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.
What’s new?
Bugfixes
- PICARD-3438 – Plugin action
MENUsetting not honored in “Plugin Tools” on main menu bar - PICARD-3439 – Unexpected font change in script editors after pasting
- PICARD-3442 – Track duration tolerance (ignore_track_duration_difference_under) no longer suppresses the ~length diff in the Metadata box
- PICARD-3446 – CLI does not run config upgrade hooks, leaving old config files unmigrated
- PICARD-3448 – Some constants aren’t properly translated, though translations are available
- PICARD-3450 – Button titles on scripting options page are compressed
- PICARD-3453 – Metadata box tag tooltips re-render Markdown per row, causing severe CPU load during save/selection
Improvements
- PICARD-3441 – Clarify read-only non-tag values in the metadata box (length, filepath)
- PICARD-3444 – Bundle sqlite3 in packaged builds
- PICARD-3449 – Rework Cover Art → Processing options layout to stack Tags/Files vertically
- PICARD-3452 – Sort debug options by translated name and show CLI name in tooltip
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 release candidate version from the Picard download page. Linux users can run from source or try the “candidate” channel of the Picard snap package.
Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub.
Helping out
We want to provide a polished release of Picard 3.0 that everyone can feel confident to upgrade to. To achieve this, we need the help from the MusicBrainz community.
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 3.0 release is using and testing this release candidate. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
We also need help with translations, as there are a lot of new features and UI changes over previous Picard versions. We will avoid any further text changes before the final release, so now is the right time to help with translation on Weblate. Please see the translation instructions on the Wiki for details.
If you are a software developer you are very welcomed to provide fixes and features. Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub. See Contributing to Picard on the Picard website to get started.
You can also look at the new Plugin API and develop plugins for Picard or update your existing Picard 2 plugin to work with Picard 3.
Acknowledgements
Code contributions by Bob Swift, Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer.
Translations were updated by BestSteve (Chinese (Traditional Han script)), Laurent Monin (French), Marc Riera (Catalan), MichTheOcelot (Spanish (Latin America)), pXF (Hungarian), st.esser (German), Vaclovas Intas (Lithuanian) and wileyfoxyx (Russian).