May 2026 – MetaBrainz Blog

Picard 3 beta 4 fixes startup issues on macOS

We have released Picard 3 beta 4. The recently released beta 3 did crash on macOS and when running the picard-plugins command line tool, both has been fixed in this. In addition beta 4 fixes display issues in the new log view.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 3 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.

While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might 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 beta version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

Picard 3 beta 3 released

Today, we’re making available another pre-release version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. This beta release offers various bugfixes and improvements over the last beta. Most notably the release lookup and matching was improved, several cover art related issues were fixed, the UI got more responsive during file load and the log view became faster and allows better filtering.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 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.

MusicBrainz database schema change release, 2026-05-11 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2026 database schema change now! Thanks to all who were patient during Monday’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers.

This is a fairly small database schema change release which mostly improves things behind the scenes. Of the schema change tickets, the only one that affects users directly is you are most likely to notice while you browse and edit in MusicBrainz is MBS-14092 (which allows adding series of series, for example for award series for podcasts).

Thanks to chaban, UltimateRiff and yyb987 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements, and thanks to jmrr83, salo.rock and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations.

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

Downtime for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: Monday, May 11, 15:00 UTC

On Monday, May 11, at 15:00 UTC (8am PT, 11am ET, 5:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v18.
Performing the MusicBrainz schema version 31 upgrade.

See the previous announcement for more information.

We’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible, but expect MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, and BookBrainz to be down for the hour. Thanks in advance for your patience!

Afterward, we’ll post instructions on the blog about how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server.