MetaBrainz Blog – MetaBrainz Foundation Community Blog

Picard 3.0.3 released

Picard 3.0.3 is a maintenance release for Picard 3.0 with fixes for reported issues and updated translations.
This release fixes a crash when switching color themes, a crash when loading a release from an ISRC lookup, metadata issues in the Album Pane when multiple files match a track, and problems saving tags to WAV files with invalid chunk sizes, along with several plugin, cover art, and sorting fixes.
It also brings a few small improvements, including Enter-key navigation in the scripting documentation search, better recording-match scoring to avoid false positives on gross track-length mismatches, and normalization of lowercase or unhyphenated ISRCs.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.13 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 3.0.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.

MetaBrainz Summit 2026

Hi everyone! Sorry if we react slowly this week, that’s because our brains are all slowed down digesting all of the chocolate! Which long term readers will know means we are in Barcelona at our yearly summit all week.

Picard 3.0.2 released

Picard 3.0.2 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 3.0 with fixes for reported issues and updated translations. This releases fixes a crash in the Setup Wizard if Picard was packaged with the automatic update check disabled and several color theme related fixes.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.13 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 3.0.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.

Picard 3.0.1 released

Picard 3.0.1 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 3.0 with fixes for reported issues and updated translations. In particular this release fixes issues on newer macOS Tahoe and Golden Gate, a possible crash when updating from Picard 2.x and the picard-cli utility in the Windows package.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.13 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 3.0.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.

Happening NOW: AMA with Silona Bonewald, MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director

Silona Bonewald, our new Executive Director, is NOW hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in this forum thread.

Please respect the code of conduct, as you always do!

You are welcome to post questions in the thread later, and Silona will do her best to answer them when she has the time. We will close the thread after a couple of days – though of course the door remains open to chat with the MetaBrainz team any time in the future!

You can find more information about Silona on our Executive Director announcement post.

Picard 3.0 released

The Picard team is happy to announce the new major version 3.0 of MusicBrainz Picard, now available to download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with data from MusicBrainz.

An image of a mock software cardboard box, showing "MusicBrainz Picard" as the title. There are two worn-out looking stickers visible on the box, one saying "Complete Tagging Solution", one "Community Support".

Beside the box there is a pink / orange circle with the text "Version 3".

This release brings many changes, including an upgrade to Qt6, a completely new plugin system, several improvements to the user interface, cover art processing, ISRC submission and many more. More details below.

Our editors: vzell

This is part of a series where we talk to some of the amazing editors that have cracked one million MusicBrainz edits and qualified for super special (lousy) shirt plan.*

These users have donated substantial amounts of their time to improve open music data, enriching open-source knowledge and culture for billions of people. Let’s find out what makes vzell click. And click and click and click!

Save the date: AMA with Silona Bonewald, MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director

Silona Bonewald, our new Executive Director, will be hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our forums at:

5th October 2026
17:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST)
In this forum thread

Please respect the code of conduct, as you always do!

We are aware that this time will not suit everyone’s timezone, so we will open the thread a day or so before the AMA, for early questions. We will also leave the thread open for a couple of days – but don’t wait too long!

You can find more information about Silona on our Executive Director announcement post.

GSoC 2026: GraphQL Server For Musicbrainz

Hi everyone, I’m Sreehari, also known online as owlpharoah (op3kay on Matrix). I’m a second year student at IIIT Jabalpur. This summer I worked on the foundations of a GraphQL server in Rust that sits over the MusicBrainz PostgreSQL database, under the guidance of @bitmap and @jadedblueeyes.

The Setting

MusicBrainz already has an XML/JSON API, but getting related data out of it means chaining together inc parameters, and browsing support differs from one entity type to the next. Looking up five artists at once isn’t really possible either.

GraphQL fixes most of this by letting a client ask for exactly the fields and relationships it wants in one query. It also lets the server check how expensive a query is before running it, instead of finding out after the database has already taken the hit.

Picard 3 Release Candidate 4

We received good feedback on the previous release candidate 3, which resulted in several bugfixes and small improvements. The Picard team hence decided to release a fourth release candidate in preparation for the final release of Picard 3.0.

It fixes an important performance issue, so if you are currently running any of previous alpha, beta or release candidate versions upgrade ASAP.
It also fixes issues related to internationalization, causing some of existing translations to not actually show in the application (mainly constants).

Please test, test, and test, report any issue on forums, matrix, or, ideally, on the ticket system. When reporting an issue, always provide details about your environment and a full debug log helps us a lot. Also now is a good time for final review and improvements of the translations.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 release candidate 3 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

If you are updating from Picard 2, note that some of the changes are backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying this version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.