History:Server Release Notes/NGS Beta 1: Difference between revisions

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* The ability to add new releases (though we do have a release editor to edit existing releases)
* The ability to add new releases (though we do have a release editor to edit existing releases)
* Relating to URLs
* Relating to URLs
* CD Stubs (all functionality)
* Submitting CDs
* Timeline
* Dashboard
* Backward compatible v1 Web Service

Revision as of 23:30, 18 January 2010

The MetaBrainz Foundation is proud to present the first beta of the long anticipated next generation schema (NGS). This beta release is the effort of numerous developers and years of planning, designing, and programming.

Nontheless, here we finally are!

Website design

One of the major improvements this server release will have is a brand new website design and user interface. The amount of visual noise has been reduced and the overall experience had been streamlined, however, familiar key concepts (e.g. colored highlights on pending edits) have been kept.

Schema change

The "next generation schema" is a broad term for the schema changes required to expand the depth of information MusicBrainz collects. The schema changes are vast, and at the moment we are focusing on realizing some of the most important of these changes.

Artist credits

Often, artists work together on tracks and albums in various ways, but it is difficult to credit them. Not only this, but some artists have minor differences in the spelling of their name over different releases, and this information has been hard to capture in the past.

In this server release we have implemented artist credits in places where the artist would have been credited previously. For example, the release artist and track artist fields now display artist credits. To help enter these artist credits an inline JavaScript editor has been added to the release editor. Sadly, this means that this server release is not yet compatible with browsers that have JavaScript disabled, though we hope to address this in a future beta release.

Artist credits bring two main changes:

Collaborations

The first is the ability to link multiple artists to one release or recording, instead of having to create fake "collaboration artists". For example, the single "Under Pressure" being credited to the fake artist of "Queen & David Bowie".

Artist credits solve this by instead linking the single to an artist credit that contains the two distinct artists, "Queen & David Bowie", and making it available from both artist's pages.

Name variation

The second change is the ability to credit an artist with a different name. For example, the artist S.P.Y. can now be credited on a release with the name variation of "SPY".

Releases & Mediums

Releases in current MusicBrainz terminology represent a single disc, and there is no accurate way to group these entities together. NGS addresses this issue with another type of entity - the medium. A release now represents a final product that a customer would buy. Releases have 1 or more mediums, which could be a set of CDs, vinyl discs, or any combination of these. The easiest way to think about all of these is to remember the following:

  • A release is the finished product that a consumer would purchase, which consists of many...
  • Mediums which contain the actual audio content to listen to. Mediums have a specific type of format - CD, vinyl, digital media, etc

Tracklists & Recordings

With the introduction of mediums, we have also introduced a new concept - the tracklist. Sometimes exact same tracklist is featured on many different releases (for example, a CD single and a vinyl single, or boxset compilations). A tracklist is a bridge between a medium and the tracks it contains, which allows the same tracklist to appear on many different mediums.

Tracks are often released on multiple tracklists - for example, it is fairly common to have different tracklists depending on the region a release is released in. To group these different tracks together we now have recording entities. Recordings are not directly part of releases, every track on a mediums tracklist has a direct link to a recording - so multiple tracks can point to the same recording.

How to Test

We'd really like you to just get stuck in and start using the site! The site is certainly rough around the edges, and we've started to capture a lot of known problems already (as you can see). However, if you don't manage to find an error in the server, please report it! We're using JIRA to do bug reporting now, but it's straight forward - just head to that site and click "Create Issue" in the top right. Briefly tell us what you were doing, and we'll do the rest of the sorting and try and get it fixed.

What Hasn't Yet Been Completed

  • The ability to add new releases (though we do have a release editor to edit existing releases)
  • Relating to URLs
  • CD Stubs (all functionality)
  • Submitting CDs
  • Timeline
  • Dashboard
  • Backward compatible v1 Web Service