Happy Birthday to us: 25 years of MusicBrainz and 20 years of Picard!

Hello!

Today is the 25th anniversary of me registering the musicbrainz.org domain. I told the story of how that happened two years ago, if you’re curious about that story. 25 years is a long time for sure and I had zero ideas that this little project would end up so enormous with users from literally all over the world.

Thanks to everyone who had/has a part in it. ❤️

Also, let’s talk about the 20th anniversary of the Picard Tagger! The beginning of Picard has a less clear starting point — at least not one that is easily Googleable 20 years on. At least ChatGPT suggests that Picard came into this world as vaporware on Februrary 9th, 2004 when the Real Networks sponsored Helix Community made a number of grants to support several open source projects.

Personally, I can’t recall those details, so we’ll have to trust ChatGPT, which is questionable on the best of days. Thankfully that isn’t important, but I also wanted to share the origin of Picard’s name, so I asked ChatGPT if it knew:

MusicBrainz Picard is named after Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a character from the television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” portrayed by Patrick Stewart. The software’s name reflects its mission of organizing and managing music metadata with the same precision and leadership associated with Captain Picard.

ChatGPT

The first part is spot on, but the second part is pretty much a hallucination by our beloved ChatGPT. Good marketing, for sure!

But reality differs, as it often does: The Helix Community wanted to launch on the 9th and it was important that all its grant recipients had their projects setup on Helix Community, which meant that I needed a name. Stat!

I panickedly started pondering — what should I name this? Its a next generation tagger from the decrepit Windows Tagger that has existed up until now. Next Generation? Next Generation.

Oh, Star Trek. OH, Jean-Luc Picard! Yes! Yes! Picard!

That’s a great working name for the project — later on we can change the name to something more fitting, I thought. Little did I know that provisional project names have a pesky habit of sticking.

Here we are, 20 years later, and Picard has seen ups and downs in development cycles, for sure. However, recently as people are getting fed up with streaming and re-embracing their digital music collections, Picard has seen a resurgence — more development and more releases. Picard is looking better than ever!

The Picard team (@outsidecontext and @zas) currently has a Google Summer of Code student working on Picard artwork features for the summer, so with any luck Picard will get much better at managing cover art in the autumn. Thanks @twodoorcoupe for working on those features!

Thanks to everyone who has worked on Picard or even used it to tag their own music collections. It’s been a fun journey and I can’t wait to see where the next 20 years take us!