Picard 2.4 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that version 2.4 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This releases brings significant performance improvements, improved documentation, new features and many bugfixes.

What’s new?

Better performance and responsiveness

Picard 2.4 features heavily improved performance and responsiveness of the user interface when loading or saving a large amount of files.

Improved online documentation

There is a completely new User Guide for MusicBrainz Picard, which replaces the documentation previously available on the Picard website. This documentation is much more complete and easier to update and maintain.

We are also looking for contributors who help to improve the documentation. If you have some ideas for improvements have a look at the Picard Docs project on GitHub.

Support for tagging WAVE and DSDIFF

Picard now finally supports writing tags to WAVE files. This was previously not possible, as there is lack of a proper standard to tagging WAVE files. Now Picard will allow you to write ID3v2 tags to WAVE files. As this is not supported by all players and tagging tools, Picard can optionally fall back to writing RIFF INFO tags to the files. Just be aware that RIFF INFO is very limited in regards to tags available and support for non latin character sets.

As a new file format Picard now supports DSDIFF (also known by their file extension as DFF) files. These can be loaded and saved using ID3v2. Similar to WAVE there is no standard way for tagging DSDIFF files, but many playback tools which support DSDIFF also support the ID3v2 tags.

Script auto completion and inline documentation

The script editors in the options dialogue (both for file naming and metadata scripts) now support auto completion for function and variable names. In addition there is a new script documentation dialogue, which shows the documentation for all scripting functions without the need to open the online documentation in your browser.

Dark mode support for Windows 10

On Windows 10 Picard now respects your settings for the Windows dark mode. If enabled, Picard will use a dark color theme and optimized syntax highlighting. This work also allows us to further improve Picard for dark themes on other platforms in the future.

Updated translations

With this release a lot of translatable text has been added to Picard, and many translations have been updated.

But not all translations are completed and we always need help maintaining the translations for Picard. Translating is easy and can be done online: Head over to MusicBrainz’s translation page on Transifex and click on “Help Translate MusicBrainz”. Any changes to the translations will be included in the next release.

More changes and bugfixes

Picard 2.4 has many more improvements and fixes. See the full changelog for details on all changes since the last stable Picard 2.3.2.

Download

Picard 2.4 is available for download from the download page. For Windows 10 users installing from the Windows Store an update will come automatically as soon as the new release has been approved by Microsoft.

Acknowledgements

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

Special thanks go to Gabriel Ferreira for his excellent work in profiling and improving Picard performance and to Bob Swift, who completely overhauled Picard’s documentation, making it much more complete then it ever has been, and to all the translators who updated their language translations on Transifex.