Picard 2.6 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that Picard 2.6 is now available. This release fixes issues where the user interface could freeze and contains many new features, bugfixes and improvements.

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

Download

Picard 2.6 can be downloaded from the Downloads section on the Picard website.

For macOS users there are now two separate builds available. If you are using macOS Mojave 10.14 or later, including macOS 11.0 Big Sure, please use the download for macOS 10.14+. If you are still on macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13 you should use the download for 10.12+ instead.

Only the 10.14+ builds support the macOS dark mode. This build also uses newer versions of Qt5 and Python and is hence recommended, but won’t run on macOS before 10.14.

Users who have installed Picard on Windows 10 from the Windows Store will receive the update automatically once it has been approved by Microsoft.

Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.

What’s new?

Fix for user interface freezes

Since the release of Picard 2 we had some reports of some users experiencing Picard’s UI completely locking up. This mostly happened when adding or removing tags or toggling the “Show changes first” in the metadata view. As this was a timing issue not all users on all systems were affected by this issue the same.

The root cause for this has been now identified and Picard 2.6 comes with a fix to prevent those freezes.

Dark mode switching on Windows and macOS

On both macOS and Windows it is now possible to switch to dark or light UI independent of the system setting. By default Picard will follow your system settings.

This is also the first stable release which supports the dark mode on macOS Mojave 10.14 and later in the official app packages. Previously this was only available when running Picard from source or installing via PyPi. Please note that you need to use the Picard app build for macOS 10.14 or later for this feature to work (see above).

Reworked cover art options

The cover art options have been rearranged to be easier to understand their meaning. Some options that previously had been shown in the Cover Art Archive options but actually affected all cover art sources have been moved to the general cover art options.

Please note that there was no change in functionality, all the options are still available and behave as before.

Support for track-level original release date

The MusicBrainz server since recently supports returning a first release date per recording. This information is based on the earliest release on which this recording appears on according to the MusicBrainz database.

Picard makes this date available in the variable %_recording_firstreleasedate%. If you want to have this date set in your files for the original release date you can use the following script:

$set(originaldate,%_recording_firstreleasedate%)

Please note that this means that each track on a release can have a separate date. In this case you should not use %originaldate% as part of a folder name in your file naming script.

By default %originaldate% will still be filled with the first release date of the release group. To be more flexible this date is also now available in a variables %_releasegroup_firstreleasedate%.

Improved script editor

The auto completion in the script editor has been improved to not popup unnecessarily and to provide better suggestions. It also is now possible to trigger the autocompletion anytime by pressing Ctrl+Space.

Support WebP images for cover art

Picard now supports cover art in WebP format. Please note that support for this depends on your playback software. Also WebP images will not be embedded into MP4 files as those do not support this format.

Other changes

There are many more bugfixes and improvements since the last stable release 2.5.6, such as support for a director tag (for videos), the release annotation being available as a variable %_releaseannotation% and fixes for cover art drag and drop from browsers

For a complete list of changes since the last stable release please see the full changelog below.

Notes for package maintainers

If you are maintaining packages of Picard for a Linux distribution or another OS please note the following changes:

• The minimum supported Python version is now Python 3.6
• Qt 5.10 or later and PyQt5 5.10 or later are now required

The newer Qt5 versions are necessary in order to work around the dead lock issues (see above). If possible it is recommended that you use PyQt5 5.15.3 or later, as those versions actually fix the root cause for the deadlock. But Picard applies a workaround that should also prevent this in earlier versions. Please see the discussion on PICARD-2088 for details.

Acknowledgements

This release contains code contributions by Philipp Wolfer, Laurent Monin, Gabriel Ferreira, Sophist, Bob Swift, RomFouq and petitminion.

Many thanks also to all the translators and everyone who tested the beta releases and provided feedback on the community forums, IRC and the issue tracker.

Changelog

This is the complete list of changes since Picard 2.5.6:

Bugfixes

• PICARD-1528 – “Search for similar albums” causes crashes if the selection includes clusters and files
• PICARD-1689 – Freezes when adding tags to large album
• PICARD-1747 – macOS: Tearing when scrolling list of plugins
• PICARD-1926 – “Show changes first” in tag preview window leads to freeze
• PICARD-2088 – Picard hangs when adding new tag to multiple tracks in an album
• PICARD-2091 – Loading images from cover art via drag and drop from browser only loads PNG and JPEG images
• PICARD-2097 – Crash with zh_CN locale
• PICARD-2113 – Script can change title of “Unclustered files” special cluster
• PICARD-2127 – “Lookup in browser” in metadata box does not pass tagger port
• PICARD-2135 – Tags license and website cannot be deleted and get duplicated on update for ID3
• PICARD-2136 – macOS: File browser does not use user’s home folder by default
• PICARD-2138 – macOS: After saving options the toolbar style changes
• PICARD-2156 – macOS: Use Cmd+Shift+H instead of Cmd+H for opening history view to avoid conflicts with system keyboard shortcut to hide window
• PICARD-2159 – macOS: Scripting Documentation dialog opens behind options dialog

New Features

• PICARD-204 – Support for track-level original release date
• PICARD-1998 – Add “director” (for videos) tag
• PICARD-2089 – Support WebP images for cover art
• PICARD-2124 – Add MB release annotation field as %_releaseannotation% variable

Tasks

• PICARD-715 – Chrome to block browser access to localhost
• PICARD-1950 – Fix macOS builds with PyQt > 5.13.2

Improvements

• PICARD-2084 – Use TLS for AcoustID web service requests
• PICARD-2090 – Reenable TIFF support for cover art images
• PICARD-2092 – Improve script editor function/variable auto completion
• PICARD-2105 – Improve script function popup descriptions
• PICARD-2110 – Add %originaldate% and %originalyear% to file naming examples
• PICARD-2114 – Show disambiguation comment in CD Lookup popup window
• PICARD-2125 – Enable CAA Release Group cover art provider by default
• PICARD-2126 – Allow cross origin access to browser integration
• PICARD-2130 – Restructure cover art options to make them easier to understand
• PICARD-1357 – Support dark mode on macOS Mojave 10.14 and later
• PICARD-2095 – Allow the user to choose between light or dark theme on Windows and macOS
• PICARD-2158 – Make Scripting Documentation dialog available in renaming script
• PICARD-2164 – Add shortcut Ctrl+T for “Search for similar tracks”