Picard 3 beta 7 released – MetaBrainz Blog

Today, we have released MusicBrainz Picard 3 beta 7. This new versions brings several fixes over the last beta 5 (yes, we have skipped a beta number again), but also improvements and some new features. Among the highlights are:

Option profiles can now be exported and imported as TOML files. This makes sharing options much easier. We are excited to see how this will be used by you all.
Artist name standardization can now be set to one of three values: no standardization, standardizing only variations of the artist name (“Beatles” vs. “The Beatles”) or standardizing also actual artist name changes (“Diddy”, who previously performed under the names “P. Diddy” and “Puff Daddy”). Standardizing name variations is the new default setting. See also the documentation.
Plugins can now implement custom CD ripper log file support, and there is built-in support for Cyanrip log files.
Picard can now much better handles wrongly or differently encoded filenames when loading files.
The setup wizard got some improvements, allowing users to configure their update notification settings for the app and plugins. Also the setup wizard can now be started again from the help menu. This is not yet the final version of the wizard, but it’s getting closer.
The User Guide was updated to document the latest changes.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 5 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-3330 – Config upgrade hooks do not update profile overrides for value transforms
PICARD-3331 – Encoding error when saving file metadata
PICARD-3332 – Enums are not stored as values in option profiles
PICARD-3333 – Cover art provider plugin option pages cannot have profile highlights
PICARD-3334 – Enabling track title translation always uses the recording title
PICARD-3336 – Can not go back to main app window after viewing Picard > About Picard
PICARD-3338 – PICARD_PLUGIN_REGISTRY_URL env var ignored when official registry cache exists
PICARD-3339 – Plugin boolean options show up in quick settings, but are not usable as such
PICARD-3342 – Profile highlights broken if same option name is used by different plugins
PICARD-3344 – Crash when refreshing collections list
PICARD-3345 – Exception when reading SYLT tag with newline

New Features

PICARD-30 – Add _artistcomment and _albumartistcomment variables
PICARD-3328 – Support TOML-based exportable/importable profiles
PICARD-3346 – Cyanrip log support

Improvements

PICARD-2673 – Standardize artist name variations by default
PICARD-2845 – Add wizard illustration to first run information dialog and setup wizard
PICARD-2999 – Automatic update check should be opt-in
PICARD-3335 – Replace picard-plugins with picard-cli subcommand architecture
PICARD-3337 – Add a picard-cli plugins compile-ui command
PICARD-3343 – Allow starting the setup wizard again from the help menu
PICARD-3347 – Add a plugin v3 extension point to register a custom CD ripping log parser

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.

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

Acknowledgements

Code contributions by Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer.
Translations were updated by Marc Riera (Catalan), rez00 (French) and zatto13 (Japanese). Documentation updates by Bob Swift, Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer.