Server update 2012-10-29

The MusicBrainz team are all mostly back after participating in Google Summer of Code and having a small face-to-face meetup, so we’ve finally got round to getting the latest release out. Because of so much travel, this is a tiny release, but here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-4727] – Regression : Can’t add ISWC when adding work
  • [MBS-5463] – Release editor fails on releases without disambiguation comment
  • [MBS-5478] – Can’t unselect all recordings / works

Improvement

  • [MBS-5422] – Show close time in open auto-editor elections

Virtual Machine for 2012-10-15 release now available

If you’ve been waiting for the VM for the 2012-10-15 version, your wait is over! I’ve updated the Server Setup page with the links to the latest VM. As usual it contains a replicated database that can easily catch up to the latest data.

Grab yours now and start replicating!

UPDATE: This virtual machine is broken — we’ll work to get a new one up soon.

Update on postgresql 8.4 issues and missing functions in upgrade

We’ve been seeing a number of issues with the upgrade scripts for this release reported here on the blog, in IRC, as well as the ticket tracker. We’ve got a couple bits of news for those upgrading from codebases older than mid-August and those using versions of PostgreSQL older than 9.0:

  1. MBS-5473: This is the ERROR: function controlled_for_whitespace(character varying) does not exist migration problem. Slaves with imports done before mid-August are missing a few stored procedures that are necessary for the upgrade. This has been fixed in the master branch as of commit 082e608c074641e2e8df2c0809d35421b02c7899 — to run the upgrade, run git fetch origin, then git checkout 082e608c074641e2e8df2c0809d35421b02c7899, then continue with step #6 of the original instructions. If you already started the upgrade but failed on the ‘merge-duplicate-credits’ script (as is likely, with this bug), don’t worry: at that point in the upgrade, restarting is not an issue.
  2. MBS-5475: This is the ERROR: syntax error at or near “ORDER” migration problem. Unfortunately, this one’s more serious: on PostgreSQL 8.4, our upgrade scripts don’t work, as one uses a feature introduced in 9.0 (as previously mentioned) After some hours of investigation, it appears that this issue can’t be resolved reasonably; therefore, for 8.4 users the upgrade path is a data re-import using a recent (post-schema-change) codebase and a data dump from October 17th or later. We’d also recommend updating to PostgreSQL 9.x at the same time if that is possible.

Sorry again for the inconvenience.

2012-10-15 migration on postgres 8.4 is broken

Our users have reported a bug where migrating a slave DB on postgres 8.4 results in this error:

ERROR: syntax error at or near “ORDER”
LINE 6: SELECT array_agg(artist_credit ORDER BY artist_credit AS…

If you are 8.4 please wait on your migration — we’re hoping to have a workaround ready today. If you need to get this fixed sooner, moving to postgres 9.x or importing the 2012-10-17 data dump would solve this problem.

Sorry for the troubles!

Updating MusicBrainz slave instances for 2012-10-15

If you have a replicated instance of MusicBrainz, please follow these instructions to get your server running on the new schema:

  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. Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
  4. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-2012-10-15-schema-change
  5. Run carton install --deployment to install any new perl modules.
  6. Run carton exec -- ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
  7. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 16 in lib/DBDefs.pm
  8. Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
  9. Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.

This upgrade requires quite a bit of disk-space to execute; your slave may run into trouble if there is less than 10Gb of disk space free. If you’re on a disk space constrained machine, you may want to consider re-importing the data rather than upgrading in place. The next data dump should be available in about 14-16 hours from now.

Schema change release 2012-10-15

We just finished the latest schema change release. Please stay tuned for instructions on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz slave instances.

