MusicBrainz – Page 9 – MetaBrainz Blog

End-of-life for external access to MusicBrainz search server

For MusicBrainz mirrors, MusicBrainz server development, and custom applications, there used to be a direct access to search.musicbrainz.org which was actually inherited from the previous search infrastructure until 2018.

Keeping it available in the current infrastructure uses a compatibility layer which has been unintentionally broken last year. This issue has been reported only once. The alternative and much more sensible solution which is to install a local search server has improved in reliability and simplicity in the meantime. Polling the community shown that only one person would be interested which isn’t enough to justify the maintenance overhead for this replaceable service.

Therefore it has been decided to close this access for good.

Thanks to everyone who made this transitioning service to work and handle about 40k requests a day on average!

MetaBrainz Summit 2022

The silliest, and thus best, group photo from the summit. Left to right: Aerozol, Monkey, Mayhem, Atj, lucifer (laptop), yvanzo, alastairp, Bitmap, Zas, akshaaatt

After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.

We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!

A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

MusicBrainz Android App: Adding BrainzPlayer in Android App

Greetings, Everyone!

I am Ashutosh Aswal (IRC nick yellowhatpro), pursuing my bachelor’s from Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh, India. As a Google Summer of Code’22 contributor, I worked for MetaBrainz, on the MusicBrainz Android app and added a music playback feature to the app, which we call BrainzPlayer.

During the GSoC period, I was mentored by Akshat Tiwari (akshaaatt). Through this post, I will be summarizing my journey throughout the summer with MetaBrainz.

Let’s begin!! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧

My Google Summer of Code 2022 summary

What and for whom

Organization: MetaBrainz Foundation
Project: MusicBrainz Picard
Mentors: Laurent Monin (zas) & Philipp Wolfer (phw)
Main focus: Introducing single-instance mode in Picard 3.0
GSoC website: Link

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-09-06

This release mostly consists of small bug fixes and improvements. One bigger bug fix (MBS-12497) involves an issue where it was impossible to apply any edit which would cause an artist credit with any redirects pointing to it to be removed. Sorry about your stuck edits, people! They should now pass.

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 chaban, HibiscusKazeneko, jesus2099, Mineo and sammyrayy for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to ikerm2003 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-09-06.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-08-22

It’s time for more fixed bugs and refactoring/maintenance tasks.

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 and otringal for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to hamaryns, ikerm2003 and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-08-25-hotfixes.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-08-08

This is a small release since we’ve been resting (and sometimes fully on holiday) for the summer. The most visible change for website users is that the “Ratings” tab for ratable entities is now a “Reviews” tab, and it also includes ratings and reviews from CritiqueBrainz. We used to only display these for release groups – now you can see them for every entity that supports reviews (artists, events, labels, places, recordings, release groups and works). We’re hoping having this reminder that things can be reviewed will encourage more users to have a say and let us know about their favourite – or less favourite – music!

Also: for people running a mirror server who updated to our May schema change and want to use tags and genres: sorry, we broke your tags table. Please check our separate blog post on how to run a script to fix it.

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

The git tag is v-2022-08-08.

Steps to fix missing genre and tag data on MusicBrainz mirror servers

If you recently updated your mirror server to the 2022-05-16 schema change release, we’re sorry to say that a bug in our upgrade script caused aggregate genre and tag data (if you had imported any) to be deleted. If you need this data, it can be re-imported from a recent dump, and we’ve written a script to help automate that.

You can safely ignore this post if

you’re not running a mirror server;
you’ve never imported the derived data dump or don’t make use of genre or tag data;
you’ve already done a full re-import of your database after the schema change release.

To restore the genre and tag data, follow these steps:

Ensure you’ve replicated up to the most recent replication packet available. If you’re not sure, run ./admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges. If you’re up-to-date, it should log “Replication packet … is not available.”
Run git checkout production && git pull origin production.
Turn off any cron jobs that update the database, including for replication.
Run ./admin/sql/updates/20220720-mbs-12508.sh.
Restart any cron jobs that you disabled.

You can verify that this process worked by checking the number of tags in the database: echo 'SELECT count(*) FROM tag' | ./admin/psql READWRITE. It should be over 200,000.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and let us know if you encounter any further issues.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-07-18

This release is very small, mainly consisting of minor improvements related to genre relationships. We have quite a few of those now, including links to Wikidata and Rate Your Music for pretty much any genre that has matching entries in those sites and links between many genres and their country of origin. We’re also fixing one bug with event setlist display that had probably been there since we introduced events – whoops!

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 chaban and sound.and.vision for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to mfmeulenbelt, outsidecontext and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-07-18.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2022-07-03

This is a small release in number of tickets, but it finally adds the functionality to add relationships to genres. As such, you can now find out what għana or harsh noise wall actually are by simply reading their Wikipedia extracts. We can also store aliases for genres now, so while we still don’t do anything with that information directly, we do indicate that “hiphop” and “hip-hop” are alternative ways to write “hip hop“. Eventually, the plan is to combine these with the main genre in smart ways.

NB: As a side effect of adding new edit types for genres and genre aliases, the daily subscription emails failed for a few days. After this release the emails are working again, and you should have received the edits for all the missing days in your first email after the update.

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 chaban and selflessself for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Mellthas, mfmeulenbelt, rinsuki and salo.rock for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2022-07-03.