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.

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.

What’s new?

Bugfixes

• PICARD-2833 – macOS: “New user” dialog breaks application menu
• PICARD-3116 – Sorting columns does not work on Apple M2
• PICARD-3173 – Exception if custom columns list is empty
• PICARD-3174 – Collection menu does not show labels and checked state
• PICARD-3176 – Image processing is changing JPEG quality even without any processors running
• PICARD-3178 – Cover processing setting enabled when it should be disabled
• PICARD-3181 – File sizes not shown if “clear existing tags” is active
• PICARD-3182 – Lookup in Browser not working for album cluster
• PICARD-3184 – Using “keep original cover art” on an album does reset the cover for children, but not the album itself
• PICARD-3185 – Built-in server must not serve CORS request with invalid origin
• PICARD-3186 – Without pygit2 the plugin page shows an error message
• PICARD-3190 – Crash on network errors when searching from the search bar

Improvements

• PICARD-3187 – Add config upgrade hook to update usage of $matchedtracks()
• PICARD-3177 – Make JPEG quality configurable in image processing settings
• PICARD-3179 – Add the cover processing settings to the profile manager

Download

As this is a pre-release and early alpha version, it is not available on all the channels where Picard’s current stable version is available.

We appreciate your interest in trying this new version. Use with care, backup your files and please use the MetaBrainz community forums and the ticket system to give feedback and report bugs.

• MusicBrainz Picard for Windows (installer)
• MusicBrainz Picard for Windows (portable)
• MusicBrainz Picard for macOS (Intel)
• MusicBrainz Picard for macOS (ARM64)
• Source code

UPDATE: If this version of Picard crashes on startup with an error about config upgrade with an error message like “Error during config upgrade from version 3.0.0.dev9 to 3.0.0.dev10 using upgrade_to_v3_0_0dev10()” then try installing and starting Picard 3 Alpha 1 first. This version can perform the config upgrade successfully, and afterwards you can upgrade to the Alpha 2 version.

Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub.