September 2026 – MetaBrainz Blog

Picard 3 Release Candidate 4

We received good feedback on the previous release candidate 3, which resulted in several bugfixes and small improvements. The Picard team hence decided to release a fourth release candidate in preparation for the final release of Picard 3.0.

It fixes an important performance issue, so if you are currently running any of previous alpha, beta or release candidate versions upgrade ASAP.
It also fixes issues related to internationalization, causing some of existing translations to not actually show in the application (mainly constants).

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 now is a good time for final review and improvements of the translations.

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

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.

Welcome Silona Bonewald, new MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director!

We are very pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has appointed Silona Bonewald as Executive Director, following the unfortunate passing of our Rob at the beginning of the year.

Silona has served as Executive Director of IEEE SA Open and Vice President of Community Architecture at Hyperledger, part of the Linux Foundation. Earlier in her career she served as Director of InnerSource at PayPal and authored the widely used O’Reilly publication Understanding the InnerSource Checklist.

Silona also founded the League of Technical Voters, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to government transparency through open source technology, and has since advised nonprofit and open source organizations including the Cardano community’s IntersectMBO, the Foundation for Public Code, and the Software Freedom Conservancy. She has served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Austin chapter in the past and holds standing relationships across the world wide standards communities, and more… If you would like to keep browsing Silona’s looong list of professional credentials you are welcome to follow her on LinkedIn.

That’s all a long way to say that we are very excited to have Silona on board! The team is looking forward to working with Silona and you (our wonderful community) to carry Rob’s legacy forward.

Please give Silona a warm welcome in the comments!

Silona will also be hosting an AMA on 5 October 2026, at 17:00 UTC, on the forums (we will do another announcement regarding this, closer to the time), where you can post questions and share with Silona some of your dreams for the future of the MetaBrainz Foundation and its projects!

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-09-21

Hi! It’s been a while since our last release since we have been working on stability improvements for both website and search to better cope with all the load we are handling recently. The first related changes are part of this release, with more to come, including limiting searches to 500 results (if you need something further down the search, sorry but you probably need a better search!). Additionally, the very annoying bug that sometimes lost track times when parsing tracklists should hopefully be gone now (thanks dvirtz!), and a lot more aggregator and shortener links are now blocked; even when not yet blocked, remember to always add all the relevant destination links rather than redirects and aggregators if possible.

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 derat, dvirtz, ibmibmibm and mib for having contributed to the code. Thanks to DenizC, derat, dvirtz, HibiscusKazeneko, j.rohr, outsidecontext, Raman Sinclair, rinsuki and salo.rock for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to AligFu, AndrejsD1718, BestSteve, blueday, Covium, Denatura, EmO686, Flavia Telcean, joao_over9k, Kolesteraw, Life4649, liilliil, mfmeulenbelt, naturbrilian, NorwayFun, Priit Jõerüüt, pXF, syntariavoxmortem, TheParaziT, Vaclovas Intas, vacuousVersifier and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-09-21.0.

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.

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.