The MusicBrainz Picard team has just released a third beta for the upcoming Picard 2.9. This addresses issues and feedback we got after the beta 2 release. See the section “What’s new?” for details.
Picard 2.9 Beta 3 is supposed to be the final pre-release we put out for wider testing and to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.9 release.
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.
Download
Picard 2.9 Beta 3 can be downloaded from the 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?
The change to enable standardized artist names by default caused some controversy. After a community discussion about the change it became clear that this change causes some unintended issues for artists commonly publishing under varying names and a better solution will be needed. So we decided to revert this change for now and keep the default settings of previous Picard versions. We still want to address the issue of using consistent artist names in folders and tags by default in a future release. For details see PICARD-2673.
As a new feature Picard will now show an information dialog on startup and by default a confirmation dialog when saving files. Both dialogs can be permanently dismissed. The texts for these dialogs still need translation into most languages. If you want to help with this please see below.
Several issues with the new single-instance mode and threading related bugs have been resolved as well.
Below is a complete list of changes since Picard 2.9 Beta 2.
Bugfixes
- PICARD-2658 – macOS 10.12 build is not responding after launch, no UI shown
- PICARD-2659 – Picard 2.9.0b2 stuck in login loop if MusicBrainz server port is not set to 443
- PICARD-2660 – RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object
- PICARD-2668 – On application crash the main process does not exist, waits for interprocess communication pipe threads
- PICARD-2669 – File status icon sometimes shows wrong status
Improvements
- PICARD-2662 – Give better user message with corrupted file
- PICARD-2665 – Ignoring artist credits shouldn’t be default behavior
- PICARD-2671 – Show a first run information dialog
- PICARD-2676 – Show a file save confirmation dialog
- Update: Discussion on the two new dialogues, above, is on ticket PICARD-2681
- PICARD-2679 – “Open folder” does not work on Snap install
Helping out
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.9 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 multiple changes to the user interface and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.9 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 the “picard” resource.
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.