Updates – MetaBrainz Blog

Picard 3 Release Candidate 1

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.

Search upgrades: Nov 30, 2026

MusicBrainz is announcing a set of upgrades for its search service on November 30, 2026. The main change will be upgrading Solr from version 9 to 10. Fixes and improvements will be released alongside this. Some of these changes may break some specific search requests. Finally, a new feature will be released making it possible to use the search service to search for (musical) genres. See below for more information.

Breaking changes

The following tickets may break search requests in some way.

SEARCH-444: Improper ‘relation-list’ in ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be a breaking change for accessing related entities in area and URL search results.
SEARCH-642: Drop ‘id’ fields for cdstub and tag. This will technically be a breaking change, but it was broken by design as the values for these search fields are not documented and have never been intended for public use anyway.
SEARCH-666: Use quality names rather than numeric IDs. This will be a breaking change for release searches that use quality search field.
SEARCH-752: Relationships have an extra ‘target’ property in JSON output. Fixing it by removing the redundant property target will be a breaking change if you are accessing it in search results. The “proper” way to do this is to use the property target-type and access the property id under the property named after this target type.
SEARCH-764: Upgrade to Solr 10. This will be a breaking change for mirror owners only, not for search requests. More specifically, it is advised to change the Solr configuration and to re-index the whole MusicBrainz database.

Soft changes

The following tickets will improve search with breaking any requests:

SEARCH-452: Index all URL relationships. So far, only URL relationships to Artist and Release were indexed. URL relationships to all other entity types will be indexed too.
SEARCH-646: Return exact match first for tag search. It should improve tag search results using indexed Solr search compared to direct Postgres search.
SEARCH-677: Include disambiguation of event’s place and work’s recording. Places related to searched events and recordings related to searched works will now be outputted with disambiguation comment, in the same way other related entities are outputted in search results.
SEARCH-680: Index genre annotations. It will add genre annotations to the results of annotation search which is already supported for all other annotation-able entity types.
SEARCH-681: Support indexed search of genres. It will add “Genre” as a target type for search, just like most other searchable entity types.
SEARCH-751: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘event’ and ‘work’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.
SEARCH-753: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.

Miscellaneous

A MusicBrainz Server release is also expected to go with some of these changes.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.

Picard 3 beta 9 released

Today, we have released MusicBrainz Picard 3 beta 9. This new versions brings several fixes over the last beta 7 (yes, we have skipped a beta number again), but also improvements and some new features.

Since we are near a final release, we tried to focus on quality of life and UI/UX improvements, some changes in the UI are quite important (release preferences UI is a complete overhaul, and the new About dialog also got a nice refresh). Among the highlights are:

MetaBrainz OAuth2 support and various OAuth improvements and bug fixes
ISRC reading (from files or CD) and optional submission
Word diff for tags in the Metadata Box
UI/UX improvements: Redesign of some option pages, along re-organization and performance improvements
Plugin API improvements

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 7 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.

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.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-07-30

We’re happy to release our first MusicBrainz Server update since the schema change, following our migration of user accounts to the MetaBrainz website, which we’ve been spending most of our development time on until now. (This blog post also lags a bit behind the date we tagged the release, as you can tell from the title.)

In case you’re running a local MusicBrainz Server for development purposes, know that you can preserve the ability to log in without OAuth by adding sub LOCAL_ACCOUNTS_ENABLED { 1 } to lib/DBDefs.pm. (It’s already enabled by default if DEVELOPMENT_SERVER is.)

We’ve also made changes to digest authentication in the web service, detailed in the blog post linked above. If you don’t use digest authentication or any apps that do, it’s recommended you disable it from the Applications page.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to julian45 and rinsuki for having contributed to the code. Thanks to affronttonature, Anesidora, arsinclair, chirlu, DarkAdonis, jesus2099, julian45, Lotheric, practik, rinsuki, and wileyfoxyx for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to 7Stars, ApeKattQuest/MonkeyPython, Denatura, Early6431, EmO686, Flavia Telcean, GABG, Jeluang, JerryBest, KevinOpperman, LAY.JOSHI97, Lummerkurt, MFreedom89, Philipp Wolfer, ROManceJP, RalfZhang, The
ParaziT, afterthemagic, blueday, coffeeicus, cuhsy, jerry155756294, julian45, karpuzikov, meze, mfmeulenbelt, mr_monkey, salo.rock, sashimi3433, scientists360, silentbird, soonaf, sq, welikeheon, wileyfoxyx, and
zatto13 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-07-30.1.

Picard 3 beta 7 released

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.

Picard 3 beta 5 released

Today, we’re making available the fifth beta version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. This new versions brings some important changes:

The Options menu was reworked with generalized quick settings and easier access to scripts and options.
Handling of the Options dialog and the File Naming Script Editor was streamlined. Editing file naming scripts is now available in the menu in Options > File naming scripts > Edit scripts… or via Ctrl+Shift+S.
Option profiles can now be used with plugin settings, the “Attached option profiles” dialog allows changing selected options.
Plugins can be installed from a local directory without git, which simplifies local development and plugins created just for personal use.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 4 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.

Upcoming changes to user accounts and authentication

We are in the process of moving user accounts, authentication and OAuth applications from the MusicBrainz website to the MetaBrainz website.
This centralizes our account management between all the *Brainz projects, along with some security improvements.

Historically, all accounts were managed on the MusicBrainz website simply because it existed before the MetaBrainz Foundation itself. However, creating a MusicBrainz account just to use ListenBrainz or our other sister projects doesn’t make much sense.
We are changing this legacy setup to improve the user experience and bring better cohesion to the entire MetaBrainz ecosystem.

New MetaBrainz login page

Here is what you need to know about how this transition affects you:

Continue reading “Upcoming changes to user accounts and authentication”

Picard 3 beta 4 fixes startup issues on macOS

We have released Picard 3 beta 4. The recently released beta 3 did crash on macOS and when running the picard-plugins command line tool, both has been fixed in this. In addition beta 4 fixes display issues in the new log view.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 3 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.

Picard 3 beta 3 released

Today, we’re making available another pre-release version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. This beta release offers various bugfixes and improvements over the last beta. Most notably the release lookup and matching was improved, several cover art related issues were fixed, the UI got more responsive during file load and the log view became faster and allows better filtering.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 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.

MusicBrainz database schema change release, 2026-05-11 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2026 database schema change now! Thanks to all who were patient during Monday’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers.

This is a fairly small database schema change release which mostly improves things behind the scenes. Of the schema change tickets, the only one that affects users directly is you are most likely to notice while you browse and edit in MusicBrainz is MBS-14092 (which allows adding series of series, for example for award series for podcasts).

Thanks to chaban, UltimateRiff and yyb987 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements, and thanks to jmrr83, salo.rock and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the (amended) release notes for update instructions.