Category: MusicBrainz

Posts related to the MusicBrainz encyclopedia in general: community, data, client, server, etc.

Picard 2.0.4 released

This is a minor release that fixes a lot of issues, most notably few annoying crashes and a bunch of audio file formats-specific bugs.

I’d like to thank Philip Wolfer (outsidecontext/phw) for the fantastic job he did on this release.

As usual, you can find the latest downloads on Picard’s Website.

Here is the complete changelog for this release:

Bug

  • [PICARD-803] – tagging “8½ Minutes” with “replace with non-ascii characters” results in a directory being created
  • [PICARD-1216] – Does not display version information
  • [PICARD-1267] – 2.0.0dev6 crash in debug mode on Windows April Update (1803)
  • [PICARD-1281] – Picard has wrong version string
  • [PICARD-1294] – Crashes every time Picard connects to MB server.
  • [PICARD-1310] – Picard crashes on clearing log
  • [PICARD-1318] – RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration
  • [PICARD-1321] – CD drive selection not working on Linux
  • [PICARD-1322] – Crash in options on “Restore defaults”
  • [PICARD-1323] – Restore defaults does not restore CAA types
  • [PICARD-1324] – Default locale not working reliable
  • [PICARD-1326] – Picard Save Changes 5.1 Mix Type
  • [PICARD-1327] – Loading TAK files fails
  • [PICARD-1328] – Loading OptimFROG files fails
  • [PICARD-1329] – Picard fails saving ID3 tags with iTunNORM tag
  • [PICARD-1331] – Picard crashes on error during plugin install

 

Picard 2.0.3 released: Crash-fixes and scripting improvements

This is a minor release that fixes a lot of crashes and unicode errors on certain platforms. It also reverts a scripting improvement (PICARD-259) which had caused a couple of scripting bugs (PICARD-1207). Scripting now works exactly like Picard 1.4.

As usual, you can find the latest downloads on Picard’s Website.

The change-log is as follows –

Release Notes – Picard – Version 2.0.3

Bug

  • [PICARD-1122] – Preferred release type settings are exclusive and should be inclusive
  • [PICARD-1207] – Move additional files feature fails when source directory contains non-ascii characters
  • [PICARD-1247] – Not all “preserved” tags are preserved
  • [PICARD-1305] – Search dialog crashes picard when record doesn’t have an album
  • [PICARD-1306] – picard crashes when opening the options dialog if the cwd doesn’t exist

New Feature

  • [PICARD-1289] – Allow manually running any tagger script

Improvement

  • [PICARD-1292] – MusicBrainz Picard 2.01 64-bit for windows installs to “C:\Program Files (x86)” by default
  • [PICARD-1302] – Dropping an image from Google image crashes picard
  • [PICARD-1303] – picard crashes when matching a cluster with a release with no tracks
  • [PICARD-1304] – Info dialog for album crashes because track doesn’t have a tracknumber

Regression

  • [PICARD-259] – Make file-specific variables available to tagger script

 

samj1912 out o/

 

Picard 2.0.2 released! Signed macOS builds

This is a minor release that fixes some crashes due to logging events and compatibility issues on Macs running on dual-core processors.

I would like to extend a word of thanks to Francois Ferrand and Ryan McKern, following whose advice, bitmap was able to successfully fix our macOS packaging and code-signing issues, details of which can be found in our recent CFH blog.

As usual, you can find the latest downloads on Picard’s Website.

The change-log is as follows –

Sub-task

Task

Bug

  • [PICARD-342] – Picard is not properly signed for Mac OS X Gatekeeper
  • [PICARD-1212] – Picard 2.0.0dev4 crashing at startup
  • [PICARD-1300] – Picard crashes when logging lots of events

samj1912 out o/

Call for help: Picard 2.0 macOS packaging

Hello everyone,

As you might know, we recently released Picard 2.0 stable. One of the major problems with the macOS version of the same is that is very unreliable. It works perfectly on some systems and doesn’t on others with the same macOS version. See PICARD-1212 for example.

Another major problem we are facing is code-signing Picard 2.0. In order to ensure that our macOS users have a seamless experience, we paid for an Apple dev account, but we are unable to code-sign Picard.  See PICARD-1296

If you have experience with either and are willing to help, please email us at – support@metabrainz.org or join us on irc at #metabrainz (freenode).

