[mb-devel] libmusicbrainz development

[Andy Bridle]

Just some thoughts after a couple of weeks spent coding libmusicbrainz
support into my app. I'm aware that gripes and feature requests from a
client SDK developer won't be that high on your priority list, and I'm more
than grateful for the free access to your metadata, so I'll just post this,
then I'll shut up.

1) Most importantly, it works. The development process (native W32 C++ app
in VS2005) was fairly pain-free, the API documentation adequate, and I can
now query for the track info I want from my app.

2) It only works, however, if I use my patched version of the dll, with
fixes for the buffer overrun problems in function MBHttp::WriteToBuffer that
I posted about in November. With these fixes incorporated, I've not had a
single heap corruption failure; without them, I get sporadic crashes. I'm
not sure if this is being followed up. Is it up to me to report it on your
bug-tracking system, or will someone else pick it up?

3) I'm developing with version 2 (RDF) of libmusicbrainz, and I'm a bit
worried that this will soon be obsolete, ie when the XML WebService version
is released. Is there a time-line for this release, and will v2 still work
afterwards?

4) It would be *very* nice to have programmatic access to the list of mirror
servers. I've got round this by hard-coding the current mirror URLs, plus a
link to your /doc/MirrorServer page so the user can manually enter a server
URL. But it's a bit unsatisfactory.

5) Regarding the current mirrors, the German server responds very slowly to
libmusicbrainz queries (I'm querying from UK). The Netherlands mirror
doesn't work at all from libmusicbrainz, at least when using the built-in
queries; I guess this is because the client lib performs direct (not
indexed) searches, which fail even when done from the NL website search page
(with a DBI Connect System Error). It looks like these mirrors are still
under development, which is another good argument for point 4 above. I'd
really like to be able to query for a list of servers, and their current
status.

Apart from that... excellent. Best wishes from me for the future of this
venture.

Andy

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