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Hi everyone! As you might remember, our last post was the end of a series of entries meant to summarize everything that had happened in instrument-land so far. So now that catching up is done, here’s what has happened lately!
This post is rather large, so if you only read one thing about instruments today, make it our new guide for requesting instruments! (More details about this in the last section below.)
Continue reading “Interlude: Ensembling!”
Picard 2.1.2 includes just few changes over Picard 2.1.0, but fixes some annoying bugs, so it is recommended to upgrade:
As usual, packages will be available from Picard website and from GitHub release pages
Bugs can be reported on Picard bug tracker.
MusicBrainz Picard 2.1 is finally here. This version includes a lot of fixes and improvements over previous stable version (2.0.4). It is recommended to upgrade of course.
Most notably, it includes following changes:
$title and $delete-P, --no-plugins) allowing to skip plugin loading, which may help when a plugin is crashing Picard at start and to identify if an issue is due to a plugin or the main programI’d like to thank all developers, translators, testers and users who contributed to this version, kudos to Philip Wolfer (phw).
Binary packages from OSx and Windows are available from Picard Github releases page and from Picard website.
Here is the complete change log:
Picard team is working hard on the upcoming 2.1.0 version, we decided to release a preliminary version for all to test and to let time for translators to work.
We’ll accept patches that actually fix current features until the final release which is planned in 2 weeks.
Translators can update translations on transifex as usual, strings shouldn’t change (but if we can’t avoid it) anymore until the final release.
It should be noted a new resource picard_appstream was added for the translation of appdata.xml file (PICARD-1424).
This version includes a lot of fixes related mostly to features added in 2.0.x, plus new features related to MusicBrainz changes (like genres support), tag compatibility with other apps, and file formats.
Here is the change log:
Philip Wolfer (outsidecontext/phw) did (again) a fantastic job on this release. Thanks also to Mineo and all contributors, bug reporters, testers, translators and, of course, users !
We’ll update Picard website soon, in the meantime you can download OSX and Windows packages on GitHub release page.
At the end of the last version I was getting into the groove—and feeling determined.
I had managed to vittle down the instrument backlog to half! I though surely I could do even better! Let’s start digging into the meat of things and, get serious.
Now we were going to do things seriously, so therefore this was a pretty big version!
It’s called:
I started by looking into a few issues during autumn:
However right in the middle of this version came GCI!
I was part of the contest as a mentor this year (for the first time) so naturally I had some instrument tasks ready for our participants. They were pretty popular, with a lot of tickets being added or improved by the participants. So, this is how serious we got for GCI:
After GCI we still had quite a bit of seriousness left:
The majority of these where done during autumn ’17 and the first half of ’18. The whole thing would have been finished in the summer, hadn’t May, June and July ’18 been the hottest summer ever! I just couldn’t think, so I took a break until August and then I finished dealing with the last few stragglers.
This version ended up including 58 tickets: the largest to date!
What happens now? Well, at the end of the “Let’s get serious” version I noticed some issues with families and the like, but that’s a topic for the next blog post!
It’d been almost 2 years since I started, and I’ve managed to get quite a lot done! Here is a graph that illustrates the progress (notice the the jump in added tickets during GCI period, when the participants actually added them faster than I could close them!):
And with this we have finally caught up! So hopefully all future blogs from now on will be posted soon after the relevant versions are released.
After 2-ish months of summer vacation I decided to do an “After Summer Special” (name as a reference to After School Specials)
By the end of summer I had been working hard… on Debussy instead of instruments! Oops!
Once September arrived I realised that I needed to get things back in order, so I set about finishing this version:
——–
I also decided to close the tambouras (strings) version, as after much delay there wasn’t really much progress on it. I had started work on these way back in January, adding the Tamburica instruments (see Instruments part two).
However, by the time ASP came to an end it had became clear to me that I had to move on from dwelling on this, to feel like there was progress and avoid burning out.
Now, after over half the INST tickets have been closed, I had a bit more experience and I could finally finish work on this + some random stragglers left over from the “next” version.
Anyway, after all that, I decided that the thing we needed to do, was to, Get Serious
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:
It’s time for Instruments again!
Now that I was allowed to create fix versions I set about creating such fix versions! (And also, retroactively (re)creating previous batches where these seemed logical.) This also meant creating JIRA Tickets for instruments I had already added without tickets, like the Taonga pūoro instruments.
By now, I was also starting to see the limits of the relationships between instruments we already had, so I was already thinking about what relationships could be added to improve the way we link things. As such, I created a topic to discuss some ideas I had (Reader beware! This is an early and now outdated idea-thread! (More on this in a later post!))
However, reosarevok added two more helpful link types: Artist created and Label (company) invented instrument.
next: 2017 March to May
Quite a lot of tickets!
Eventually I came to recreating the Taonga pūoro tickets (previously I just added the ones in the Wikipedia page). It became clear to me that this was huge task and deserved it’s own version:
After this I was a bit tired and summer was finally here, so I decided to Go On Summer Vacation… so hold on for the fourth part!
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
samj1912 out o/
