Picard 2.4 Beta 1

Picard 2.4 Beta 1 is now available. There have been some important changes and we would like to gather feedback with this beta release before releasing the final Picard 2.4.

This release contains code changes by Gabriel Ferreira, Laurent Monin, Bob Swift, Philipp Wolfer, RaysDev, Wieland Hoffmann and new contributors Adam James and jcaesar.

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

What’s new?

The most notable change in this release are significant performance improvements when handling large amount of files thanks to the excellent work of Gabriel Ferreira.

We would also like to get some feedback on the new scripting auto completion feature and the scripting documentation provided directly inside Picard. Windows 10 users can also try Picard’s new support for Windows 10 dark mode.

Here is the full list of changes:

Bugfixes

• [PICARD-1753] – Fix font size of script editor and log view on Windows
• [PICARD-1807] – Wrong error handling when using python-libdiscid
• [PICARD-1813] – $title function throws error on empty value
• [PICARD-1820] – PLUGIN_VERSION no longer displayed correctly in plugins dialog
• [PICARD-1823] – Genre tag ordering is non-deterministic
• [PICARD-1826] – “no appropriate stream found” when saving .ogg (OPUS) file
• [PICARD-1838] – Files with a .dff file extension are interpreted as DSF files and fail to load
• [PICARD-1853] – Crash if tags contain null character
• [PICARD-1855] – Relationships not tagged for non-album track
• [PICARD-1859] – “ValueError: Invalid literal” followed by crash when opening certain files

New Features

• [PICARD-1704] – Support Windows 10 dark mode
• [PICARD-1797] – Autocompletion for script functions and variables
• [PICARD-1798] – Add support for inline translatable script documentation

Improvements

• [PICARD-824] – Expand all option submenus by default
• [PICARD-920] – Remember selected options page
• [PICARD-1117] – Instrumental recordings of a work should set language to “No lyrics”
• [PICARD-1796] – Consider release date when matching files to releases
• [PICARD-1805] – Make it easier to add the first script
• [PICARD-1818] – Make PyQt5.QtDBus optional
• [PICARD-1829] – Add support for disc numbers in cluster Info dialog tracklists
• [PICARD-1831] – Mitigate performance impacts of file selection and UI updates during processing
• [PICARD-1840] – Instrumental recordings of a work should drop the lyricist credit
• [PICARD-1842] – AIFF and DSF: Add support for albumsort, artistsort, titlesort and discsubtitle
• [PICARD-1843] – Improve load and clustering performance
• [PICARD-1844] – Further improve loading and clustering performance
• [PICARD-1845] – Add “lookup in browser” for musicbrainz_discid tag in metadata view
• [PICARD-1846] – Metadata.unset should not raise KeyError
• [PICARD-1847] – Restructure tag compatibility options
• [PICARD-1852] – Make about a separate dialog
• [PICARD-1854] – Improve sorting performance in main window
• [PICARD-1856] – Use pgettext function in Python 3.8

Download

Picard 2.4 beta 1 is available for download from the download page.

Helping out

The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.4 release is using and testing this release candidate. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.

Please also help translate Picard. There have been many changes to the user interface and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.4 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.

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.