History:Server Release Notes/NGS Beta 1

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Revision as of 22:41, 18 January 2010 by 74.13.99.212 (talk)
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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 necessary schema changes MusicBrainz needs to make in order truely capture as much structured information as we can about music. 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 again been hard to capture.

Artist credits bring 2 main changes - the ability to link multiple artists together, and the ability to credit an artist with a different name. To help understand this, here are some examples.

A collaboration
Display: Queen & David Bowie
Links: /artist/0383dadf-2a4e-4d10-a46a-e9e041da8eb3 (Queen) /artist/5441c29d-3602-4898-b1a1-b77fa23b8e50 (David Bowie)


An artist credited with a name variation
Display: SPY
Links: /artist/abe931fd-bc88-40ee-ba42-f0ef2dc2eba5.html (S.P.Y.)

In this release we have added in support for artist credits in places where they would be credited on releases. So this means the release artist, and track artist fields now point to artist credits. To help enter these artist credits we now have an inline JavaScript editor, which will help you enter data for each of the fields. Sadly, this does mean this release is not yet compatible for browsers without JavaScript, though we hope to address this in future test releases.

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.