The Picard team is happy to announce the availability of the first beta release for the upcoming Picard 2.9. This is a pre-release we put out for wider testing and to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.9 release.
Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback. This release contains contributions by Laurent Monin, Philipp Wolfer, Bob Swift, David Kellner, Tushar Rohith, Aerozol and certuna.
Download
Picard 2.9 Beta 1 can be downloaded from the Picard website Downloads section.
Linux users might want to install the beta version using Snap. If your Linux distribution supports Snap you can install Picard from the beta channel using:
snap install --beta picard
What’s new?
Among the more visible changes are a new application icon for macOS, several new scripting variables for file creation dates, series details and lyricist / writer sort and a new tag releasedate which maps to ID3 v2.4 TDRL.
Also with this release Picard changes the default settings to use ID3 v2.4 instead of v2.3 and also enables the option “Use standardized artist names” by default. These changes of default configuration values only affects new installations, existing installations retain the existing configuration settings.
The Picard documentation has also been updated to reflect the changes in this release.
Below is a complete list of changes since Picard 2.9 Alpha 1.
Bug Fixes
- PICARD-2534 – Vorbis / FLAC: Trailing null char in
datetag causes date to be ignored - PICARD-2605 – Windows: libssl-1_1-x64.dll missing
- PICARD-2608 – Application exit waits for outstanding loading request
- PICARD-2611 – During clustering selection changes are ignored, can lead to users performing actions on unexpected files
- PICARD-2615 – Picard does not check for unsaved files when using the QUIT command
- PICARD-2624 – ValueError writing truncated AIFF / WAVE / DSDIFF files
- PICARD-2627 – Interprocess communication pipe hangs on quit
- PICARD-2629 – Keyboard shortcut for “Search for similar albums”
- PICARD-2630 – Crash at startup due failing to upgrade configuration
- PICARD-2642 – Submit cluster as release opens on 0.0.0.0 if “Listen only on localhost” is disabled
- PICARD-2645 – QUIT command only works if there are files that need saving and user cancels the quit
New Features
- PICARD-711 – New variables for release group, release, recording and work series
- PICARD-2617 – Add variables for file creation (
_file_created_timestamp) and modification date(time) (_file_modified_timestamp) - PICARD-2606 – Add
_writersortand_lyricistsortvariables
Improvements
- PICARD-900 – Use Id3v24 by default instead of id3v23
- PICARD-1649 – Allow plugins to link to documentation
- PICARD-1945 – Option to set the number of parallel fpcalc processes
- PICARD-2535 – Handle null terminated tag values in Vorbis / FLAC tags
- PICARD-2609 – Improve UI responsiveness during file loading
- PICARD-2616 – Support tag
releasedatefor TDRL / RELEASEDATE (not filled by default, but available for scripting and plugins) - PICARD-2620 – New icon for Picard on macOS
- PICARD-2625 – Improve visibility of creating a new file naming script
- PICARD-2626 – macOS: add 512px & 1024px icons
- PICARD-2634 – Use standardized artist names by default
Helping out
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.9 release is using and testing this beta release. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
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 Developing on the Picard website to get started.