MusicBrainz – MetaBrainz Blog

Rest in Peace drsaunde!

Hello!

It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news today; we’ve just found out that one of our most prolific editors, David Saunders (AKA drsaunde) has passed away.

We don’t know much about the circumstances of what happened, but a friend of David’s was kind enough to reach out to us to let us know of his passing. The friend said:

“Our dear friend, David Saunders aka drsaunde sadly passed away March 26, 2025 surrounded by friends listening to his favourite music. Dave was a brilliant man with a great sense of humour and obviously an avid fan of music. I knew he wrote for a music site but never learned which one. Quick search for a common username he used landed me on your site.”

To put into context who drsaunde really was, lets look at his impressive statistics:

He made a total of 2,191,225 edits, with only 37 rejected edits, for an astonishing acceptance rate of 99.998%. He was a member of MusicBrainz since 2006-05-06 for a total of 18 years, 10 months and 20 days, which amounts to 317 edits for each day he was a member of MusicBrainz. 🤯🤯🤯

On top of that he was our Areas editor, the person in charge of maintaining our database of cities and regions in the world. Needless to say, drsaunde has left a giant hole in our community and our hearts.

In keeping with his spirit, his friends will hold a celebration of life for drsaunde on May 3rd. We’ve sent some funds to help ensure that celebration really honors his spirit.

Finally, if you would like to take a moment to remember drsaunde, you could head over to ListenBrainz radio and make a playlist from his most listened tracks.

Rest in peace, drsaunde, you will be missed.

Picard 2.13.3 released

Picard 2.13.3 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.13. This primarily fixes a regression with the Windows package, where a system wide installed libssl would cause SSL failures in Picard’s network requests. This release also includes a workaround for libopus not loading embedded cover art files.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.12 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.13.1.

Picard 2.13.2 released

Picard 2.13.2 is a maintenance release for the recently released Picard 2.13 which fixes a crash when opening the context menu for multiple selected changed tags.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.12 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.13.1.

Picard 2.13.1 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that the final version 2.13.1 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release brings multiple bugfixes and some new features. More details below.

X-odus: Find our projects on Bluesky and Mastodon

We have now completely moved off X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). It has been a long time coming, with rampant enshittification, uncertainty around platform changes, and content that has been increasingly unpleasant to interact with. Politics aside, we’re sick of going to check notifications and getting blasted with a feed largely consisting of violence, porn, advertising, the owner, and AI grifters*.

Instead, come join MetaBrainz, MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz and BookBrainz on Bluesky and/or Mastodon!

MusicBrainz Server update, 2024-10-21

As mentioned in the banner of MusicBrainz website for a week already, images for events and releases are currently unavailable due to the Internet Archive (IA) recovering from a DDoS attack. See the IA’s Mastodon page for follow-up. Both the Cover Art Archive and the Event Art Archive were available from the Internet Archive which is doing its best to restore services safely, that will take as many days as necessary. Meanwhile, today’s server update temporarily disables editing images, until our access to the Internet Archive is fully restored. It also brings some updates behind the scenes. Last but not least, it also features a few improvements and bugfixes, mainly contributed by volunteers without whom this would not have the same significance!

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 derat, Divyansh Gupta, and Serial-ATA for having contributed to the code. Thanks to Dan and HibiscusKazeneko for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Arainuki, Aris_8585, blit, Echelon666, salo.rock, Vaclovas Intas, and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2024-10-21.0.

Picard 2.12.3 released

Picard 2.12.3 has been released, fixing an issue with some tooltips and disallowing using a directory separator as replacement character.

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.11 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.12.

Picard 2.12.2 released

Picard 2.12.2 has been released, fixing an issue with sorting numbers in list views.

Picard 2.12.1 contained a fix for crashes on macOS which were related to language aware sorting. Unfortunately the solution we chose for this caused sorting of numbers to be broken on Windows. With this release this gets solved by using the previous sorting technique on Windows again (which was not affected by the crashes experienced on macOS).

The latest release is available for download on the Picard download page.

The detailed changes for this maintenance release are below. For an overview of the new features since Picard 2.11 please see our detailed release announcement for Picard 2.12.

GSoC 2024: Picard image processing

Hello, I’m Giorgio Fontanive (aka twodoorcoupe), a computer engineering student from Italy. For the past few months I’ve been working on Picard under the mentorship of zas and outsidecontext.

Objective

Currently, Picard can retrieve releases’ cover art images from multiple providers and embed these into music files’ tags or save them as separate files. While most cover art providers allow some options over things like size, the user still has little control over the final images.

The goal of the project was to fix this by adding more options to filter and to post process images, independent of the provider, while also having different options for images embedded into tags and the ones saved as separate files.

GSoC 2024: New Email Service with Internationalization

This post is also available on Jade’s blog

Personal Introduction

Hello! I’m Jade Ellis, AKA JadedBlueEyes. I’m an undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of Kent in England. I was thrilled to be selected as a participant in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 program. My project focused on developing an email service with internationalisation support, MJML-based markup and text fallback to produce emails that are visually appealing and accessible to as many people as possible.

Reason for the Project

The MusicBrainz project sends thousands of emails every day to its diverse contributors. However, the existing email system was limited, having organically grown over the project’s lifetime. It could only send emails in English, and only in plain text. The experience that new contributors got could only be described as unfriendly. The overarching goal of my proposal was to improve this.