February 2026 – MetaBrainz Blog

Picard 3 alpha 3 released

While our hearts are heavy following Rob’s passing, we remain committed to our mission and carry on, as Rob would have expected from us.

Today, we’re making available another pre-release version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. Alpha 3 focuses on fixing issues that were found in the previous releases as well as some minor improvements and updated translations.

Download links and a list of changes since Picard 3 alpha 2 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

As before this is still an early pre-release. While we have all the major features implemented and we are rather confident in the current code, it is still a development release and it is expected there will be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the alpha version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback, reported issues and provided translations.

Robert Kaye

It is with profound sadness that the MetaBrainz Board of Directors announces the unexpected passing of our Founder and Executive Director, Robert Kaye.

Robert’s vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.

The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.

C4GT 2025: Integrate Internet Archive Into BrainzPlayer

Hey Everyone 👋!

I am Rayyan Seliya (AKA rayyan_seliya123 on IRC and RayyanSeliya on GitHub), a prefinal year student at Indian Institute of Information Technology Agartala, India, studying Computer Science. I was thrilled to be selected as a contributor in the C4GT (Code For Govt Tech) 2025 program under the MetaBrainz Foundation. My project focused on integrating music streaming from Internet Archive into BrainzPlayer. It was mentored by Kartik Ohri (lucifer on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC).

Project Overview

ListenBrainz has a number of music discovery features that use BrainzPlayer to facilitate track playback. BrainzPlayer (BP) is a custom React component in ListenBrainz that uses multiple data sources to search and play a track. As of now, it supports Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and Funkwhale as music services. It would be useful for BrainzPlayer to support the Internet Archive, which hosts a vast collection of digitized recordings from physical releases of the early 20th century, including 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings. Each recording comes with audio streaming and metadata web services that can be used to retrieve metadata automatically and embed a player in ListenBrainz using BrainzPlayer.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-02-12

We have a small release coming mid-week for once since we wanted to deploy some behind-the-scenes updates to remove potential vulnerabilities. Other than that, this release includes a few small URL and interface improvements, and converts a few more pages to use React.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to SuperSaltyGamer for having contributed to the code. Thanks to chaban, Griomo, iamdrowning, Raman Sinclair, salo.rock and SuperSaltyGamer for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to BestSteve, EmO686, Lise Andersen, djtusa, karpuzikov, m67186636, mfmeulenbelt, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-02-12.0.

Picard 3 alpha 2 released

A second alpha version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3 is now available. This focuses on fixing issues that were found in the previous alpha 1 as well as some minor improvements and updated translations.

Download links and a list of changes since Picard 3 alpha 1 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback, reported issues and provided translations.