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.

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-3412 – Picard logs the user out after ~1 hour, requiring re-authentication on nearly every startup
PICARD-3413 – Crash in User Interface > Toolbar Actions on Add Action
PICARD-3415 – The item views for unclustered and clustered files do not use the system folder icon
PICARD-3416 – Generated Appstream appdata file has empty release list
PICARD-3417 – Item views and the metadata box do not refresh correctly when interface colors are changed and applied
PICARD-3420 – Set proper pygit2 timeouts, reduce the risk of hang
PICARD-3421 – Wrong desktop file name passed to QApplication.setDesktopFileName() breaks XDG/Wayland app-id association
PICARD-3423 – Snap package does not register the MPRIS2 audio player DBus interface
PICARD-3424 – Infinite re-authentication loop when a server rejects a valid OAuth token
PICARD-3425 – Submission server is not used for ISRC and rating submission
PICARD-3426 – “Submit data to the configured server” checkbox checkmark not visible in dark mode
PICARD-3427 – Crash when clicking on a track rating

Improvements

PICARD-3137 – Do not ask for authentication when switching to a server not supporting authentication
PICARD-3407 – Add is_from_mb flag to plugin register_script_variable() function
PICARD-3408 – Using --debug-opt flag alone doesn’t enable debug log level
PICARD-3409 – Reduce memory usage
PICARD-3410 – Show a busy cursor to acknowledge async lookup and cluster actions
PICARD-3414 – Unify boolean environment variable parsing and add PICARD_FORCE_FUSION
PICARD-3419 – Add option to standardize artist name only in “artists” and “albumartists” tags
PICARD-3422 – Make the “Make It So!” accept button reusable and configurable, and extend it to the Script Editor

Tasks

PICARD-3048 – Document manual editing of tags with metadata view and tag editor
PICARD-3215 – Update documentation for restructured CD lookup menu

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, Greg Myers, krotka, Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer.
Translations were updated by Marc Riera (Catalan), mfmeulenbelt (Dutch), ninjum (Galician) and st.esser (German).