MusicBrainz – Page 6 – MetaBrainz Blog

Happy 23rd Birthday, MusicBrainz!

23 years is a quite a long time and I had never thought that this little project I was starting in 2000, would grow into what it is today — it has been an amazing journey with many ups and downs. Despite many early hardships, I’m extremely happy that I stuck with it and nurtured the project into an important resource for the internet today.

With that in mind, I feel compelled to tell a story of where the name MusicBrainz came from and how July 17, 2000 was the first day that the name has ever been uttered and the domain was registered seconds later.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-07-10

This release makes a few small changes, including an updated set of basic edit icons that hopefully will be the start of a consistent icon set for MusicBrainz. Additionally, and sadly, opening voting for new editors has caused the creation of way too many sock-puppet accounts, so we have been forced to restrict voting for beginner editors again. Hopefully the two week wait is not too long; we’ll look into ways to improve beginners’ experience without helping bad actors in the future.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-07-10.

How to build your own music tagger, with MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata

In the blog post where we introduced the new Canonical Metadata dataset, we suggested that a user could now build their own custom music tagging application, without a lot of effort! In this blog post we will walk you through the process of doing just that, using Python.

New dataset: MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata

The MusicBrainz project is proud to announce the release of our latest dataset: MusicBrainz Canonical Metadata. This geeky sounding dataset packs an intense punch! It solves a number of problems involving how to match a piece of music metadata to the correct entry in the massive MusicBrainz database.

The MusicBrainz database aims to collect metadata for all releases (albums) that have ever been published. For popular albums, there can be many different releases, which begs the question “which one is the main (canonical) release?”. If you want to identify a piece of metadata, and you only have an artist and recording (track) name, how do you choose the correct database release?

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-06-07

We have a small release this time, slightly delayed because of maintenance work on our servers for the last couple days. The most noticeable changes are probably 68 new locales available for aliases (for example, we can now specify an alias is in Latin language), and a fix to a bug where a small amount of tracks would not be shown in their release’s relationship editor and as such couldn’t have relationships added from that page.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to salo.rock, UltimateRiff and yyoung for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-06-07.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-05-22

As announced for our schema change release, after a week of beta testing, the ability to modify or remove edit notes is fully delivered in today’s release! A few other unrelated but small improvements and fixes are included too.

As an editor, you are now able to modify or remove your own edit notes if they’re not older than 24 hours and nobody else has replied; you can see the full set of conditions in our edit note documentation. Admins are allowed to modify or remove any edit note from anyone at any time, and have already been using this to remove some spam and inappropriate comments during the beta period.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to ShivamAwasthi for contributing code and to kellnerd for helping with code review. Thanks to chaban, Cyberskull, jesus2099 q_fdb and yurim for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-05-22.

We are ready for Summer of Code 2023 !

A belated congratulations to the 7 contributors that we selected to work with for this year’s Google Summer of Code program!

The competition was fierce this year. MetaBrainz received a huge amount of high quality applications. Narrowing it down gets harder every year – what these contributors did right is getting in early, engaging with our community, presenting specific and detailed proposals, and proving excellent communication skills and the ability to integrate our feedback back into their proposals.

MusicBrainz schema change release, 2023-05-15 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2023 schema change today! Thanks to all who were patient during today’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers, and thanks to CatQuest, jesus2099, and yindesu for creating tickets.

This is a fairly small schema change release which mostly removes unused code and improves things behind the scenes. Of the schema change tickets, there are only two that will directly affect users as they browse and edit in MusicBrainz.

The first (MBS-12800) makes it so that cancelled releases are ignored when calculating the first release dates for recordings and release groups; since something that was cancelled was by definition not released, it should not be used as a first release date.

The second (MBS-11312) lays the foundation for a new feature (MBS-4685) that will allow users to edit or delete their edit notes, as long as a set of conditions are met (see the edit note docs for details). Admins will be able to edit or delete any edit notes at any time (MBS-13084), mostly to get rid of spam or offensive content, but also to help any editor who cannot change their note anymore but has an important reason why they need to do so. This feature will be available for testing in our beta server on Tuesday and we expect to release it next week, assuming our beta testers don’t find any too big issue with it by then.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-05-02

In our last version before the May 15 schema change release, we are mostly releasing a fair amount of React conversion work for smaller pages. We’ve also tried to make some error messages more clear and helpful and made a few improvements to ETI guess case, alongside other small bits and pieces.

The most significant change for editors is the standardization of all auto-deletion waiting periods to 48 hours. Until now, most entities would be removed when empty for 24 hours, while unused artist credits would take a full week to go away. This meant removing the last artist credit usage for an otherwise empty artist would lead to an eight days wait for that artist to be automatically deleted; now it will be four. As a reminder, 48 hours is also the minimum time needed for a merge edit to pass. As such, it’s not always faster anymore to let an entity be removed automatically rather than merging – hopefully this will encourage more autoeditors to merge rather than delete!

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to CatQuest, chaban, jesus2099, Lotheric, and rdswift for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to okaits#7534 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-05-02.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2023-04-17

Here is a tiny spring cleaning release that features small bugfixes and, behind the scenes, a larger refactoring of code in preparation for the database schema change.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to Maxr1998 for his patch of Genie. Thanks to chaban, jesus2099, mr_maxis and yindesu for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2023-04-17.