Category: MusicBrainz

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Instruments part five: Let’s get serious & GCI

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:

Let’s get serious!

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!):
progress graph

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.

Instruments, part four: After Summer Special and loose ends

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:

Bug

  • [INST-545] – Reverse parentage of classical/acoustic guitars

New Feature

Improvement

  • [INST-430] – akete is missing proper description (along with some improvements)
  • [INST-477] – table steel guitar alias
  • [INST-501] – Please add a couple of Dutch aliases to bullroarer
  • [INST-518] – rebec relations
  • [INST-554] – Improvements to hardingfele aliases
  • [INST-583] – add aliases to handclaps

——–

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

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

 

Instruments part three: The “next” branch and Even Moar Taonga pūoro

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

Bug

  • [INST-442] – Alias of three-hole pipe has erroneous end date
  • [INST-465] – Typos in names, descriptions and aliases of concertinas

New Feature

Task

  • [INST-451] – Confusion in n'goni/ngɔni instruments
    • [INST-452] – Fix ngɔni relationship to banjo and picture
    • [INST-409] – Doussn'Gouni
    • [INST-453] – Fix donso ngɔni description and its relationship to kamalen ngɔni (and add relationships as improvement)
    • [INST-133] – Kamale n'goni
    • [INST-454] – Fix kamalen ngɔni description, check invention relationship (and add relationships as improvement)
    • [INST-450] – jeli ngɔni
  • [INST-476] – Conclusion of the n'goni/ngɔni instruments

Improvement

  • [INST-125] – add alias to zither (was: Harpeleik)
  • [INST-379] – Add aliases to the Melodica instrument
  • [INST-398] – add aliases to three hole pipe (was Flauta de 3 agujeros)
  • [INST-438] – Missing search hint aliases for sax instruments
  • [INST-441] – Typos in descriptions of pipe and tabor
  • [INST-443] – Add aliases to three-hole pipe and tabor

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:

Taonga puortwo: 2017 May 9th to 25th

Updates

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!

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.