The Picard team is happy to announce that Picard 2.6 Beta 2 is now available. This is a pre-release to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.6 release.

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback.

MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) application written in Python and is the official MusicBrainz tagger. Picard supports the majority of audio file formats, is capable of using audio fingerprints (AcoustIDs), performing CD lookups and disc ID submissions, and it has excellent Unicode support. MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public. MusicBrainz aims to be: The ultimate source of music information by allowing anyone to contribute and releasing the data under open licenses.

If you wonder why this is beta 2 and there was no announcement of beta 1: We had prepared beta 1 for release last week. But then AcoustID got into serious technical trouble. Asking for wider testing of a new Picard release when such an important service was unavailable seemed not a good option, so we decided to delay the announcement. But since AcoustID has now recovered we are now ready for testing the beta version, and we even could get some improvements in over last week’s beta.

Download

Picard 2.6 Beta 2 can be downloaded from Picard website Downloads section.

Musicbrainz Picard Alternative

For macOS users there are now two separate builds available. If you are using macOS Mojave 10.14 or later, including macOS 11.0 Big Sure, please use the download for macOS 10.14+. If you are still on macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13 you should use the download for 10.12+ instead.

Functionality wise both are the same, but the 10.14+ build uses newer versions of Qt5 and Python and is hence recommended, but won’t run on macOS before 10.14.

Linux users might want to install the beta version using Snap. If your Linux distribution supports Snap you can install Picard from the beta channel using:

Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums. Ps4 remote play ipad controller.

What’s new?

This release fixes Picard becoming unresponsive on some systems, especially when editing or adding tags to multiple selected items. This issue has been around since Picard 2.0 and we are happy to have it now fixed.

Apart of that there are also several new features and improvements, such as support for original release date per track, support for a new “director” tag, WebP support for cover art images, improvements to the script editor and the script documentation and more.

Below is a complete list of changes since Picard 2.5.6.

Bugfixes

• [PICARD-1528] – “Search for similar albums” causes crashes if the selection includes clusters and files
• [PICARD-1689] – Freezes when adding tags to large album
• [PICARD-1747] – macOS: Tearing when scrolling list of plugins
• [PICARD-1926] – “Show changes first” in tag preview window leads to freeze
• [PICARD-2088] – Picard hangs when adding new tag to multiple tracks in an album
• [PICARD-2091] – Loading images from cover art via drag and drop from browser only loads PNG and JPEG images
• [PICARD-2097] – Crash with zh_CN locale
• [PICARD-2113] – Script can change title of “Unclustered files” special cluster
• [PICARD-2127] – “Lookup in browser” in metadata box does not pass tagger port
• [PICARD-2131] – Tagger button reacts slow in Firefox

New Features

• [PICARD-204] – Support for track-level original release date
• [PICARD-1998] – Add “director” (for videos) tag
• [PICARD-2089] – Support WebP images for cover art
• [PICARD-2124] – Add MB release annotation field as %_releaseannotation% variable

Tasks

• [PICARD-715] – Chrome to block browser access to localhost
• [PICARD-1950] – Fix macOS builds with PyQt > 5.13.2

Improvements

• [PICARD-2084] – Use TLS for AcoustID web service requests
• [PICARD-2090] – Reenable TIFF support for cover art images
• [PICARD-2092] – Improve script editor function/variable auto completion
• [PICARD-2105] – Improve script function popup descriptions
• [PICARD-2110] – Add %originaldate% and %originalyear% to file naming examples
• [PICARD-2114] – Show disambiguation comment in CD Lookup popup window
• [PICARD-2125] – Enable CAA Release Group cover art provider by default
• [PICARD-2126] – Allow cross origin access to browser integration
• [PICARD-2130] – Restructure cover art options to make them easier to understand

Helping out

The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.6 release is using and testing this beta release. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.

Please also help translate Picard. There have been changes to the user interface and inline scripting documentation and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.6 release. Translating is easy and can be done online: Head over to MusicBrainz’s translation page on Transifex and click on “Help Translate MusicBrainz”.
Once you have registered an account on Transifex you can start translating. For Picard the primary resource to translate is “picard“, but there is also the “picard_appstream” resource, which is used for providing descriptions for various Linux software-center applications, and “picard_installer”, which contains the translations for Picard’s Windows installer.

Musicbrainz Picard Hangs

If you are a software developer you are very welcomed to provide fixes and features. Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub. See Developing on the Picard website to get started.