Archive for May, 2008

Come play with a new search engine

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Do you have a search bug that really annoys you? If so, please come help me test a new search engine!

I’ve ported our search services to a new text search engine called Xapian. While the indexes are bigger on disk, it is easier to install, much faster to index and probably also faster to search. And, over Lucene it has vastly fewer problems. And you can perform stop word searches!

Come play with it on my dev server! (Never mind the connection being slow and indexes being a few weeks old) Report issues to the usual place please!

Posted in Development | 9 Comments »

Good news for Classic Tagger users

Friday, May 30th, 2008

What started out as a joking suggestion has actually extended the life of the Classic Tagger! :-)

One jokester at the recent summit suggested that we return random TRM values (as opposed to matched acoustic fingerprint ids) and just switch the TRM server off. Turns out, that suggestion was actually brilliant!

Doing this essentially makes every TRM lookup return “I don’t know this one”. But in that case the MusicBrainz server falls back to doing a metadata match (without the acoustic fingerprint). And it turns out that works pretty well all around! And I think some people may prefer this method, since you won’t have to clear up TRM collisions anymore.

So, what does mean for when we switch off the TRM server? The Classic Tagger lives on and may match fewer files than before — life may actually be better once we shut it off! But I think that many people will find it useful still.

Huzzah!

Posted in WindowsTagger | 4 Comments »

Personal email troubles

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

The heat wave in California over this past weekend fried the disks in my community mail server and I lost all the email from over the weekend. If you sent me mail over the weekend, (either to rob [fat] eorbit [dork] net or rob [fat] musicbrainz [dork] org) please re-send it so I can respond to it.

Sorry for the hassle and thanks for your understanding.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

UK Mirror downtime

Friday, May 16th, 2008

The UK mirror will be down from now (8pm BST, Noon PDT, 13 May) until about Noon BST, 4am PDT, 14 May due to scheduled power outage at last.fm where the server is hosted.

Sorry for the invconvenience!

Posted in General | Comments Off

Are you attending the MusicBrainz Summit 9?

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

If so, please re-read the Wiki page and follow the instructions at the top of the page. I’m looking forward to meeting up with everyone on Friday!

Posted in Community | 1 Comment »