Hello, and welcome to the April recap of what’s happened in MetaBrainz land!
Compared the first quarter, April was somewhat on the slow side (reflected on the blog with only three posts that month). I’m guessing this is a mix of both recovering from all the activity in the first few months and a lot of work going on in the background—incl. preparing for Google Summer of Code. However, some stuff did happen, so let’s talk about those things! Continue reading “Community Recap April 2017”
Hi everyone! Here we are with another very, very late style update for the last couple months.
Apart from quite a few smaller changes (full list below), we split the translator relationship so that it’s its own relationship rather than lyricist + attribute (so if any of you were using translator data at all you’ll want to change the way you query for it). Similarly, we got rid of the “transliterated” vs. “translated” difference for alternate tracklists: it often wasn’t clearly one or the other, and the information wasn’t particularly useful in any case without checking the language and script of the release, so now there’s only one relationship type without attributes.
We also demoted the “Do Not Cluster” guideline – while it’s a good thing to keep in mind when creating relationship types, it’s not really something users should be worrying about (and the cases where they might have to are already covered in the specific relationship documentation).
If anyone has any question about these or any other changes, feel free to ask in the comments! And if you want to propose other changes or additions, remember you can always do it from the STYLE section of our bug tracker.
After skipping a fortnight because of concentrating on the schema change release, here’s the next edition of the style update, with all the changes from the last month. Most of the changes involve adding new medium formats and new place/area relationships, plus making changes and additions related to the new schema change features (events and data tracks).
The biggest change this month is the addition of a classical music titles guideline. This deprecates the old Opera Tracks guideline, and basically just provides a certain amount of standardisation while keeping mostly true to the on-cover titles.
As mentioned when the new style process was announced, at a similar time to every server release post we’ll be publishing a list of what’s changed in style during that period.
The first period of two weeks (or three, in this case) under the process has passed, and these are all the style-related issues that have been accepted and implemented during it. Most of them are very small (mostly adding sites to the whitelist for the Other Databases relationship) although a couple are new relationships or relationships being extended to more entities.
No changes to the guidelines themselves have happened during this period.
We got this from Ben, who has been in charge of taking this discussion forward:
Since the beginning of the year there has been a lot of discussion about recordings and what exactly they should be used for. After several meetings on IRC and a couple of huge topics on the style mailing list, we’re finally ready to bring in a new definition for recordings, and new style guidelines to go with it!
The new recording definition can be viewed at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Recording
And the accompanying style guidelines are at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Recording
The new guideline brings significant changes to the way recordings should be used, so all editors dealing with recordings should take the time to read it.
As a short summary, recordings are now never produced solely through copying or mastering. This means that recordings shouldn’t distinguish between different masters of some audio – in general, a recording will correspond a particular mix or edit. In addition:
– AcoustIDs and ISRCs have been removed from the guideline – they are mostly irrelevant for managing recordings under the new definition.
– Guidelines for audio channels have been introduced.
– Existing guidelines have been expanded.
– Several in-depth examples have been added to explain how recording should be used.Also, as a result of these changes, the recording-recording remaster relationship type and the artist-recording master relationship type have been deprecated.
Thanks to everyone who was involved on mb-style and in the IRC meetings for your excellent ideas and contributions!
Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) is replacing Kuno Woudt (warp) as style leader. This will allow Kuno to fully concentrate on development, and also allow our other style leader Nikki to dedicate more of her time to testing changes and make it less likely for us to have botched releases.
We are also updating the proposal process, and tying it to the Jira tracker, to avoid the manual updating of the proposal table and problems with two people using the same proposal number by mistake. The updated system is at Proposals – the huge table there has been moved to Proposals/History
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