MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog
I just posted the Profit & Loss for 2010 for the MetaBrainz Foundation!
Short summary: We earned $177k and we’re in the black by almost $5k, but we’re still not raking in the bucks.
But, a tiny non-profit being in the black for this crappy economic climate is awesome and makes me happy. Watch for a full annual report coming in the next few weeks!
Using Virtual Box I’ve created a virtual machine that contains a complete NGS installation. This installation also has the latest NGS data (without the edits) loaded in it.
If you’re interested in playing with NGS on your own machine, but don’t want to go through the long setup process, this virtual machine is for you!
To play with this virtual machine on your Windows, Linux or Mac machine, read our wiki page!
As of today we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel! We feel confident that we can finish all new features (and most improvements as listed in jira) by January 17th. Once we reach RC1 we’re going to freeze the features for NGS and only work to fix bugs in our codebase.
That said, we hope to release NGS onto the main servers sometime in February.
Its been a very long road to NGS, but it is finally tangibly close. I’m getting excited!
Hello and Happy New Year!
Very late last year we finally hit a milestone we’ve been working towards for quite some time: Freezing the public NGS schema!
The public schema refers to the collection of tables that will be replicated in NGS. See below for a complete list of all those tables. However, we may make small changes to some of the tables in NGS that are not replicated. This should not affect anyone, unless you are actively hacking on the MusicBrainz Server code.
Also, we have a new data dump for this frozen schema available for anyone who would like to play with it. This data dump will cleanly import into the current version of the server source code in git.
All the tables that will be replicated for NGS:
annotation, artist, artist_alias, artist_annotation, artist_meta, artist_tag, artist_credit, artist_credit_name, artist_gid_redirect, artist_name, artist_type, cdtoc, clientversion, country, gender, isrc, l_artist_artist, l_artist_label, l_artist_recording, l_artist_release, l_artist_release_group, l_artist_url, l_artist_work, l_label_label, l_label_recording, l_label_release, l_label_release_group, l_label_url, l_label_work, l_recording_recording, l_recording_release, l_recording_release_group, l_recording_url, l_recording_work, l_release_release, l_release_release_group, l_release_url, l_release_work, l_release_group_release_group, l_release_group_url, l_release_group_work, l_url_url, l_url_work, l_work_work, label, label_alias, label_annotation, label_meta, label_gid_redirect, label_name, label_tag, label_type, language, link, link_attribute, link_attribute_type, link_type, link_type_attribute_type, medium, medium_cdtoc, medium_format, puid, recording, recording_annotation, recording_meta, recording_gid_redirect, recording_puid, recording_tag, release, release_annotation, release_gid_redirect, release_meta, release_label, release_packaging, release_status, release_group, release_group_annotation, release_group_gid_redirect, release_group_meta, release_group_tag, release_group_type, release_name, replication_control, script, script_language, tag, tag_relation, track, track_name, tracklist, tracklist_index, url, work, work_annotation, work_gid_redirect, work_meta, work_name, work_tag, work_type
The MusicBrainz data has been used in a very interesting MIT paper that discusses illegal music downloading, Napster and the sharp rise of people attending music concerts. ARS Technica writes:
For album sales, the researchers accessed Nielsen SoundScan, the music sales data service, and looked at aggregate receipts from 1993 through 2002. The paper also examined data provided by MusicBrainz, a site that allows users to create relational databases about their favorite artists or music genres.
Since file sharing technologies made millions of songs freely downloadable over the internet, they were naturally expected to displace legal sales. Most empirical studies have found evidence of this displacement. However, while file-sharing decreased legal sales, it almost certainly increased the overall consumption of recorded music.
It is nice to have some of these things I suspected confirmed — especially with the use of our data. 🙂
Ollie and I have been working on a bunch of schema changes to make things more consistent and to add more time stamps to the database. We’ve included other data migration patches from Luks and Murdos as well.
All of these changes have been pushed to the master branch on our git repository. If you pull this branch from our repo, you must reload your data with this fresh NGS snapshot!
On monday we will discuss if we can call our core schema frozen yet. Let’s hope so. 😉
We’ve changed the path to our main MusicBrainz Server git repository. The repo is now available at:
git://git.musicbrainz.org/musicbrainz-server.git.
Please update your local repos accordingly!
To update a repo run:
git remote set-url origin git://git.musicbrainz.org/musicbrainz-server.git
Where origin is the name of the remote repo (run git remote -v to find that out if you’re not sure).
Note: The previous path has been turned into a symlink to ease this transition, but it will stop working as of November 1st so make sure to update sooner rather than later!
If you are a developer with write access, replace the url above with:
ssh://mbgitrw@git.musicbrainz.org:10015/musicbrainz-server.git.
We’re working hard to get to the Release Candidate 1 release for NGS. We’ve got lots of code reviews in progress, lots of code being committed and a lot of activity all working towards shipping NGS.
However, as we’re working an exposing new features we’re still getting a number of new bugs submitted that expose other issues that we need to address. This is the problem with porting a very large old codebase — we need to simply slog through it and get it done as soon as we can.
With those caveats, I’ll say that I expect the RC1 release to happen somewhere near the end of November. When we get closer and our bug list is converging, I’ll post an actual date for this release. In the meantime, we’re going to put our heads down and get more work done.
Sorry for being vague about this — but I would much rather not slip anymore releases.
Martin Belam from the Guardian says:
The announcement is that we’re adding Linked Data to the Guardian’s Open Platform. We’ve tagged about 20,000 articles with MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs, and we’ll add more sources soon.
So, for example, if you want to use our Cee Lo coverage on your web site or for an iPhone or iPad app or wherever, you can query the Open Platform to get content from the Guardian to integrate your app.
There are more details in this introduction and more more information on how to search the Guardian with MusicBrainz IDs. I’m really stoked that MusicBrainz IDs are reaching beyond the music world. If we reached mainstream journalism today, where are we going tomorrow?
Thanks for all of your hard work Martin!
I’ve just pushed out a new NGS data dump.
We’re finishing up work on the migration scripts and we’re hoping to finalize the last schema change for NGS next week. After that the NGS schema will be officially frozen in anticipation of the release. After this change I will update the data on the test server and restart the replication feed for one (hopefully) last time.
Stay tuned for more updates!