New Acoustid web service

Some time ago I realized that having the server code in Java keeps me away from working more on it. The original reason for writing it in Java was that I expected it would do harder work, but I really don’t need a “fast” language for simply running SQL queries. Additionally, since developing simple websites in Java turned out to be a pain, I used PHP to do the Acoustid website. I have no problem with PHP, but later I wanted to start integrating the website with the rest of the fingerprint database and it felt like a waste of my time to not share code, which is not easy if some parts are in Java, some in PHP. So, today I’ve released a new version of the server which is written completely in Python.

Chromaprint 0.3 released

A new version of Chromaprint has been released. There aren’t many changes, mostly just compatibility improvements for Windows and Mac OS X, plus simple ctypes-based Python bindings.

Making Fail2ban with IPFW firewall on FreeBSD work

The internet is a nasty place, everybody is trying to hack into your servers if they are publicly accessible. Even though I always disable password authentication, so there is very little chance somebody could “guess” my private RSA key, I don’t like /var/log/auth.log being spammed. Fail2ban is a nice solution to that I use on Linux with iptables, but it was not working for me on FreeBSD with IPFW.

Easier MusicBrainz NGS database setup

Some time ago I wrote a couple of tools that help me set up and update a mirror of the MusicBrainz database on the Acoustid server. It turned out to be work really well. Recently I’ve seen a few people struggling with setting up the NGS database using the original server codebase. The official route assumes you are going to run a MB server instance, which makes things a little bit more complicated than it has to be. You have to install a number Perl modules, you have to compile the MusicBrainz-specific PostgreSQL extensions, even though you most likely don’t need them, you are forced to setup a musicbrainz_db_raw database that you are definitely not going to use, because there is no data in it, etc.

Acoustid moved one more time

Last week, with the help from Zvooq, the Acoustid service was moved one more time, this time to a much more powerful server. This move made it possible to import all submissions from the backlog, so the database now contains fingerprints for over 5M unique tracks. Unfortunately, only around 2.4M of them are matched to the MusicBrainz database, but I’m hoping that the ratio will improve soon.

TagLib 1.7 released

TagLib 1.7 has been released. This release adds support for Monkey’s Audio files and cover art reading/writing for WMA and FLAC files. There is also a number of bug fixes, more details in the changelog. There are two important changes associated with this release:

Picard 0.13 released

MusicBrainz Picard wasn’t under active development for a long time. In fact, the last release was in November 2009. Even due to the situation, some bug fixes accumulated in the source control repository over the time, so the primary goal of this release is to publish these bug fixes. There were also a few larger patches, such us the sorting support by Aaron Lambers, but these are not included in this release. I’m hoping that patches like that will get committed now that 0.13 is released and a new release will follow in less than a year from now. :)