.

To use the FreeDB gateway, set the FreeDB server in your application to freedb.musicbrainz.org on port 80. For more information, please take a look at our wiki page for the gateway.

Thanks to Lukas for porting this code to NGS!

Web server update, 2011-09-26

A bit late on releasing this one I’m afraid, but we finally got this delayed release out today. Here’s everything that got fixed and changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-375] – Create redirect web server config files
  • [MBS-1349] – Differences in current and migrated "Set track lengths from discID" edit display
  • [MBS-1380] – An URL ending in closing parenthesis gets broken when listed in edit notes
  • [MBS-1947] – When logged out, viewing a private collection should prompt a log in
  • [MBS-2084] – Approve/cancel and tagger buttons add extra whitespace above the heading
  • [MBS-2202] – User names with spaces cause superficial problems when sending emails
  • [MBS-2591] – Release editor unescaping HTML entities POSTed to http://musicbrainz.org/release/add
  • [MBS-2608] – Logged in as autoeditor, seeing nag screen
  • [MBS-2911] – URL decoding should not decode non-utf-8 strings
  • [MBS-2936] – Merging Artists does not merge birthday
  • [MBS-3001] – Set track lengths now even more difficult to compare
  • [MBS-3134] – When viewing a DiscID ToC page, there’s no indication if there’s a pending Remove edit for an issue.
  • [MBS-3170] – UTF error yields 502
  • [MBS-3264] – Historic "Add ISRC" edits not linked to releases
  • [MBS-3268] – Approving an edit in a new tab yields a misleading error message
  • [MBS-3309] – An error while trying to add a release from Picard
  • [MBS-3333] – Internal server error when adding AR twice (accidental misclick)
  • [MBS-3467] – /otherlookup for freeDB ID gives misleading error
  • [MBS-3497] – Artist credit editor is hidden when the balloon is stretched too high
  • [MBS-3499] – Encoding error – couldn’t render template…
  • [MBS-3511] – Edit note syntax broken
  • [MBS-3521] – Sporadic ISEs when trying to view the editing history of an artist
  • [MBS-3529] – Uppercase cover art file extension not recognized
  • [MBS-3530] – "Edit barcodes" edits are not linked to relevant release artists
  • [MBS-3532] – ISE when editing a relationship to the same as an existing relationship
  • [MBS-3533] – ISe adding a CD Stub where MB already has the discID
  • [MBS-3538] – Two redirects for /show/edit/conditions.html
  • [MBS-3539] – Regression: Instrument search in relationship editor no longer works in Firefox/Opera
  • [MBS-3546] – ISE when visiting Tag Lookup page without arguments
  • [MBS-3548] – Admin "adjust flags" panel crashes on form submission
  • [MBS-3549] – Field validation prevents adding lyrics relationship URL to lyricstatus.com
  • [MBS-3559] – Searching works gives an internal server error: Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::Search->external "Can’t use string ("backward") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use
  • [MBS-3561] – Can’t find any work
  • [MBS-3565] – "Can’t use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference" ISE when doing artist query for works from /ws/2

Improvement

  • [MBS-1470] – Ask for confirmation before canceling an edit
  • [MBS-3493] – Show message in overview for empty artists
  • [MBS-3545] – Make Tag Lookup usable again by "regular" editors

New Feature

  • [MBS-2963] – Support ‘release-groups’ inc parameter for /ws/2/release browsing

Search Server Update, 2011-09-28

On Wednesday we rolled out an upgrade of our indexed search servers. These search servers are used for search in both the web service and website. This release includes some fixes and improvements added to make it easier to handle some particular search cases, plus few other fixes. A fairly critical bug with respect to work searching was came up yesterday after this update, but we’ve released a hot-fix patch to solve that problem. Here are the release notes:

Bug

  • [SEARCH-82] – Relation Type in Work relation list is reported as {xxxx}{yyyy}zzz
  • [SEARCH-104] – Querying "code:XXXXX" in a label search returns no results.
  • [SEARCH-106] – target-type attribute missing in relation-list elements
  • [SEARCH-110] – Web service is returning ‘disambiguation’ element in release groups
  • [SEARCH-112] – Label codes are indexed as strings
  • [SEARCH-113] – Label aliases don’t produce the expected results
  • [SEARCH-116] – Freedb import chokes on entries with multiple ids
  • [SEARCH-121] – Recording search only searches on recording artists not track artists if different

Improvement

  • [SEARCH-114] – Index unset artist countries as unknown
  • [SEARCH-115] – Allow advanced search for releases with zero mediums

New Feature

  • [SEARCH-90] – Search for standalone recordings

Our new wiki warden: Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok)

After too many moons of neglect, we finally have a new wiki warden who is going to put some serious effort into sprucing up our wiki. Nicolás Tamargo (user reosarevok) has been promoted to be our new wiki god. His first task is to clean up dead pages and to get rid of a lot of cruft; then he’ll work on improving some doc pages that have been long out of date. Hopefully soon we can get to a state where the wiki is useful, rather than filling us with a sense of dread. 🙂

If you’re interested in helping reosarevok with the wiki, please let him know by leaving a comment here or contacting him directly.

Thanks for taking on our very messy wiki, Reosarevok!

Record traffic, new server in NGS rotation

We’re currently seeing record levels of traffic right now. Since the beginning of August our traffic has gone from 9M hits per day to 14M hits per day today, which is a significant increase in traffic. Fortunately our servers were able to handle the extra load, but we started getting near capacity.

Yesterday I started working on taking one of the servers from the classic site and moving it into the NGS cluster. We finished this a couple of hours ago and we now have a maximum limit of 227 queries per second (qps).

If you find any spurious troubles with the site in the next day or so, please open a ticket.