Tag: MusicBrainz

New MusicBrainz test VM available

There is a new test VM available for anyone who would like to try the latest, possibly not fully debugged, VM. I’m not sure why the VM is nearly 20GB larger than the previous one, while containing roughly the same stuff, but that is what we’re stuck with for this test. I’ll try harder to minimize the size for the final build.

Grab the VM here.

Read these Usage tips.

IMPORTANT: Please ignore the usage tips published on the wiki — they do not apply to this release. For the next release I’ll try and match more of the characteristics of the last version. Do read the usage tips above!

File a bug here.

We’re actually really going to take the HTTPS plunge!

Closing in on three years after stating that “We’re going to take the HTTPS plunge!”, we’re actually really going to do it now. 🙂

Most of our sites have forced HTTPS for some time (metabrainz.org, critiquebrainz.org, bookbrainz.org, listenbrainz.org), but there are still a couple of stragglers, notably musicbrainz.org and acousticbrainz.org.

For MusicBrainz, our beta site is now all HTTPS, web service and all. The main, non-beta musicbrainz.org will be going HTTPS-only except for what’s under /ws/ (ie., the web service) to allow taggers and other programs not currently using HTTPS some transition time. We do not currently have an ETA for when we will make the final jump to HTTPS-only on the MusicBrainz web service, as that partly depends on feedback from our web service users, which leads me to:

If you’re currently using the MusicBrainz web service, please try and switch your program to using beta.musicbrainz.org and see whether your program breaks or not and let us know the status of it. We are aware that some Python versions and MusicBrainz libraries do not support our setup, so while your program may fail now, it might simply be because of dependencies of your program not being updated yet and you might not need to do anything specifically on your end – however, some programs/libraries might need some updates, so the more people test and report back, the better we’ll be able to judge when we can go all-HTTPS-only on musicbrainz.org.

For AcousticBrainz, we now have a shiny new Let’s Encrypt certificate on https://acousticbrainz.org thanks to our systems administrator Zas! As a result, we are going to start redirecting all HTTP traffic to HTTPS on the AcousticBrainz website, including API queries.

In order to give everyone time to verify that their scripts correctly recognise and validate our Let’s Encrypt certificate, we are going to delay the redirect until July 1, 2016. On this date, any HTTP query will automatically be redirected to HTTPS. We will also enable HSTS, so that compliant browsers will redirect to HTTPS on the client-side.

If you have any questions about either the MusicBrainz or the AcousticBrainz transition, please ask.

Temporary autoeditor election procedure

Hello people,

In former days, new autoeditor elections were announced on the autoeditor mailing list that all autoeditors were automatically subscribed to. However, all our mailing lists, including the autoeditor one, died in September 2015 when the server they were hosted on took its last breath. This effectively halted the election of new autoeditors. It was always the plan that our new forums should be able to handle this, but our recent issues have meant development on the features necessary to completely replace the autoeditor mailing list has been slow. Thus Nicolás (reosarevok) and I had a talk about how to handle elections going forward, and we came up with this procedure:

  1. The proposer nominates the editor normally (starting an election), and then adds a post in the Autoeditors category of the forum linking to the election and asking for seconders. Like with the mailing list, this should also contain the proposer’s reasoning for proposing the candidate.
  2. Nicolás (reosarevok) will then mail out to all autoeditors with a link to the election topic (and possibly a link to this blog post).
  3. The proposer, Nicolás or me (or another autoeditor, if they’re faster) will update the thread once a 2nd seconder is found and the voting has started, and again when the voting has ended and the results are in.

We have added most autoeditors who are already signed up on the new forums to the @MB_Autoeditors group, but not all autoeditors have signed in to Discourse yet, and some have spaces or other “weird” characters in their username that make Discourse not able to parse them. If you find that you’re not in the @MB_Autoeditors group and you think you should be, please write a message to me (Freso) or Nicolás (reosarevok) via MusicBrainz and ask us to add you to the group. (Sending your message via MusicBrainz will let us know that it is indeed you/your account, so please don’t poke us on IRC or elsewhere about it.)

This is all obviously intended to be temporary, just until we’re able to get the process fully automated again. If you have any Ruby experience/know-how and would like to help out, please check out OTHER-248 (and possibly OTHER-254). There’s also MBS-8836 on the MusicBrainz server side for the Perl-istas.

Let us know if you have any concerns or questions about this (reminder: temporary) approach, either in the comments or on the forums. I personally hope it’ll work well enough to carry us through for a while longer until everything is ready.