This release features work from Nikki, Navap, Bitmap, Freso and the MusicBrainz developers. Thanks for your work everyone! The following changes were included in this release:

Bug

  • [MBS-240] – Attached files not downloading properly in transcluded page
  • [MBS-3610] – Ratings : 502 Bad Gateway
  • [MBS-3853] – Annotation history page allows the same version to be selected for both Old and New
  • [MBS-3963] – Edit search "artist in my subscription" should hide the artist input field
  • [MBS-4033] – Offered and installed search plugin name mismatch
  • [MBS-4206] – Whitespace isn’t removed from the last join phrase
  • [MBS-4220] – Artists shown to last 0 days if begin year = end year
  • [MBS-4268] – "{age} ago" does not work for all languages
  • [MBS-4747] – Wrong diff or wrong edit allowed for an URL
  • [MBS-4812] – Empty "Remove release label" edit was entered
  • [MBS-4929] – Some fields on user’s "Open edits" page are duplicating while merging works
  • [MBS-4978] – Release merges with strategy "Merge mediums and recordings" don’t show up on the affected recordings’ open edits list.
  • [MBS-5047] – Changing secondary RG types is an autoedit for all users
  • [MBS-5051] – Empty artists with pending edits still get the « will be removed automatically » warning
  • [MBS-5090] – Some entities are marked as having pending edits when they don’t
  • [MBS-5177] – Editors can edit after removing their email address
  • [MBS-5253] – Table release_group_secondary_type_join misses a created field
  • [MBS-5264] – Track Parser results in edits changing durations on tracks in mediums with discids in some cases
  • [MBS-5306] – Internal server error when searching for edits by artist country and relationship type
  • [MBS-5321] – Some relationship editor tests are failing.
  • [MBS-5329] – Relationship editor breaks when using translations
  • [MBS-5330] – Medium formats untranslated on release pages and in release editor
  • [MBS-5331] – Edit note label is cut off when translated
  • [MBS-5332] – Last updated timestamp is missing on some details pages
  • [MBS-5333] – cover art types translate incorrectly
  • [MBS-5336] – Relationships get double-translated
  • [MBS-5342] – .pot files are generated with the ‘perl-format’ po flag when they are not being passed to sprintf
  • [MBS-5344] – Edits display page, for an add cover art edit, for a removed release, has invalid link
  • [MBS-5346] – TuneCore blocking blocks valid ISRCs
  • [MBS-5357] – Translations creeping into edit info
  • [MBS-5368] – Changing the link type in the relationship editor causes the dialog to jump
  • [MBS-5372] – AR editor: paste should detect entity type
  • [MBS-5377] – MediaWiki upgrade broke WikiDoc redirects
  • [MBS-5382] – AR editor: "part of" ARs are displayed backwards
  • [MBS-5384] – Relationship editor: track artists only shown when AC has different number of artists
  • [MBS-5385] – Relationship editor shouldn’t merge relationships with different dates
  • [MBS-5390] – Relationship editor isn’t loading related works for some recordings
  • [MBS-5391] – Relationship editor doesn’t support the "ended" checkbox
  • [MBS-5392] – Relationship editor should display dates consistent with the rest of the site
  • [MBS-5396] – relationship editor changes to MB.utility.keys cause it to die on null
  • [MBS-5406] – "Subscriptions" editor tab shows 3 empty <li> inside <ul> between « jesus2099 is subscribed to: » and p.pageselector
  • [MBS-5412] – Some statistics tabs have partially-untranslated headers
  • [MBS-5413] – e.g. "Artist-Artist" and "Artist-Artist relationships" not translating correctly on /statistics/relationships
  • [MBS-5414] – Javascript tests no longer run in older versions of Opera
  • [MBS-5415] – "Types:" (under cover art) should often be in singular
  • [MBS-5417] – WikiDocs: Prevent access to File and Image namespace
  • [MBS-5419] – Chrome frame wasn’t removed completely/properly
  • [MBS-5425] – Some ModBot edit notes end up stored translated

