Picard 3 beta 3 released – MetaBrainz Blog

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.

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.

What’s new?

Bugfixes

PICARD-2376 – Log view becomes unresponsive on long list
PICARD-3194 – Custom column %_musicbrainz_discids% or %compilation% only displays value on track level
PICARD-3256 – Preferred Releases always saved in alphabetic order
PICARD-3258 – tagger.remove_album crashes inside register_album_metadata_processor handler
PICARD-3265 – Translation locale selection does not sort locales by UI language
PICARD-3267 – macOS app claims to support macOS 11.0, but minimum supported version for Qt 6.11 is macOS 13.0
PICARD-3272 – “Never replace selected cover image types” ignored
PICARD-3274 – Crash after removing last item in standalone recordings
PICARD-3275 – Default optical drive always used regardless of which drive is selected in Lookup CD drop down
PICARD-3277 – Cover art to be saved as external files has no types and comments set
PICARD-3278 – Non-front CAA cover art images replace front cover
PICARD-3279 – Cover art column does not update for tracks
PICARD-3281 – Improve UI responsiveness during scan of many files
PICARD-3287 – Context menu is missing “Expand all”, “Collapse all” and “Select all” entries
PICARD-3290 – Built-in player prevents file write access
PICARD-3294 – “Never replace cover image” options only run on image loading
PICARD-3295 – Track loses original cover art when file gets removed
PICARD-3297 – Cover art “Show more details” failing after clustering

New Features

PICARD-2197 – Use artist aliases to find a more appropriate artist sort name for the artist credit

Improvements

PICARD-3299 – New debug options “plugin_development” and “coverart”
PICARD-2867 – Improve matching and lookup by utilizing barcode
PICARD-3163 – Make using artist sortname for translation optional, disabled by default
PICARD-3261 – Simplify Unicode characters when saving tags with non-Unicode character set
PICARD-3262 – New picard-plugins --init command to initialize a new plugin directory
PICARD-3264 – Improved alias selection for artist, album and track translations
PICARD-3269 – Make ISWCs available as %_iswc% variable
PICARD-3283 – Add stop button for pending network requests
PICARD-3284 – Improve release matching with tiered scoring and identifier support
PICARD-3285 – Add a button to clear the network cache
PICARD-3286 – Log View dialog: performance issues, limited filtering, and UX improvements
PICARD-3289 – Allow user to set the default log level used when Picard is started
PICARD-3291 – Utilize barcode/catno/date from file tags for better release matching
PICARD-3296 – Adjust Haiku platform detection to changes in Haiku’s latest Python versions
PICARD-3298 – Plugin options UI improvements

Download

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.

For Windows and macOS you can download the beta version from the Picard download page. Linux users can run from source or try the beta channel of the Picard snap package.

The minimum supported macOS version for this beta is macOS 13.0 “Ventura”. This is the same as for the previous beta, but there Picard wrongly reported to be compatible with macOS 11.0. We are looking into options to lower the macOS requirements for the final release of Picard 3, but this is not yet decided.

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

For anyone wondering if they missed beta 2: We had the version updated for beta 2, but we never released it and instead had further changes that got now released as beta 3.

Acknowledgements

Code contributions by Bob Swift, Laurent Monin, OscarL and Philipp Wolfer. Translations were updated by Marc Riera (Catalan), mfmeulenbelt (Dutch), RT2231 (Japanese), salo.rock (Italian), Vaclovas Intas (Lithuanian) and Wonordel (Russian).