Category: Picard

Picard 0.15.1 released

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.

You can download 0.15.1 here.

Picard 0.15 released!

The 0.15 stable version was finally released today, with some new features and bug fixes since beta2. There were too many small changes to list, but here’s a partial changelog with the most user-visible ones:

Version 0.15 – 2011-07-17:

  • Added options for using standardized track, release, and artist metadata.
  • Added preferred release format support.
  • Expanded preferred release country support to allow multiple countries.
  • Added support for tagging non-album tracks (standalone recordings).
  • Plugins can now be installed via drag and drop, or a file browser.
  • Added several new tags: %_originaldate%, %_recordingcomment%, and %_releasecomment%
  • Changes to request queuing: added separate high and low priority queues for each host.
  • Tagger scripts now run after metadata plugins finish (#5850)
  • The “compilation” tag can now be $unset or modified via tagger script.
  • Added a shortcut (Ctrl+I) for Edit->Details.
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes.

You can download the new version and report bugs for it 🙂

Picard 0.14 released

NGS is obviously the release of this week, but Lukáš has today announced the release of Picard 0.14 on the mailing list.

Picard 0.14 should be the last release that doesn’t support the NGS web service. It brings some improvements in handling of network errors, changes the default ID3 version, finally adds support for sorting, prioritizing matches based on release types and fixes a couple of bugs. It is also the first release that has a Mac package available at the release time, many thanks to bitmap for that.

You can download the packages as usually at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Picard

Changelog:

  • Fixed a problem with network operations hanging after a network error (#5794, #5884)
  • ID3v2.3 with UTF-16 is now the default ID3 version
  • Option to set preferred release types for improved album matching
  • Added support for sorting the album/file lists (#75)
  • Fixed OptimFROG tag reading (#5859)
  • Fixed colors for a white-on-black color scheme (#5846)
  • Added an option to replace non-ASCII punctuation (#5834)
  • Support for writing release group and work IDs, currently unused (#5805)
  • Fixed saving of the release event format tag (#5250)
  • Added support for the language and script tags (#943)
  • Plugins can now use track-track relationships (#5849)
  • Allowed external drives to be visible in the file browser panel on OS X (#5308)

Picard 0.13 binary releases now available for Linux, Mac and Windows

Picard 0.13 was recently released and thanks to the packaging efforts of Michael Wiencek we now have a working Mac DMG for Intel Macs running OS X 10.4+! At this point we do not have any support for older PPC Macs and it doesn’t look like we will ever have support for that. Sorry. There is an older 0.11 Universal Binary that PPC users can use.

Download your Picard version 0.13 binary version now!

Thanks to Lukáš, Philip, Michael and everyone else who worked on this release!

UPDATE: You see a change log for this release here.

Picard 0.12

We have released the next version of MusicBrainz Picard. Picard 0.12 includes a lot of bug fixes and new features, including:

  • Support for ratings and folksonomy tags.
  • Live syntax checking for tagger script and naming strings.
  • Embed cover art into WMA and APEv2 tags.
  • New script functions $matchedtracks(), $initials(), $firstalphachar(), $truncate() and $firstwords()
  • New plugin extension point ui_init, allowing plugins to add new UI elements to the main window.
  • A new high quality application icon.
  • Support for originaldate tag. While this is not filled by Picard itself it can be used from within plugins such as the Original Release Date plugin.
  • Write ISRCs from MusicBrainz into tags.
  • CD drive dropdown selection on Linux.
  • Various small improvements to the UI.
  • Updated translations and the option to choose the user interface language.

A complete list of changes be found in NEWS.txt.

Picard 0.12 is available for download for Windows and Linux. The Mac OS X version will be released later, sorry for that. We are still in search for a long term maintainer of Picard on OS X.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release.

New Picard builds for Mac available

Timothy Lee says:

After a month of trying universal builds through macports unsuccessfully, using a tool named ‘unify’ (h/t John) to lipo i386 and ppc arch bins together unsuccessfully, and bugging just about everyone I know to use their i386 tiger machine (I have an i386 leopard and a ppc tiger) unsuccessfully I’ve made the decision to halt my progress on trying to deliver a UB.

What I do have though is two builds. I have one PPC build that was built on a tiger machine and one i386 build that was built on a leopard machine. I have not had a chance to test my i386 leopard build on a tiger machine (read above failure to ‘borrow’ a tiger machine) but there is a chance it may work. If you feel like you have a better handle on the ‘lipo’ process, please, take my builds and smash them together and let me know! (It may be desirable NOT to deliver a UB as
each separate build of Picard is fairly large).

Timothy is looking for feedback on these builds. If you’ve been waiting for a complete version of Picard that includes working PUID generation, then please try these builds:

Picard for OS X Intel i386 (md5)
Picard for OS X PPC (md5)

If you have problems running these please enter a bug report and use the component “Picard Tagger (Mac OS X Packaging)“. Thanks very much Tim and everyone else who has helped along this somewhat frustrating process.

Testing PPC build of Picard

If you have a PPC Mac that runs 10.4/10.5 and have been waiting for a DMG of Picard, please try download and install this version. Please let us know if it works in the comments.

Jon Hermansen and I have been working on building Picard with only MacPorts prerequisites — that is how this DMG has been built. If this install works then we can proceed to work on a Universal Binary that should work on 10.4/10.5. If we can reach that, we should be able to release Mac binaries at the same time as we release binaries for other platforms.

Thanks for all your hard work Jon!

UPDATE: We’ve found a problem with PUID generation and have fixed it — we hope. The above link now points to the updated dmg. May not work on Tiger yet — if you have a Tiger PPC box, please try it and let us know.

Search: Why is it so important?

After many days of tinkering, the new search server has passed its tests and is nearly ready for deployment next week. After my last post on the search services, there were lots of questions, so I’ll give some more history on why I’m working on this now:

  1. The old Lucene based search services worked well, but installing them was a major pain. Installing compilers by hand, sacrificing chickens and hoping that things would work wasn’t my idea of fun.
  2. Lucene has a philosophy of working out of the box without significant tweaks. That’s great if you’re indexing a bunch of text, but indexing music metadata from an SQL database is a bit of a different beast. The usual Lucene tricks didn’t work so well for us, so we couldn’t tweak it to work better for us. Xapian requires a little more tuning out of the box, but our search results are much better now than they were before.
  3. Sending metadata lookup traffic to a service like Xapian is generally a good idea, as a single Xapian server can handle lookup traffic more elegantly than a Postgres database. And adding more search servers is easier than adding more database servers.
  4. Our traffic is growing — I expect us to handle twice as much traffic in July as we did the July before. A lot of this traffic growth is coming from people using our web-service to look up music. If the web-service slows down, the rest of the site slows down as well. So I’m trying to stay ahead of the curve an anticipate when we reach capacity and be able to add more machines as necessary

As of next week, MusicBrainz will have twice as much rack-space (20U’s of space!) and we can finally rack the two new servers that were donated a few months ago. Fortunately due to dropping bandwidth costs, this new space doesn’t really come at a greater expense to us — I expect our hosting costs to stay nearly the same as they are now. (about $1000/mo, btw)

This will allow us to have 3 times the search capacity we have now, which should keep the site working for a while longer. In fall I hope to start moving our web-service to Amazon’s EC2 service, which should allow us to get as much capacity as we need.

As soon as I get the new search services deployed I’m putting my head down and coding the next server update. So, keep your fingers crossed that this process goes smoothly.