Improvement

  • [MBS-1226] – Address verification email should include the client’s IP address
  • [MBS-1530] – More space/sections on the add disc id page
  • [MBS-1789] – No way to compare discid track length against tracklist length
  • [MBS-2449] – Search page should say when it was last updated
  • [MBS-2492] – Don’t show quality levels in edit documentation where they don’t apply
  • [MBS-2543] – Make the dash at the end of /cdtoc/ and /cdstub/ URLs optional
  • [MBS-2650] – After adding a relationship, go to the overview tab
  • [MBS-2717] – User’s ratings page should be paginated
  • [MBS-3606] – Matched CD TOC page should have a link to the disc id
  • [MBS-3791] – Drop Description from URLs
  • [MBS-4104] – Show release merges under all track/recording artists
  • [MBS-4405] – Report: Artists that may be persons shoudn’t show obvious groups
  • [MBS-4690] – Include links to all image sizes
  • [MBS-5099] – Make release/work language clickable
  • [MBS-5236] – Add stats for work types
  • [MBS-5279] – Try to avoid duplicating links in the sidebar
  • [MBS-5285] – Add NOT NULL constraints to disambiguation & join phrase column
  • [MBS-5290] – CAA replication
  • [MBS-5350] – Add a way to check # of open edits and edits entered in the last day
  • [MBS-5352] – /doc/Edit_Types/38 and similar should link to the documentation.
  • [MBS-5362] – Add cleanup and autoselect for iTunes links
  • [MBS-5364] – Ask the user to confirm navigation away from the relationship editor (mainly for backspace)
  • [MBS-5365] – In the relationship editor, pressing enter while focused in the entity lookup should add the relationship
  • [MBS-5366] – Make it easier to reuse artists in the relationship editor
  • [MBS-5371] – Don’t show ModBot as a limited user
  • [MBS-5375] – Remove whitespace above doctype declaration
  • [MBS-5376] – Add artist credit description
  • [MBS-5404] – Improve the relationship editor’s multiselect plugin

New Feature

  • [MBS-5320] – All data dumps should be signed by MusicBrainz
  • [MBS-5324] – Relationship editor should allow using auto-editor privileges
  • [MBS-5363] – Allow adding/editing release group relationships in the relationship editor

Task

  • [MBS-5182] – Add final controlled_for_whitespace checks
  • [MBS-5289] – Finish/merge log statistic features
  • [MBS-5291] – Move existing timeline stats into its own schema
  • [MBS-5316] – Remove PGOPTIONS/search_path from ./admin/psql
  • [MBS-5354] – Remove drastically out-of-sequence cover art images
  • [MBS-5355] – Remove depedency on Function::Parameters
  • [MBS-5374] – Commit MB logo into repo

The Git commit SHA for this release is 5bd71d211dceb25a7a0d545a14cb3273e3e89f19, tag is v-2012-10-15-schema-change.

Announcing the Cover Art Archive

In a server update last April we quietly said that “we’ve also improved cover art support slightly.” What we actually did was release the first version of the Cover Art Archive, a cooperation between MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive. First, a little background:

Cover art (the images associated with music products) adds a great amount of value to the digital music experience. Many projects and apps on the net use these images to add color and depth to their music tools. However, there isn’t a cleanly organized, publicly available resource where everyone can access these images. You can use Amazon product images, but your project needs to be able to abide by their Terms of Service, which doesn’t work for everyone. Many projects use Google Images to source their cover art, but that is an inexact science since they may not always find the right image.

The Cover Art Archive aims to solve these problems by making these images available to the public. But since we are not lawyers, we can not say what can and can not be done with these. So use them at your own risk! That said, everyone on the internet is using these images anyway and the common understanding is that if you’re selling music you’re pretty safe. We suggest that when you try to figure out what to do, make sure that you respect the artists and their labels and make the music world a better place.

All images in the Cover Art Archive are indexed by the release’s MBID, and all metadata can be parsed by a JSON document. For instance, to fetch the front cover for any given release, construct this URL:

http://coverartarchive.org/release/76df3287-6cda-33eb-8e9a-044b5e15ffdd/front

Once you GET this resource, you will be redirected to the proper Internet Archive URL that yields either an image file or a 404 error if we do not have this image. For lots more details on how to use the Cover Art Archive, please take a look at our API documentation. So far, there are Java, C and Perl bindings to the API.

For some stunning examples of what people have already done with the Cover Art Archive, please take a look at these links:

So far, we’ve collected nearly 100,000 images that are attached to 54,000 releases for a 5% coverage in MusicBrainz. The largest file we have clocks in at 23MB and the largest image is 16,000 x 7842 (125 megapixels!). For all of the juicy stats on this project, check out our cover art statistics page.

We’ve just gotten started and we need your help! Won’t you please consider uploading some images to this archive? To get started, log in with your MusicBrainz account (or create a new one) find your favorite release and then click on the cover art tab to view the existing pieces of art and/or upload new ones. For more details, see our How to add cover art guide.

Thank you to everyone who has worked hard to make this project a reality! And thank you to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive for fostering this project!