History:Server Release Notes/NGS Beta 1
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!
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.
New features
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.
Fixed bugs
- For a detailed list of fixed bugs, see Jira.
Schema changes
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.
Search changes
Web service changes
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
