With much help from Lukas Lalinsky and Dave Evans, we’ve finally managed to scrape together the next picard release. The highlights for this release are:
- Full UNICODE support on all supported platforms. Tags and filenames are now read and written with the proper encoding support.
- ID3v2.3 AND ID3v2.4 support — selectable in the options dialog.
- Increased stability
- A more rounded feature set
- Tons of bug fixes
- UI improvements
- Built on top of a release version of wxWidgets, for greater stability
- New windows installer
Downloads:
- Linux tarball
- Windows installer (NT, 2000 and XP only!)
NOTES:
- This is a BETA quality release — once we get some bug reports in from this release we will release an updated version that should be a little better than BETA quality.
- We’ve not started polishing the UI — please don’t pelt us with minor annoyances about the UI. Currently we very much care about getting the tagging engine/functionality to work right. Once we nail that, we’ll touch up the UI.
- Please read the quick start guide: http://musicbrainz.org/wd/PicardQuickStartGuide
- Before reporting bugs, please review the currently open bugs for picard: http://musicbrainz.org/bugs
- Please do not tell us about the following issues (we know!): Multi-select in the album panel, missing menu items, UI inconsistencies for your platform. Please don’t ask us why all your tracks end up in the ‘unclustered files’ folder — read the quick start guide.
If you do find an issue that isn’t covered by the above, please report a bug here:
Note for Linux users: If your lookup function stops working properly and picard directs you to an error page, please check the setting of your BROWSER variable. Make sure it looks like:
BROWSER=”mybrowser ‘%s’ &”
The quotes around ‘%s’ are key.
Note for Mac users: Sit tight. We’ll have something soon.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Works awesome so far. Keep up the good work. I really love this album matching feature. It’ll make tagging go much faster. The album art is a nice touch, would it be possible to save the amazon album image to each album’s directory?
Seems like the windows installer is broken. When I have installed the application it refuses to start with the following message:
MSVCR71.dll was not found.
This sounds like some library is compiled with debugging information?
Sorry, we don’t have the rights to include the cover art into the files.
A good program for downloading album art is here:
http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart/
This is a very nice release, although it needs a lot of getting used to. The old tagger is still better for single files, but for albums this thing rocks.
The Linux tarball seems to not be gzipped. Despite the file ending.
Wow — how did I miss that, and how come 129 downloaders never mentioned anything?
Thanks for mentioning this!
The new client works fine so far, thanks. It is indeed much easier and faster to tag full albums now.
One thing still surprises me. It seems that the Picard client does not create any TRMs. Is this correct? I have not been able to find any mention of this issue in the documentation either.
Excellent work. Just trying out the new client now, I’m very happy with the way it works, it seems very intuitive and quick.
Is there any chance of a new test version any time soon? I know this will be done “when it’s done”, but it would be nice to see something new again. 🙂