Author: outsidecontext

ruby-discid 1.0

This has already been announced on the mailing list back in May: ruby-discid, the Ruby bindings for libdiscid, have been released in version 1.0. This libdiscid binding for Ruby is the successor of mb-discid. As libdiscid has gained quite a few features in the past I took the opportunity to simplify the API and do some fundamental changes to ruby–discid.

The most important features of this release are:
  • Full support for libdiscid 0.1 to 0.5, including ISRC and MCN reading and feature detection.
  • Uses FFI to load libdiscid, so no compilation is required.
  • Support for Ruby 1.8.7 – 2.0, jRuby and Rubinius.

The probably easiest way to install and use ruby-discid is by using the Ruby gem. For Ubuntu users there is a PPA and for Arch Linux users an AUR package available.

The source code is available on Github, there you will also find more detailed installation and usage instructions.

If you have previously used mb-discid you can continue using it, but you should consider updating to ruby–discid. The API is quite similar and simple enough to make that a painless process.

Picard 0.14 released

NGS is obviously the release of this week, but Lukáš has today announced the release of Picard 0.14 on the mailing list.

Picard 0.14 should be the last release that doesn’t support the NGS web service. It brings some improvements in handling of network errors, changes the default ID3 version, finally adds support for sorting, prioritizing matches based on release types and fixes a couple of bugs. It is also the first release that has a Mac package available at the release time, many thanks to bitmap for that.

You can download the packages as usually at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Picard

Changelog:

  • Fixed a problem with network operations hanging after a network error (#5794, #5884)
  • ID3v2.3 with UTF-16 is now the default ID3 version
  • Option to set preferred release types for improved album matching
  • Added support for sorting the album/file lists (#75)
  • Fixed OptimFROG tag reading (#5859)
  • Fixed colors for a white-on-black color scheme (#5846)
  • Added an option to replace non-ASCII punctuation (#5834)
  • Support for writing release group and work IDs, currently unused (#5805)
  • Fixed saving of the release event format tag (#5250)
  • Added support for the language and script tags (#943)
  • Plugins can now use track-track relationships (#5849)
  • Allowed external drives to be visible in the file browser panel on OS X (#5308)

Picard 0.12

We have released the next version of MusicBrainz Picard. Picard 0.12 includes a lot of bug fixes and new features, including:

  • Support for ratings and folksonomy tags.
  • Live syntax checking for tagger script and naming strings.
  • Embed cover art into WMA and APEv2 tags.
  • New script functions $matchedtracks(), $initials(), $firstalphachar(), $truncate() and $firstwords()
  • New plugin extension point ui_init, allowing plugins to add new UI elements to the main window.
  • A new high quality application icon.
  • Support for originaldate tag. While this is not filled by Picard itself it can be used from within plugins such as the Original Release Date plugin.
  • Write ISRCs from MusicBrainz into tags.
  • CD drive dropdown selection on Linux.
  • Various small improvements to the UI.
  • Updated translations and the option to choose the user interface language.

A complete list of changes be found in NEWS.txt.

Picard 0.12 is available for download for Windows and Linux. The Mac OS X version will be released later, sorry for that. We are still in search for a long term maintainer of Picard on OS X.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release.