Category: MusicBrainz

There seem to be many questions about Picard at the moment and a lot of people who love the old tagger interface and are frustrated with Picard’s UI. So, let me address the feedback we’re getting from our users:

• “MBTagger was perfect. Picard sucks.” — Ok, this feedback doesn’t help much, but we understand that you are frustrated. We’re working to improve Picard as we speak and the latest release is a beta release, so please bear with us.
• “I don’t understand the Picard interface.” — We understand that there are some people who prefer to tag tracks, not albums. We also understand that the UI is not immediately intuitive. We have plans to fix this, and to allow Picard to be usable by people who prefer to tag tracks and those who prefer to tag albums. For our thoughts on this improved interface, check out this wiki page. For more documentation on how to actually use Picard, see HowToTagFilesWithPicard. And to calm down all the people who are threatening to leave the project if the old MBTagger goes away, we plan to improve the interface of Picard way before the old MBTagger stops working.
• “Picard keeps crashing on me.” — It works for us, which is sucky since we can’t fix your crashes if it doesn’t crash for us. We’re actively soliciting feedback from people who can reproduce crashes. If you have a case where Picard crashes for you consistently and repeatably, please file a bug report.
• “Picard screws up my files!” — First, check to make sure you’re writing the right version of id3v2 tags. Depending on what other programs you use, you may need to switch to version 2.3/2.4 or vice versa. We know about some incompatibilities between the MusicIP Mixer and Picard. We’re going to start working on these issues soon.
• “How do I get PUID’s into MB?” — This answer has two parts. First, to create a new PUID for a file that MB doesn’t have a PUID for currently, you need to download and run the file through the MusicIP Mixer. (Yes, we know not everyone wants to use the Mixer application — for you we’re going to create stand-alone analyzer applications soon). Once a file goes through the MusicIP Mixer, in theory it should become available to the MusicDNS.org service (that MusicBrainz uses) within 24 hours. In practice, this is not happening yet. The MusicIP folks are working on this! Once the MusicDNS.org service has a PUID, you can re run the file through Picard and it should pick up the PUID and prompt you to submit the PUID to MB. Again, there may be bugs in the process — we’re working to iron out the bugs as we speak.

What can you do if you’re affected by these issues? Here is a quick check list for you:

1. Do you have an issue not addressed herein?
2. Can you reproduce the issue?
3. Yes: Please review the open bugs for picard and if this bug doesn’t already exist, please add a new one.
4. No: Please stop using Picard 0.7.0 for the time being and go back to Picard 0.6.0 or the old MB Tagger. Then wait for a new release of Picard and see if your problems have improved.

Bottom line: If you’re frustrated by how things are working right now, go back to a non-beta release and give us more time to iron out these issues. We’re aware that you are frustrated and we’re working on it. But if people keep pestering us with the same issues over and over again, it only keeps us from fixing actual bugs.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, picard

libmusicbrainz and libtunepimp and many of the requirements of Picard are in Debian, but Picard itself has not been packaged up for inclusion into Debian. I would love to find a volunteer to take on the task to package Picard into a .deb so we can get it into the Debian respositories. If you’d like to help, please post a comment!

Technorati Tags: picard, debian

After too many months of tinkering the latest stable release of Picard has been released:

• picard-0.5.0.tar.gz (Linux tarball)
• picard-setup-0.5.0.exe (Windows installer)

Big thanks goes out to Lukas Lalinsky for fixing many bugs and creating the Windows installer. Also, many thanks to everyone who helped work on the Norwegian, German, French, Russian and Slovak translations!

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, picard, release

Continue reading “Picard 0.5.0 released!”

In the last few days I’ve been playing around with Picard on OS X. After fixing a few bugs in libtunepimp that prevented it from compiling on OS X, I managed to get Picard to come up. However, there are so many UI bugs that it is essentially unusable:

1. Drag and drop does not work
2. Some options dialog items won’t un/check
3. Adding files from Add Files dialog doesn’t work
4. The UI is butt-ugly

This is the same code that has undergone a fair amount of debugging on Windows and Linux. Given that the code works fairly well on those two systems, I have to suspect the wxWidgets toolkit on Mac OS X. I looked into a number of UI bugs listed above only to be stumped by these bugs on multiple occasions. The code looks ok and works great on two platforms. No manner of tweaking the code allowed me to make any headway on any of the bugs.

My conclusion: wxWidgets on OS X, even the 2.6.x version, is still not ready for prime time. Thus, I’m sad to say, Picard won’t be coming to OS X soon. If someone has more experience with wxWidgets on OS X and would like to take a stab at looking at these bugs, please do. At this point I should spend my time on bugs that will make Picard better on the two platforms where there is hope.

I’m bummed. 😦

With much help from Lukas Lalinsky and Dave Evans, we’ve finally managed to scrape together the next picard release. The highlights for this release are:

• Full UNICODE support on all supported platforms. Tags and filenames are now read and written with the proper encoding support.
• ID3v2.3 AND ID3v2.4 support — selectable in the options dialog.
• Increased stability
• A more rounded feature set
• Tons of bug fixes
• UI improvements
• Built on top of a release version of wxWidgets, for greater stability
• New windows installer

Downloads:

• Linux tarball
• Windows installer (NT, 2000 and XP only!)

Continue reading “Picard 0.5.0-test2 released!”