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2015

The Google Code-in Google Code‐in is pretty much over for this time, and we’ve had a blast in our first year with the competition in MetaBrainz with a total of 116 students completing tasks. In the end we had to pick five finalists from these, and two of these as our grand prize winners getting a trip to the Googleplex in June. It was a really, really tough decision, as we have had an amazing roster of students for our first year. In the end we picked Ohm Patel (US) and Caroline Gschwend (US) as our grand prize winners, closely followed by Stanisław Szcześniak (Poland), Divya Prakash Mittal (India), and Nurul Ariessa Norramli (Malaysia). Congratulations and thank you to all of you, as well as all our other students! We’ve been very excited to work with you and look forwards to seeing you again before, during, and after coming Google Code-ins as well! 🙂

Rayna Kanapuram MusicBrainz presentation
Indian student Rayne presenting MusicBrainz to her classmates.

In all we had 275 tasks completed during the Google Code-in. These tasks were divided among the various MetaBrainz projects as well as a few for beets. We ended up having 29 tasks done for BookBrainz, 124(!) tasks for CritiqueBrainz, 95 tasks for MusicBrainz, 1 task for Cover Art Archive, 6 tasks for MusicBrainz Picard, 3 tasks for beets, and 17 generic or MetaBrainz related tasks.

Some examples of the tasks that were done include:

Ariessa MetaBrainz infographic
Finalist Nurul Ariessa Norramli’s MetaBrainz infographic.

In all, I’m really darn happy with the outcome of this Google Code-in and how some of our finalists continue to be active on IRC and help out. Stanisław is continuing work on BookBrainz, including having started writing a Python library for BB’s API/web service, and Caroline is currently working on a new icon set for the MusicBrainz.org redesign that can currently be seen at beta.MusicBrainz.org.

Again, congratulations to our winners and finalists, and THANK YOU! to all of the students having worked on tasks for MetaBrainz. It’s really been an amazing ride and we’re definitely looking forward to our next foray into Google Code-in!

Polish student Stanisław Szcześniak presenting about MusicBrainz.
Romanian student Borza Alex presenting MusicBrainz to his classmates.
Indian student Rayne presenting MusicBrainz to her classmates.
Ariessa’s MetaBrainz infographic
Caroline Gschwend’s MetaBrainz infographic
Divya Prakash Mittal’s MetaBrainz infographic

Notifications and messaging in MetaBrainz projects

During the last MusicBrainz summit in Barcelona we decided to start working on finding possible ways to implement two features that have been requested for a long time:

  1. Messaging between users
  2. Notifications about various actions in MetaBrainz projects

Since MetaBrainz is more than just MusicBrainz these days, we also want to integrate these features into other projects. That, for example, means when a user is reading reviews on CritiqueBrainz they can see notifications about comments on their edits on MusicBrainz. Same applies to messaging. These features are intended to encourage our communities to communicate more easily with each other.

Messaging

http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-8721

The only ways of communication we have right now are two IRC channels, forums that we plan to replace with Discourse, and comments on individual edits. Sometimes we end up sending private emails to editors for one reason or another. Perhaps it is better to have our own messaging system for this purpose? I imagine it being similar to messaging systems on forums, reddit, etc. We would like to know what you think potential uses are for this and how it might look like to be useful.

Notifications

http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-1801

Site-based notifications are another thing that people have been asking for a long time. For example, these notifications can be related to edits on MusicBrainz, reviews on CritiqueBrainz, datasets in AcousticBrainz, etc. It can be an addition or replacement for email notifications that we currently have in MusicBrainz. Maybe something similar to the inbox feature that the Stack Exchange network has. People should be able to choose if they want to keep receiving email notifications or only use the new site-based notifications.

Progress so far

We looked at a couple of ways to implement this functionality.

First suggestion was to use the Layer toolkit. The problem with it is that we don’t want to be dependent on closed software and another company’s infrastructure, especially in case of such important features.

Second was to use the XMPP protocol to handle communication and notifications. We tried to implement a proof of concept using this protocol and encountered several issues at the start:

  • It’s unclear how to store messages and process them later;
  • It can be problematic to reuse the same connection in different browser;
  • There are plenty of things that we’ll need to implement on top of this protocol ourselves (like authentication, storage, notifications).

Repository with everything that was implemented so far is at https://github.com/metabrainz/xmpp-messaging-server. Given these problems we started considering implementing our own server(s) for this purpose.

You can take a look at the document where we collect most information about current progress.

