The Picard team is happy to announce that version 2.3 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.
This release brings changes across the board, including additions to the user interface, performance improvements, better tag support, improved desktop integration and many more.
Notable changes
User interface
Picard now allows you 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. And while it has always been possible to reorder and resize the displayed columns, Picard will now remember your settings.
Editing tags became more comfortable with multi-line editing for comments and lyrics and autocomplete for media, release country, release type and release status and the ability to reorder the values of multi-value tags. For date tags there is an indication of the expected format shown as “YYYY-MM-DD”. You can now also specify which tags you want to have always on top in the tag editor (Options > User Interface > Top Tags).
Easy submission of AcoustID fingerprints
One complaint we often received was about the ability to submit fingerprints to AcoustID. While Picard leverages AcoustID for identifying your files and searching matching recordings, and you can submit the fingerprints for such scanned files if the found match was wrong. But just using Picard to submit fingerprints for your already well tagged files without doing another search and match was not possible. To address this we added a “Generate AcoustID fingerprints” action which allows you to just generate the fingerprints. There is also a new “Fingerprint status” column which will indicate whether a fingerprint was calculated for a file or not. As can be seen above this uses the new configurable column feature. A red fingerprint icon indicates the fingerprint has been calculated. Once you submit the fingerprints the fingerprint icon will turn gray.
Desktop integration
Picard on Windows will now indicate the progress when loading or saving many files in the Windows taskbar.
The same is available on Linux if your desktop environment supports it, e.g. if you are using KDE Plasma or the default Ubuntu desktop.
On macOS Picard is now registered for supported file types. That means you can directly open your music files in Picard using Finder. Furthermore you can also drop files or entire folders directly onto the Picard dock icon.
Performance improvements
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.
Tags and file formats
With custom tags support for MP4 files an often requested feature is now finally available.
There is also new support for raw AC3 files and more details are shown for TAK files. For AC3 and AAC files Picard can save APEv2 tags, which is supported by many other tools, but also can cause problems in others. E.g. players not supporting tags in AC3 and AAC files will often show a wrong duration if there are APEv2 tags present in the file. Hence you can now choose whether to save APEv2 tags to files or not, or even remove existing APEv2 tags for those files.
Scripting
Few new script functions were added:
- for strings:
$find, $reverse, $substr
- for multi-value variables:
$getmulti, $slice, $join
- for loops:
$foreach, $while, $map
- for current date and time:
$datetime
Complete documentation can be found on Picard website.
Breaking changes
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.
Packaging
If you are using Windows 10 you can now install Picard from the Windows store and receive future updates automatically.
Picard for Windows is now also available as a portable application, which you can run directly without installation. You can put it in any folder, including putting it on a USB thumb drive, and it will store all its settings and plugins in the folder it is located in.
The Picard installer and portable app are now signed with a certificate issued to the MetaBrainz Foundation. When you run the installer or the portable app for the first time after download Windows will show you a dialog like the following:
Official releases, including beta version and development builds, will show “Metabrainz Foundation Inc.” as the publisher. If it is showing anything else, e.g. “unknown”, this indicates you are not using an official release. Once enough people have trusted the app the above warning will eventually completely go away.
For macOS the Picard app is now also fully compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina, which means you can run Picard now without security warning.
More changes and bug fixes
Picard 2.3 has many more improvements and fixes. See the full changelog for details on all changes since the last stable Picard 2.2.3.
Download
Picard 2.3 is available for download from the download page as well as from the Windows Store.
Known issues
On macOS 10.12 Sierra the CD lookup functionality is unavailable. We will address this issue in Picard 2.3.1. See PICARD-1745 for details.
