September 2026 – MetaBrainz Blog

Picard 3 Release Candidate 3

Today the Picard team is making available a third release candidate for Picard 3. We received good feedback on the previous release candidate 2, thanks to everyone for testing and providing feedback. The final 3.0 release is planned to happen in a few weeks.

Please test, test, and test, report any issue on forums, matrix, or, ideally, on the ticket system.

When reporting an issue, always provide details about your environment and a full debug log helps us a lot.
Also that’s (always) a good time to review and improve translations.

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

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.

If you are updating from Picard 2, note that some of the changes are backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying this version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

Picard 3 Release Candidate 2

Today the Picard team is making available a second release candidate for Picard 3. We received good feedback on the previous release candidate 1, thanks to everyone for testing and providing feedback. The final 3.0 release is planned to happen in a few weeks.

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

The super special (lousy) shirt plan

Editors are by far MetaBrainz’ biggest and most irreplaceable resource.

They (you) spend countless hours entering data for free, be it for the love of music, to tidy their own collections and listen histories, to support their scenes, to archive historical and cultural data, to apply the cool and soothing editing brain-balm, or a combination of all of the above and more.

Some of the top editors have provided the backbone of MusicBrainz for years, decades, and often perform the more tedious data maintenance and checking tasks.

A few summits ago, the question was asked – can we give these editors, say those with 1 million+ edits, some recognition without getting into the quagmire of things like gamifying?

Enter super special (lousy) shirt plan.

reo showcasing his super special lousy shirt – a *real* and rare image of a top MusicBrainz editor **outside**!?

Picard 3 Release Candidate 1

The Picard team is excited to announce the first release candidate for Picard 3. With this release we are confident that Picard 3 is now suitable for testing by a wider audience. The final 3.0 release is planned to happen in a few weeks.

Since we are near a final release, we tried to focus on bugfixes, final changes to the Plugin API and further UI/UX improvements. On the UI side, Picard now fully supports dark / light mode across all supported operating systems, with the ability to change the theme without a restart.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 9 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.