MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
We’ve pushed out the latest and greatest NGS data set (2011-02-22) and updated the test.musicbrainz.org with this data and restarted the NGS replication. If you’re are testing the replication for NGS, you will need to import this new data set.
A new virtual machine with the latest NGS code and the data set is being pushed out to the FTP server now. More on that tomorrow.
Google’s Summer of Code program is starting up for 2011 and we’ve applied to be part of it again. If you have any ideas for projects that Summer of Code students should tackle for MusicBrainz, please head over the the Summer of Code ideas page and add your idea!
I hope we get to participate again — last year was productive and fun!
CatCat says:
After a pretty long pause Cleanup of the Month is back in business!
From now and roughly a month onward it is Bruce Springsteen that’s on the menu for fixing, please head on over and see if there is anything you can edit, remember validating and voting on edits is also helping!
Further, collecting information and finding good resources is good too, and you can help by collecting stats or writing a blurb here.
Good Luck Everyone!
Khadija Elbedweihy, a student/researcher from the University of Sheffield has asked us to provide a months worth of our search server logs for research purposes. Khadija says the following about her research:
What my research is trying to do is finding out what kind of queries issued on linked data, what are their complexities and other statistics as well. This might go into another work which is for evaluating search tools working on linked data. So I’d use my analysis to see how we can best define evaluation queries that are based on real world usage and scenarios.
We have the logs and its easy for us to provide these logs for research purposes — and we like supporting research, especially if we can benefit from it. 🙂
We just need one final OK from our community that we’re not doing something stupid and/or betraying the trust/privacy of our users. I’ve created a tiny except of the two types of logs we propose to send to Khadija. The source IP addresses and any other information have been removed from the data — the only thing that remains are the timestamps when the request occurred and the URL that was requested. And these URLs do not contain any information that could identify our users in any way. That is it — we’d be providing no other information to Khadija.
Please take a look at the excerpt and sanity check us to make sure we’re not pulling an AOL here. 🙂
Nick at the BBC says:
We are looking for a perl contractor to do some work on getting MusicBrainz NGS on to the BBC’s Forge Platform (advised and assisted by me). There is a job description here:
http://london.pm.org/pipermail/jobs/2011-February/000280.html
The contract time is 60 working days and I believe that the day rate is around £400. The work is being sub-contracted via Reed Professional Services.
Bonus points if you already know about MusicBrainz and/or OSS software in general.
Rolling out NGS (Next Generation Schema) onto the main servers is going to be hard if we have to do it with our current hardware. If we can raise $15,000 to purchase new servers we will make this process much easier and with much less down time. Also, our current hardware is starting to get old and more failure prone. By purchasing newer hardware we can serve more users using less power, which will make MusicBrainz be responsible for less pollution!
Please make a donation today to help MusicBrainz raise money to cover the costs for a much needed hardware upgrade:
Our Next Generation Schema, improves MusicBrainz on many fronts. Its a complete re-write of our 11 year old codebase using modern tools (Catalyst, Moose, Template Toolkit) and a drastic improvement of our schema. The new schema fixes many of the problems of the old schema and introduces many new concepts that allow us to model music data better.
For instance, instead of having conflated artist names like “Queen & David Bowie” we will now have Artist Credits, which will link to the artists “Queen” and “David Bowie” individually. Releases will now have mediums and tracklists which will allow us to re-use tracklists in different releases, which makes release more accurate and removes duplication from the database. Tracks have been changed to recordings and if the same recording is used in two different releases the same recording (with the same MBID) will be used in both releases. NGS also introduces new concepts like musical Works, that can represent Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as an abstract Work, which then has been recorded into recordings and releases after his death. The goal is to remove artists like Beethoven and Bach from the list of releases and recordings since they never actually recorded anything while they were alive.
The overall goal is to allow MusicBrainz to grow into a complete music encyclopedia, rather than a CD lookup service that it started out as. This new codebase and schema allows us to grow and add many more features that we’ve not been able to add to the old code base. If you’d like a preview, please take a look at our test server.
All donations are tax deductible since MetaBrainz is a 501(c)3 non-profit! Thank you for your support!
Our old test server, which is being used for some special projects currently, is now generously hosted free of charge by Internet service provider Layer42 in Mountain View.
We really appreciate your support of MusicBrainz! Thanks Michael and Dan at Layer42 for getting us set up so fast. Also, thanks to Cliff Skolnick for hosting this machine in the past. Thanks for your support!
I’ve just finished uploading the Virtual Machine for MusicBrainz Next Generation Schema Release Candidate 1. This virtual machine is setup as a slave and can pull replication data from the test server by running the admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges from the musicbrainz-server codebase about 10 minutes after every hour.
This is an easy way to jump in and take a look at how NGS and replication in NGS will work! (hint: the replication doesn’t change much)
The MusicBrainz development team has been working hard to reach the RC1 milestone for NGS and we’re proud to announce that we’ve just released RC1 for you to play with! Not only do we have a feature-complete (only small enhancements and bug fixes remain) version of NGS, but we also have a shiny new test server to introduce to the world.
rc1.musicbrainz.org is our new Mac Mini Server based test server. Since our test server doesn’t get used that much, I really wanted to waste less power running a full sized server. And I really wanted to have the test server co-located with the rest of our machines, so we opted to purchase a Mac Mini for this job (a Mini only sucks 10W of power for most of the time, which is great). This new machine will also (and permanently) be reachable as the new test.musicbrainz.org, but the DNS hasn’t propagated yet, so we opted to give the machine a temporary name in honor of its first duties.
Back to RC1: We’ve fixed a ton of bugs and we’ve worked hard to get all the new features in that will be in NGS. From here on out we’re hoping to only fix bugs and do minor enhancements. We do not plan to add new features at this point in time. Our focus is to finish the open bugs and ship NGS as soon as possible. In this release we’ve also included a large batch of usability improvements for the Release Editor, which is getting much closer to being complete.
If you’ve been holding off testing NGS, now is the time for you to jump in. We need a lot more help to test NGS and find all those pesky bugs that still remain. Please play with RC1 and log in with your normal MusicBrainz account credentials. If you find any problems, please report them to our bug tracker. We’re specifically looking at people to test the following:
We have a new NGS data dump to go with the RC1 release. Replication has also been turned on for RC1, so if you’re interested in testing the replication, make sure you have the latest code from git, import the data dump and then run admin/LoadReplicationChanges 10 minutes after the hour to get updates for RC1. I hope to release a new virtual machine tomorrow that will allow people to test the replication on their own turf — but I’m not quite ready to promise this yet.
Thanks to everyone who helped work on this release!
After a great day of teamwork in preparing for today’s RC1 release it was the database that wouldn’t play along. Our code is ready, but we’re hitting glitches on the database on our new test server.
We’re now waiting for a new clean migration of the data which takes several hours, so we need to postpone the RC1 release for a few hours. 🙁
We’re working hard to get RC1 out ASAP — stay tuned!