Category: General

Planned downtime for Thursday, February 20, 15:00 UTC

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We’ll be performing maintenance on our database servers starting at 15:00 UTC on Thursday, February 20th. It’ll take about 15 minutes to transfer services from our primary database server to our standby, after which normal service will resume. Thanks for your patience during this time.

Welcome Julian45 (and atj)!

I’m pleased to announce that Julian Anderson (julian45) and Adam James (atj) have joined our team as volunteer System Administrators. Julian has just now joined the team, where as Adam has been part of it for nearly 2 years and I failed to post the requisite blog post welcoming him. Mea culpa, Adam! Welcome to both of you!

We welcome volunteers to help us with our infrastructure, which continues to grow and become more complicated. The ListenBrainz project in particular has many moving parts in order to process the user’s data (stats, recommendations, fresh releases, etc.). On top of that, we’re working hard to make sure that our infrastructure is as automated as possible, so we welcome any help from people who know Ansible, like Julian and Adam.

Continue reading “Welcome Julian45 (and atj)!”

ChatBrainz: IRC, Matrix & Discord

Have you ever joined the MetaBrainz chat? Team and community members have been getting up to mischief (and, occasionally, work) using IRC since 2003 and earlier – with the logs to prove it. Today, over twenty years later, we say ‘oh hi’ to ChatBrainz.

With the launch of ChatBrainz we have officially moved to Matrix! Matrix has ease of access and some modern conveniences that make access to chat possible for more contributors and users. Not a fan of the change? Not a problem – ChatBrainz also has IRC and Discord bridges, that allow cross-platform chat with the three main Matrix rooms/channels.

Click here to get chatting!

Continue reading “ChatBrainz: IRC, Matrix & Discord”

Downtime today for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7pm CEST)

Today (Monday, May 13) at 17:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

  • Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v16.
  • Performing the MusicBrainz schema change upgrade.

See the previous announcement on this topic for more information.

Expect MusicBrainz and services that depend on its database (MetaBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, CritiqueBrainz, BookBrainz) to be down for the hour, but we’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible.

Afterward, we’ll post instructions here on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server (whether using musicbrainz-docker or otherwise).

P.S. The initially announced upgrades for MusicBrainz search engine are just about to reach our beta website, and thus are postponed for mirrors too.

Off topic: mnslib updated for python 3.10/11 and new packages

[ Sorry for the interruption of the usual MetaBrainz tasks here, but we had a problem where a package we relied upon was not suited for pushing to our production servers. So, as a community effort we fixed this problem and this blog post is to let the general public know about our efforts. ]

The non-metric space library has some impressive fuzzy matching search features that we wanted to use for our metadata matching services. However, the library refused to install on Python 3.10/3.11. Nor were the recent binary packages working.

To address this, we enabled Python 3.10/3.11 support and built binary packages for Windows, Mac and of course, Linux. The code and automation for building new packages is in our clone of the nmslib library.

You can download the packages from PyPi and if you change your dependency from “nmslib” to “nmslib-metabrainz” you should be able to use our packages on Python 3.10/3.11.

However, we do not plan to make any further releases or feature improvements to this package, so please don’t ask us to do so. If anyone would like to adopt the improved version and continue to make releases, we’d be very grateful for someone to clone the repository and to carry on the work we’ve done.