 

Picard 2.0.1 released! (Windows and macOS users rejoice)

Note – There are no changes for Linux users, so they can safely skip this release if they want.

Given the massive feedback about the shortcomings of the Windows and macOS versions of Picard, we decided to do a minor release addressing some of the issues with our executables.

As usual, you can find the latest downloads on Picard’s Website.

The change-log is as follows –

Bug-fix

  • [PICARD-1283] – Fingerprinting not working on macOS in Picard 2.0
  • [PICARD-1286] – Error creating SSL context on Windows

Improvement

  • [PICARD-1290] – Improve slow start up times by moving to a non single file exe
  • [PICARD-1291] – Use an installer for Picard 2.x windows exe

Basically, the Windows executable is now a proper installer and some missing SSL dependencies are bundled with it.

The macOS builds also include the missing AcoustID fingerprinting binary.

The startup time for both the Windows and macOS version has been improved as well.

Have fun tagging your files!

samj1912 signing off o/

 

Picard 2.0 released

Hey people, samj1912 here again o/

This time we are announcing the release of a new Picard!

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 2.0 is now out, containing many fixes and new features and much needed upgrades!

The last time we put out a major release was more than 6 years ago (Picard 1.0 in June of 2012), so this release comes with a major back-end update. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependencies a bit. Python should now be at least version 3.5, PyQt 5.7 or newer and Mutagen should be 1.37 or newer. A side effect of this dependency bump is that Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive.

A couple of things to note – with Picard 2.0, Picard Windows builds will be portable standalone binaries. Also, we will only be supporting 64-bit Windows officially because of lack of resources to build a 32-bit image. The macOS requirements were also bumped up for the same reasons, with macOS 10.10 being the lowest version that is supported.

As such, Picard 1.4.2 will be the last version that is supported for both Windows 32 and macOS 10.7-10.10. You can find it in the Picard downloads section as well.

You can find a detailed change-log on the Picard webiste.

The highlights of this update are –

  • Retina and Hi-DPI display support
  • Improved performance
  • UI improvements

We would like to thank all contributors, from all around the world, who helped for this release: Laurent Monin, Sophist, Wieland Hoffmann, Vishal Choudhary, Philipp Wolfer, Calvin Walton, David Mandelberg, Paul Roub, Yagyansh Bhatia, Shen-Ta Hsieh, Ville Skyttä, Yvan Rivierre and also all of our translators!

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

Note:  If you are facing errors while tagging releases on Windows, do take a look at this FAQ about SSL errors.

Picard 2.0 beta2 announcement

Hello people,

Thank you so much for reporting bugs in our Picard 2.0.0beta1 release. We fixed most of the critical bugs that you guys and gals reported. You can find the beta2 release with the fixes here – Picard 2.0.0.beta2

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we decided to release a new stable version of Picard before the beginning of the summer.

To help us, advanced users, translators and developers are encouraged to:

Note – If any of you are seasoned Windows/macOS devs and have experience with PyInstaller, we need some help with PICARD-1216 and PICARD-1217. We also need some help with code signing Picard for OSX. Hit us up on #metabrainz on freenode for more information. We will be very grateful for any help that you may offer!

A simplified list of changes made since 1.4 can be read here.

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

Our next major challenge: Fixing the MusicBrainz site design for an improved user experience

Back in 1998 when I started playing with Perl and wrote the CD Index (the pre-cursor to MusicBrainz). I was learning web development and had little understanding of web design. The tools I was using were primitive at the time and the results were cringeworthy and have not withstood the test of time.

Fast forward some 18 years and we’ve arrived at the current MusicBrainz site design — there have been minor facelifts over time and a bigger one once we released NGS back in 2011. But really, the site design hasn’t changed much and we’ve kept gluing features and new bits of data onto the crappy design, leaving us with the current mess of a UX experience we know as the modern MusicBrainz.

Our community has been asking us to improve UX for a long time — we need to:
• Empower our community with better tools for developing, editing, viewing the magnificent data that we have.
• Build a stronger foundation for further development, interaction, and extension of our projects in future
• Make our projects more welcoming to newcomers, by lowering the learning curve as well as keeps the workflow of an advanced editor intact.

