Faster SongKong matching with the new Musicbrainz VM

To speed up matching it is possible to configure your own local MusicBrainz servers instead of using the official MusicBrainz servers and use this with SongKong. This avoids the requirement to only send one query per second to the MusicBrainz server so speeds up the matching that can be achieved by SongKong,

Additionally this resolves an issue when trying to use multiple copies of SongKong at the same time in the same home network. Usually with a home network external services such as MusicBrainz see all your computers via the same ipaddress, and therefore the rate limiter is applied to all computers as if they were one computer, this effectively prevents you using multiple copies of SongKong on a home network in parallel. But if the server being used does not impose rate limiting then there is no longer a problem.

But the problem has always been the difficulty of setting up a MusicBrainz server in the first place !

Now at long last MusicBrainz have now released a new Musicbrainz VM containing both Musicbrainz Server AND Search Server I've been trying it out and it works great !

The latest official MusicBrainz instructions are available from here. but in this blog we document the instructions so that they are more relevant to using the Virtual Machine with SongKong as follows. Warning some of the steps can take a few hours to run but the procedure is very simple.

1. Ensure you have a BitTorrent client such as Vuze installed, this is required to download the Virtual Machine, and is a much more reliable way to download large files.
2. Download the 9GB MuscbrainzVM via your BitTorrent client
3. Windows/Linux user can download and install from VmPlayer this is free and more reliable then VirtualBox
4. Mac users can use Vm Fusion, although unfortunately this is not free, or try the less reliable VirtualBox
5. The remainder of these instructions assume you are using VMPlayer, but the steps for VMFusion and VirtualBox are much the same.
6. Start VMplayer and choose Import Virtual Machine from the File menu. Select the downloaded file.
7. Select Options and increase Virtual Memory to at least 2GB if your machine is powerful enough
8. Select Play Virtual Machine
9. Log in on the console using the username vm and password musicbrainz
10. Update the database with the latest data added since the VM was created using bin/replicate now this may take a while depending on how old the VM is.
11. Build search indexes, this will take a few hours bin/reindex
12. Get the IP address of your virtual machine.using command:ifconfig | grep eth0 -A 1
13. You can check it is working in browser by pointing to port 5000 of the ipaddress found previously e.g. http://10.1.1.104:5000
14. Configure SongKong, set Server:MusicBrainzServer and Server:MusicBrainz Search Server to the same address e.g. http://10.1.1.104:5000
15. Now SongKong will use the local MusicBrainz server rather than the offical MusicBrainz server. This should be faster and more reliable.