Picard 2.7 Beta 1

The Picard team is happy to announce that Picard 2.7 Beta 1 is now available. This is a pre-release we put out for wider testing and to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.7 release. There are many new features in this release, which might or might not work for you as expected. If you prefer stability we recommend you use the stable version Picard 2.6.4 which we released yesterday.

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

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback. This release contains code contributions by Bob Swift, Gabriel Ferreira, Laurent Monin, Philipp Wolfer and Louis Sautier.

Download

Picard 2.7 Beta 1 can be downloaded from Picard website Downloads section.

Linux users might want to install the beta version using Snap. If your Linux distribution supports Snap you can install Picard from the beta channel using:

snap install --beta picard

What’s new?

This release brings a lot of new features, enhancements and bugfixes. Some of the highlights in this beta include:

• It is now possible to have more than one naming script and to switch between them as needed. A new script editor dialog allows you to edit the different scripts while tagging.
• Scripts can be exported to and imported from YAML files.
• The “Submit cluster as release” functionality, which was previously available as a plugin, is now directly available in Picard. This also fixes some issues the plugin had. While the plugin is still available for now and can be used independently it will be considered deprecated once Picard 2.7 stable version has been released.
• Picard now supports analyzing your music files and submitting the audio characteristics to AcousticBrainz. Previously this was only possible with separate tools provided by the AcousticBrainz project. This functionality requires a separate Essentia music extractor tool. The macOS and Windows packages come with this tool bundled. For Linux this tool is available from the AcousticBrainz download page. For details on this feature see the documentation.
• The scripting now allows explicitly entering any Unicode character with the escape sequence \uFFFF, where FFFF is the Unicode code point. E.g. \uff0f would enter a full-width slash. This makes it easier to handle characters that are either not easily accessible on common keyboards or are invisible control characters. If you hover your mouse over such a sequence a tooltip will show details about the corresponding character.

The Picard documentation has also been updated to reflect the changes in this release.

Below is a complete list of changes since Picard 2.6.4.

Bugfixes

• [PICARD-157] – “Translate artist names to this locale where possible” also translates ones already in the correct locale
• [PICARD-1645] – Picard doesn’t respect MusicBrainz server settings for the CD lookup in browser functionality
• [PICARD-2189] – Network cache directory at wrong location on Windows
• [PICARD-2217] – $performer() pattern matches full tag name
• [PICARD-2233] – Composer Sort Order doesn’t use the artist sort name when the “credited as” text is populated
• [PICARD-2236] – Renaming files with “replace non-ascii” treats fullwidth slash U+FF0F as directory separator
• [PICARD-2261] – Any tagger script causes multi-line fields to become changed
• [PICARD-2276] – Fix browser integration on Windows if hostname contains non-ASCII characters

New Features

• [PICARD-9] – Options profiles / quick presets
• [PICARD-257] – Option to preserve artwork when selecting “clear existing tags”
• [PICARD-1127] – Filename presets
• [PICARD-1734] – Add AcousticBrainz analyzer features
• [PICARD-2165] – Add $is_multi() function to test if a variable is multi-value
• [PICARD-2203] – Integrate add cluster as release functionality into Picard
• [PICARD-2204] – Support Unicode escape sequences in tagger scripts
• [PICARD-2213] – Allow naming script import/export as YAML scripting package
• [PICARD-2277] – When translating artist names ignore selected scripts
• [PICARD-2279] – Allow saving AcoustID fingerprint in acoustid_fingerprint tag

Tasks

• [PICARD-2231] – Fix packaging Picard on Windows with Python 3.8 or later

Improvements

• [PICARD-226] – Cluster automatically
• [PICARD-412] – Allow several locales to be selected for “Translate artist names to this locale where possible”
• [PICARD-524] – Ability to have more that one rename script and choose desired
• [PICARD-563] – Pad disc number in default renaming script if more than 9 discs
• [PICARD-1568] – Improve parsing track number and title from filename
• [PICARD-1718] – Display and log crash details
• [PICARD-2150] – Option to show or hide the tag editor
• [PICARD-2151] – Provide functions $year(), $month(), $day()
• [PICARD-2171] – Make guessing title from filename if title is empty optional
• [PICARD-2174] – Optimize metadata view displaying format specific metadata
• [PICARD-2176] – Add column to see if cover art is present
• [PICARD-2178] – Select random sample of loaded files to use as renaming examples
• [PICARD-2179] – Refactor Options > File naming
• [PICARD-2181] – Support Markdown formatting for plugin descriptions
• [PICARD-2184] – Allow fully silent install using the Windows installer
• [PICARD-2198] – Update formats for Tefifon and 5.25″ Floppy Disk
• [PICARD-2201] – Add help button to “Tags from file names” dialog
• [PICARD-2207] – Script editor: Show hover tooltip on Unicode escape sequences and functions
• [PICARD-2218] – $performer() should allow regular expressions
• [PICARD-2220] – Set default file extension for files with empty extension
• [PICARD-2232] – Allow data submission to unofficial server
• [PICARD-2237] – Realistic progress and ETA
• [PICARD-2248] – Lazily initialize the file browser on first display
• [PICARD-2251] – Add ability to import/export tagging scripts
• [PICARD-2263] – Performers without role do not get saved to TMCL (TIPL respectively) frames
• [PICARD-2266] – Add already mapped tags gapless, podcast, podcasturl, show and showsort to list of known tags
• [PICARD-2271] – Allow removing obsolete option settings from configuration INI file
• [PICARD-2273] – Set acoustid_id tag also if AcoustIDs were found, but no recordings are attached
• [PICARD-2278] – Show the path and name of the configuration currently used
• [PICARD-2288] – Add variable %_workcomment% for the work disambiguation comment

Known issues

• On macOS if you have the script editor dialog open and then open the preferences the script editor dialog will be behind the preference dialog and will not be accessible until the preferences get closed again.
• On macOS setting the user interface color theme to “Default” does not automatically use the dark mode if dark mode is enabled in the system. See the ticket PICARD-2290. As a workaround you can force the dark mode in Picard’s preferences.
• The Linux Snap package does not yet contain the Essentia music extractor binary, which is required for the AcousticBrainz submission. We plan to add this to the package in a future update.

Helping out

The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.7 release is using and testing this beta release. 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 existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.7 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, and “picard_installer”, which contains the translations for Picard’s Windows installer.

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.