Have you heard? Jean-Luc Picard is back, once again rescuing the galaxy. And MusicBrainz Picard is back with a new beta release, once again fixing your digital music collection.
We have just released Picard 2.3 beta 1 as a pre-release for the upcoming Picard 2.3. There have been quite a few additions and changes and we would like to gather feedback with this beta release before releasing the final Picard 2.3.
What’s new?
You can see a full list of changes in the changelog. Here is an overview of the most notable new features and fixes:
- It is now possible to customize the columns in the main panel, so you can choose to see additional details about the files you are tagging, such as album artist, composer, catalogue number, genre and more. For now the number of columns is intentionally limited, but this opens the door for other enhancements, like ordering releases by completion status.
- The new “Generate AcoustID fingerprints” action allows you to just generate the fingerprints without doing a search and match. This allows you to generate and submit fingerprints for already tagged files easily. To make this feature complete a new “Fingerprint status” column can be enabled indicating whether a fingerprint has been generated (showing a red fingerprint icon) and whether it has been submitted (the fingerprint icon turns from red to gray).
- AcoustID lookup (aka Scan) has been improved and now respects your configured preferred release types.
- The Scripting options have been reworked to be more consistent and easier to use.
- Several smaller improvements to tag editing, like multiline editing for comments and lyrics, manual reordering of multivalue tag values, autocomplete for media, release country, release type and release status tags and format indicators for date tags (e.g. showing “YYYY-MM-DD” for the date tag).
- Custom tags support for MP4.
- Support for tagging raw AC3 files with APEv2 tags.
- For AAC and AC3 tags you can choose whether to save APEv2 tags or not, or even completely remove existing APEv2 tags from the files. This addresses compatibility issues with those tags in some players. E.g. many players not supporting APEv2 tags in those formats will show a wrong duration.
- On Windows and some Linux desktops (e.g. KDE Plasma and Ubuntu GNOME) the task bar or dock icon will now show the progress of loading or saving many files.
- We addressed some cases where the Picard user interface became totally unresponsive for a while when clustering files or moving and matching files to releases. This was most notable when working with large releases with several hundred tracks.
- We fixed some scripting functions that are supposed to be used as conditions but behaved differently. This affects
$is_complete(), $startswith() and $endswith(). If you use one of these functions in your script please read this forum post on how to update your scripts.
- macOS: It is now possible to directly open supported files in Picard from Finder. Also you can drag and drop files and folders onto the Picard dock icon to open them.
- macOS: The Picard app is now fully supported on macOS 10.15 Catalina and can be opened without security warnings.
- Windows: Picard is now available as a Windows 10 app from the Windows Store. See “Getting the beta” below for details.
- Windows: Picard is also available as a portable app, which can be run from any folder or external drive without installation. All settings and plugins will be stored in the folder in which the Picard portable app is located.
Getting the beta
You can download the beta version from Picard’s GitHub relase page. Windows users might want to try the new portable version, as it can be run alongside the current installed Picard using different settings.
If you are using Windows 10 please help testing the newly available Picard in the Windows Store. The app is not yet publicly findable in the store, please use the direct link to Picard’s store page.
Helping out
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.3 release is using and testing this beta. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
Please also help translate Picard. There have been many changes to the user interface, which means many translations are in need for an update. Translating is easy and can be done online: Head over to MusicBrainz’s translation page on Transifex and click on “Help Translate MusicBrainz”. Once you have registered an account on Transifex you can start translating. For Picard the primary resource to translate is “picard“, but there is also the “picard_appstream” resource which is used for providing descriptions for various Linux software-center applications.
If your are a software developer you are very welcomed to provide fixes and features. Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub. See Developing on the Picard website to get started.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank everybody who contributed to this release, be it with coding, translation, reporting issues on the bug tracker or general feedback on the community forums. Many of the changes in this release are the direct result of some forum discussion.
Special thanks to team members zas and samj1912 for incessantly reviewing all my code changes. Also a special shout out to the Dutch, Finnish, French and Italian translators which provided a 100% translation of this Picard beta into those languages. Unfortunately the translation process currently is very hidden and anonymous and I would like to see this changed. But I definitely appreciate all the work put into this.
Known issues
- When deleting scripts the UI shortly shows the previous selection. This is just a visual glitch, the correct script will still be deleted. See PICARD-1708.
