We released a new version of Picard today. This new release includes a number of bug fixes. Unicode punctuation is now replaced by default for new users. Title standardization has been removed, as track titles now follow the same style guidelines as recording titles.
One larger change that is hidden by default is support for AcoustID fingerprinting. AcoustID is a new, completely open source, audio fingerprinting project, started by me last year. I’m really glad to finally integrate it with Picard. Integration with the MusicBranz website is planned for later. Configuring Picard to use AcoustID instead of AmpliFIND should be completely transparent, there are no visual differences in the scanning process. Note that this feature requires downloading an extra application, see the AcoustID wiki page for details.
Changes since version 0.15.1:
Added AcoustID support.
Fixed track metadata plugins.
Added new internal %_totalalbumtracks% tag field. (PICARD-16)
Track metadata plugins now run also on non-album tracks. (PICARD-7)
Fixed custom Various Artists name on the %albumartist% field. (PICARD-5)
Album artist is now correctly “translated”. (PICARD-1)
Unicode punctuation is now converted to ASCII by default.
WavPack correction files are moved together with the main files. (PICARD-15)
Unicode filename normalization on OS X.
Original release date is now saved into %originaldate%.
Allow tagging with localized artist aliases (PICARD-17)
I’m pleased to announce that the FreeDB gateway, which lets you fetch MusicBrainz data via FreeDB enabled applications, has been updated to use the NGS database. As of now, its updating with new data from the main MusicBrainz server and you should be able to look up new CDs.
To use the FreeDB gateway, set the FreeDB server in your application to freedb.musicbrainz.org on port 80. For more information, please take a look at our wiki page for the gateway.
Apologies for being a few days late here, but we’ve just finished updating the servers with the latest set of bug fixes and new features. This release brings a new feature that people have been asking for since NGS – the ability to “split” an artist into artist credits.
Split Artist
With NGS, we had the ability to link multiple artists to recordings/releases/etc. While our migration script handled most cases, there are some cases when it was unclear how to automatically split artists, and we opted to leave that artist unchanged. While it was possible to manually edit references to this artist, it was painful. We now have a convenient way to make this process easier. In the sidebar of artists there is now a “split into separate artists” link:
The new "split into separate artists" feature
Clicking this link will present you with a form where you can choose the new set of artists. For example, here’s me splitting the single “Alix Perez & SpetraSoul” artist into the correct separate artists:
The "split artists" form
As with the other types of editing in MusicBrainz, this edit has to be voted on by other editors before it is applied.
The split artists edit type can only be used on artists that have no relationships, other than “collaboration” relationships. If the artist does have collaboration relationships, edits to remove all collaboration relationships will be entered at the same time. Note also that this will not remove the now empty artist entirely – that will happen when ModBot does its daily cleanup.
Bugs
We’ve continued working through the bugs as well, and here are the tickets that have been closed in this release.
[MBS-1133] – Don’t try to delete relationship types that are still in use
[MBS-1343] – Add AR instrument search function has problems with accented letters
[MBS-1380] – An URL ending in closing parenthesis gets broken when listed in edit notes
[MBS-3453] – “Related works” on recordings page shows same work and AR set twice if there are two work<->recording ARs for the same work/recording pair
[MBS-3464] – Do not redirect www.musicbrainz.org to musicbrainz.org for /ws requests
Task
[MBS-1914] – Run script to remove “later/earlier release of” ARs
Things in MusicBrainz land are finally starting to return to normal, with a succession of holidays all final over and everyone getting back to work. We sadly missed the last release of August entirely, but have combined it with the latest release, which was deployed onto servers yesterday. Here’s what’s changed:
Bug
[MBS-987] – Database import doesn’t work without editor data
[MBS-1543] – Add credits to the images in the release editor
[MBS-1670] – UX, Can’t add new artist if an artist is already selected in artist credit
[MBS-2256] – UX, the current artist credit interface does not discourage changing the credit for various artists
[MBS-2839] – Artist work list > Better design: don’t split by "categories" (composer, lyricist, …) and indicates artist role for each artist related to work
[MBS-2899] – Release editor’s "Release Duplicates" tab does not suggest any releases if the release title has been translated away from the actual title
[MBS-3211] – allmusic and secondhandsongs not auto-detected
New Feature
[MBS-3261] – Add support for "deleting" user accounts
The tag for this version is v-2011-09-12-ngs-bug-fixes.
[MBS-3265] – Webservice not escaping "<<" properly
Improvement
[MBS-2232] – Auto-approve Add Medium and Add Release Label edits for new releases
[MBS-2839] – Artist work list > Better design: don’t split by "categories" (composer, lyricist, …) and indicates artist role for each artist related to work
Mostly another week of bug fixes, with a few improvements. Currently the timeline is experiencing some known problems, we hope to have this fixed by tomorrow, but we didn’t want to hold up this release.
Bug
[MBS-1231] – Age information for a person looks weird
[MBS-1393] – Artist lookup won’t search for 1 char artist names
[MBS-1394] – Enable autocomplete for 1 char when the character is cjk
[MBS-1409] – RunReports should apply a time limit to each report
[MBS-1414] – Preferences -> Regional Settings -> Date/time format has duplicates and wrong timezone
[MBS-1483] – tmp-dir option doesn’t work in InitDB.pl
This is a minor release to correct some bugs that were present in 0.15. Additionally, the Mac OS X build should now run fine on 10.4 (i386) and 10.5. Here’s the changelog:
Version 0.15.1 – 2011-07-31
“Other versions” menu now displays release labels and catalog numbers.
Added CD-R, 8cm CD to the format mapping.
Picard no longer fails to load releases with new or unknown media formats.
Threading issues that could occasionally cause Picard to stop loading files have been fixed.
Fixed album metadata processor plugins not working (#5960)
Fixed loading of standalone recordings (#5961)
Fixed requests stopping at midnight (#5963)
Stopped using QDateTime for timing requests (for Qt 4.6 compatibility) (#5967)
Fixed display of ampersands in the “other versions” menu. (#5969)
Fixed use of numerical functions in advanced scripting.