Fortunately for us, Chhavi [a design student from IIT, India] has become an active contributor to the MetaBrainz projects. She has been studying our sites and how we work as a team and has volunteered to drive the process to fix the UI and the user experience issues on the MusicBrainz site. She has proposed a part of this work as her Google Summer of Code project.

Our overall goal as a team is to create a design system which will help the designers and developers stay in sync, give a more unified theme to our projects, and make it easier for new contributors to join our projects. This will also make it much easier for our developers to address your requests for features/bug fixes faster in the future.

We are not barging into your online lives and trying to make our sites pretty — instead, we are focusing on the real experiences you have with them. We held long detailed conversations during our last summit in Barcelona, where Chhavi was also present and discussed a lot of concerns that might be running in your head while you read this.  As part of this initiative, we have been interviewing a number of key members of our project to understand what we and our users really need from this revamp. We have also kept track of community discussions around this topic. From this we decided that our users fall into three broad categories:

  1. There are those who contribute to code and understand database tech.

  2. Experienced/advanced MusicBrainz editors who don’t understand database tech.

  3. New users, who feel hopelessly lost in the current scenario.

To make all this research/discussion/feedback available for everyone to go through, we have started a Jira issue type Design that tracks all the design related tickets of MusicBrainz. The most notable tickets that show mock-ups of future MusicBrainz pages include:

When you look at these pages, please keep in mind that we’re trying to clean up the clutter and to make things simple and clean. Easier to understand for an experienced editor or a new one. The data that we have should be presented in a way that makes sense. The data should present the gaps and holes that it presently has, for people to be able to improve the data gaps. Data should also be our binding link to exploit the full potential of the projects that we have, such as ListenBrainz or CritiqueBrainz.

We are not trying to fluff things up and make them look pretty. Prettiness might come with the simplicity that we are chasing. Having user flows that do not hamper the speed and makes our life easier, is our utmost goal.

That said, we are happy to receive feedback on the upcoming designs as well as the process– if you have any, please post your comments to the appropriate tickets in Jira that we linked above. We’re currently getting some pressing dev tasks out of the way before we start the actual implementation of the redesigned project. Once our team is ready to work on this, we will public more blog posts about how this project will unfold and how it will impact our users.

 

Picard 2.0 beta announcement

Hello people,

We saw a flurry of updates to Picard these last few months and I am happy to announce that Picard 2.0 is finally in beta. You can find it here – Picard 2.0.0beta1

If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependencies a bit. What this means is that Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive.

We also decided to release a new stable version of Picard before the beginning of the summer.

To help us, advanced users, translators and developers are encouraged to:

A simplified list of changes made since 1.4 can be read here.

Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.

 

 

Expanding our team

As the world comes back to life after the summer break, we’re making some changes and expanding our team. First, Roman Tsukanov has decided to not renew his contract with us. During his tenure with MetaBrainz, Roman adopted and released CritiqueBrainz and also wrote our new MetaBrainz web page, which is helping us bring in new supporters. His contributions have been far from trivial — thank you for your efforts, Roman!

Due in part to the new MetaBrainz web site, we’ve got more financial support than ever, and this allows us to replace Roman with two engineers! I’m please to announce that we’re hiring two of our Summer of Code students who just completed the program:

Sambhav Kothari AKA samj1912: Sambhav started hacking on Picard earlier this year and knocked Picard out of dormancy, working towards a new release and then making Picard his Summer of Code project. He completed his project with flying colors and is working towards a major upgrade of Picard. On the MetaBrainz team he is going to look after the new search infrastructure and the maintenance and bug fixing of our Web Service in addition to hacking on Picard. A full plate, for sure!

Param Singh AKA iliekcomputers: About the same time that samj1912 arrived, Param arrived. He expressed interest in working on ListenBrainz — he too dove right in and started making improvements. ListenBrainz had quite a ways to go before he could aim to make a Summer of Code project out of it. Param and I embarked on a journey to revamp and improve the stability of ListenBrainz, which culminated in us releasing the new ListenBrainz beta a few weeks ago. Since then he’s been focusing on his Summer of Code project, which is also now complete. On the MetaBrainz team Param will be looking after ListenBrainz and also the new MetaBrainz web site.

Both Param and Sambhav will officially start working on the MetaBrainz team starting October 1, but I strongly suspect we’ll see them around and hacking on the projects as has become the norm this year.

Welcome aboard Sambhav and Param!