Feedback

There’s plenty of feedback on the site-based notifications feature request, and we have a pretty good understanding of what’s needed. This is not the case with the messaging feature. We explored several options for implementing this kind of functionality and decided that it’s time to refresh the list of requirements to get an idea of what needs to be done.

The goal of this blog post is to encourage discussion and gather ideas. If you are interested in these features, please share your thoughts and suggestions.

August Community Revisit

Ohoi m’hearties, it’s time for the first monthly Community Revisit, where we’ll revisit what happened in MetaBrainzLand during the last month. Ready for the ride? Leggo!

The primary thing happening this month has likely been the changes in the MetaBrainz employee line-up following Ian’s departure in July. In the beginning of the month, Freso (wait, hey, that’s me!) was pulled on board as Community Manager (a brand new position for MetaBrainz too!), and just at the end of the month, GSoC wonder child Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov was hired as the new software engineer. So hi to us two! 🙂

Speaking of GSoC, the Google Summer of Code, this year’s edition is also fast coming to an end, and our four students and their projects are closing up and giving their work the final touches to have them ready to go live. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about these projects soon.

One thing that did go live during August, in no small part thanks to Ben “LordSputnik” Ockmore and Leo_Verto: the new IRC chat logger! Chat logs from IRC are now available at http://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/ – the site still needs some MetaBrainzifying, but Ben has done a great job of importing (pretty much) all the old chat logs to the new system and the bot is running in all the official MetaBrainz channels. If you’re on IRC (or you just like poking at the IRC logs), be sure to say “Thank you!! <3” to LordSputnik and Leo_Verto next time you see them around!

Another person who has made a mark in the last month was Alex a.k.a. caller#6, starting up the discussion about the current situation of MusicBrainz’ Area entities. Be sure to check out that blog post and let your voice be heard, if you don’t feel like it’s being represented already. The next instalment should be out before long.

We also had two server updates (pretty much all bug fixes) and an updated Virtual Machine image was finally released for the more tech oriented people.

This about rounds off the August Community Revisit. What do you think about the format? Did I miss any important community happenings? Any other comments? This is a brand new venture, so nothing’s set in stone yet!

From Denmark with love,
Freso

Schema change release, 2011-07-11

Today we released our first schema change update since NGS. This change is quite a radical one, as it merges both of our databases (“READWRITE” and “RAWDATA”) into a single database. For most users of the database, this probably won’t affect you, but you’re encouraged to run the upgrade process anyway. Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
  2. Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
  3. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 13 in lib/DBDefs.pm
  4. Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
  5. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-20110711-schema-change
  6. Run ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
  7. Install the perl modules Algorithm::Merge and Algorithm::Diff
  8. Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
  9. Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.

This process may take a while, as it has to dump one database into another, and download a few extra changes to ensure slaves aren’t missing any data. The RAWDATA database should no longer be in use and you should be able to drop it, but waiting to see that everything is working well might be a good idea.

This schema change does not introduce any new data. For everyone else, here’s a list of what got fixed since the last release!

Bug

  • [MBS-1977] – ModBot is unable to close some edits
  • [MBS-1979] – Unable to edit a “later translated versions” relationship with change direction
  • [MBS-2026] – Subscribed artists open edits won’t load for editors with large amounts of subscriptions
  • [MBS-2442] – MB postgres unaccent extension overwrites unaccent.so library shipped with postgres-contrib
  • [MBS-2689] – Timeline isn’t working in Opera 10
  • [MBS-2698] – Some tables are not replicated through Live data feed
  • [MBS-2812] – Adding track times has caused a failed dependency for an edit which changed the track titles.
  • [MBS-2826] – Web service returns malformed XML (not escaped properly)
  • [MBS-2831] – “Edit medium” edit display: Artist credits changes are incorrect
  • [MBS-2974] – I don’t receive e-mail when someone votes no to my edit any more
  • [MBS-2981] – Changing the case of recording comments should be auto-edits
  • [MBS-2986] – tracklist_index was not populated during NGS
  • [MBS-2995] – Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::WS::2::ReleaseGroup->release_group_browse “Can’t call method “format”

Improvement

  • [MBS-1500] – Remove tracklist_index.tracks
  • [MBS-1707] – Advanced tracklist in RE: “Title” to “Disc title”
  • [MBS-2242] – Disable editing of Medium title when there’s only one medium
  • [MBS-2434] – Combine READWRITE and RAWDATA
  • [MBS-2462] – Other edit types that don’t highlight what has changed between old and new values
  • [MBS-2583] – “Edit Medium” should show you which medium is being edited with respect to the overall release
  • [MBS-2767] – Release-group XML result should include first release date