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.
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-1877 – The language field of a lyrics (USLT) tag is not preserved
- PICARD-3377 –
picard-cli plugins compile-uifails when called on a .ui file inside a directory - PICARD-3381 – Alternative Qt6 rcc path missing for RHEL
- PICARD-3383 –
picard-cli plugins install .gives an error about the plugin not being in the registry - PICARD-3393 – A single failing metadata processor prevents all subsequent processors from running
- PICARD-3398 – Pending request stuck if authentication gets cancelled
- PICARD-3400 – OAuth: browser-integration login exchanges code with wrong (unprefixed) scopes, breaking collections
- PICARD-3402 – ListenBrainz batch submission retries forever on permanent errors (e.g. 401)
- PICARD-3403 – Plugin git authentication crashes with AttributeError on pygit2 1.20+ (removed
GIT_CREDENTIAL_*constants) - PICARD-3404 – A rating of 0 is discarded when loading ASF/WMA/WMV files
- PICARD-3405 –
ImageList.get_types_dict()keeps the smallest image per type instead of the biggest, defeating “Never replace cover images with smaller ones” - PICARD-3406 – AttributeError: ‘Pygit2Repository’ object has no attribute ‘branches’
New Features
- PICARD-700 – Add a new tag “albumartists”
- PICARD-3378 – Add tagger script functions
$get_new()and$get_original()to allow direct access to new or original file tags - PICARD-3379 – Add a regex testing playground to the Advanced options screen
- PICARD-3380 – Option to remove all cover images from tags
Improvements
- PICARD-2109 – Set cover art default to CAA Release Group
- PICARD-2442 – Allow runtime theme changes
- PICARD-2844 – Make language required for both comment and lyrics tags
- PICARD-3117 – Write “Performer [instruments]” without specific instrument as
performer:instruments - PICARD-3374 – Disc log readers registered by plugins should have access to the PluginApi
- PICARD-3382 –
debug_if()andDebugOptshould be exposed through Plugin V3 API - PICARD-3387 – Use tags added with
api.register_script_variablefor auto-completion - PICARD-3394 – ListenQueue: Avoid unnecessary file writes and clean up queue file after successful submission
- PICARD-3396 – Offer “Use track relationships” as an opt-in in the first-run setup wizard
- PICARD-3399 – Improve browser integration auth response pages
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, Bryan Roessler, Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer. Translations were updated by hildgyorgy (Hungarian), janrieger (German), Marc Riera (Catalan), mfmeulenbelt (Dutch), ninjum (Galician), NorwayFun (Georgian), Priit Jõerüüt (Estonian) and Vaclovas Intas (Lithuanian).