I know that a lot of people have been waiting for the next release of Picard. Fortunately, I’ve been working on it — unfortunately its taking me a bit of time to get to the next release. In order to get end-to-end UNICODE support in Picard, a number of serious changes were required to the underlying libtunepimp library.
The good news is that these massive changes are nearly done. The bad news is that the application will probably no longer run on Win 9x and Me — the UNICODE support in those two OSes is too weak. And the one thing I want to get right with this release is the UNICODE support. It is exciting to see Picard writing Cyrillic filenames — that’s for sure.
I’m trying to finish up the app in the next few days — stay tuned.
MetaBrainz Blog 
To have full Unicode support on Win95, 98, ME you may want to use MSLU (Microsoft Layer for Unicode). It is free for use, but not sure if it can be redistributed as part of Piccard. Anyway it is included as part of many MS programs (e.g. Internet Explorer).
See MSDN for more details:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/MSLU/
Thanks for the update. Keep up the good work!
Great news, can’t wait for it. Keep it up!
Does that mean there won’t be a Windows version?
azertus: It sounds like Windows 2000 and XP will be supported, but 95/98/ME won’t.
About UNICODE in combination with Win 9x and Me, you might want to have a look at libunicows [1]. I haven’t used it myself but just heared about it. Maybe it’s of some use to you.
[1] http://libunicows.sourceforge.net/
So what’s so special about picard? Does it match songs better, or is it just faster, or both?
Any news? It’s been some time.
Picard is supposed to match better yes, I’m not sure if it’s also faster.