Hi! I’m Rahul Raturi, GSoC participant for Picard. This was my first GSoC, and it’s been a pretty awesome experience. Following is the overview of my project.
About the project
The outline of the project is to allow searching for albums, artists and tracks from within Picard. This avoids switching back and forth between web browser and Picard for searching, say release. If Picard fails to auto tag a file usual flow to tag the file with correct metadata is to first select the file, then click on “Lookup in Browser”, then search correct release, and load it into Picard by clicking the green “Tagger” button. In some systems, the “Tagger” button wouldn’t show, which was also a nuisance. With this patch, the entities can be searched and optionally loaded into Picard using built-in search dialogs, so no application switching.
Search dialogs
Picard already provides search options (through a web browser) for three entities; namely track, artist, and album. So I’ve built search dialogs for these three.
- Track Search Dialog — Searches for tracks and allows optionally loading corresponding album back into Picard.
- Album Search Dialog — Searches albums and optionally allows loading the selected one into Picard.
- Artist Search Dialog — Displays basic information about the artists. To get more information about the selected artist, there’s an option to lookup him/her in browser.
Searching similar tracks/releases
This is another important part of the project. Sometimes Picard fails to auto tag a file (or a cluster), or incorrectly tag it. These dialogs may prove useful here. To get expected data, right click on the file (should be in “Unmatched Files” cluster), and select “Search for similar tracks…”. The track search dialog would pop up, and expected release can be looked up there. Same procedure is for searching clusters.
Links to my work
- Picard pull request #475: includes base structure, and functionality of the dialog. Also the track dialog is written in this PR.
- Picard pull request #486: contains patches for the album search dialog. Currently in review.
- Picard pull request #487: for the artist search dialog. It’s also still open as of this writing.
Each PR is based on the previous one. A new dialog in each, plus some improvements to existing dialog. For trying the dialog, clone the artist search branch, until it gets merged into master. It has the most recent changes.
Note: To use these dialog for searching, an option in User Interface setting about built-in search needs to be enabled.
Conclusion
It was quite fun doing this project. Thanks to Michael Wiencek (mentor) for the guidance and leniency :). Also the Picard team for the reviews. I look forward to contribute more to Picard, now that I’ve a better understanding of the code. Also for another Summer of Code.
MetaBrainz Blog 
You did a fantastic job on this stuff, thank you very much Rahul !