History:Server Release Notes/NGS Beta 1

The MetaBrainz Foundation is proud to present the first beta of the long anticipated next generation schema (aka NGS) server release. This beta, and subsequent betas, is accessible at http://test.musicbrainz.org.

"Next generation schema" is a broad term for the major schema changes required to expand the depth of music information MusicBrainz collects, and it has taken the MusicBrainz development team many many years of planning, designing, and programming to get here. We are looking forward to receiving a lot of community feedback to ensure we squash as many bugs as possible as we move forward and start working on the second beta.

NGS has been well worth the wait, go explore!

How to test

Not only is this a beta release but this is the first beta release, so please keep in mind that there will certainly be some rough edges and things may occasionally break. That's the bad news. But the good news is, unlike finding bugs on the main server, this time we want you to find bugs, and as many bugs as you can!

Consider this your official invite to poke and prod the server and create the most absurd use case scenarios. Some things you may want to try are:

• Editing the database
  • Does the release editor preform unexpectedly?
  • Are there any editable fields that should be editable, but aren't?
  • Do edits pass/fail according to its votes?
  • Do edits fail mysteriously?
• Checking that data was converted properly
  • When multi-disc releases were merged into one release, were they merged correctly?
  • Were the appropriate recordings merged together?
  • Were the appropriate artist credits created for collaborations?
• Testing the search engine
• Testing the web service

Besides bug reporting, the intention of this beta release is also to receive general community feedback: what you like, what you don't like, and even suggestions. However, when requesting new features, remember that the focus of the development team is on the second beta release and so suggestions for new features will most likely be put on the back burner for the time being.

Before reporting a new issue please do a quick search on JIRA to see if what you want to report has already been reported. If not, please report it by clicking "Create Issue" at the top right and telling us the relevant details like what you were doing, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened.

The development team appreciates your contribution!

New features

• Artist credits
• Mediums
• Tracklists
• Recordings

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.

New 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.

Unfinished tasks

• 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
• Full collection support

Fixed bugs

For a detailed list of fixed bugs, see Trac and JIRA.

Schema changes

For a complete overview of the new schema, see the schema documentation.

Search changes

For information on the changes to the search server, see the search server documentation.

Web service changes

In the Beta 1 version of the Web Service (the NGS web service), the following resources are available:

1. artist
2. release-group
3. release
4. recording
5. label
6. work

For each of these types, you can request data entities via MBID and collection searches using a search query. For instance, to request a release you can request:

http://test.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/cae2ac10-057f-3d29-9e9d-1ba58e67ab9f/?inc=artists+release-groups+recordings

Or to search the release collections, you can:

http://test.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/?query=<text search query>

The structure of the V2 web service is very similar to the V1 service. Please take a look at the complete documentation for the V1 service to give you more background for this service:

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/XMLWebService

Inc options for available resources

Resource	Option(s)
artist	aliases labels sa-album sa-single sa-ep sa-compilation sa-spokenword sa-interview sa-audiobook sa-live sa-remix sa-other sa-nat sa-official sa-promotion sa-bootleg sa-pseudo-release
release-group	artists releases
release	artists recordings releasegroups labels
recording	artists releases
label	aliases
work	artists

Various artist types/statuses are not supported yet.

Differences to the V1 Web Service

1. Please note that the argument type=xml is no longer required. XML is now the default encoding.
2. track(s) have been renamed to recording(s). Use recording wherever you would use track previously.

Not Supported

In beta 1 the following items are not supported yet:

1. Any POST (write) operations
2. ISRC lookup/submission
3. PUID lookup/submission
4. Discid lookup/submission
5. Advanced relationships
6. Collections
7. Tags
8. Ratings