Picard 2.6.3 is the third maintenance release for the recently release Picard 2.6. It contains a couple of bug fixes, most notably it fixes a bug where changes to some options did not get applied until a restart of Picard. Users of Picard 2.6 are highly recommended to update.
Picard 2.6.2 is a maintenance release for the recently release Picard 2.6. It fixes a bug where a plugin update could fail because Picard would use the old version from the network cache.
We also reverted a change from Picard 2.6.1, where if a file had no title or track number in metadata and Picard guesses this information from the file name, the title and track number would show up only as new metadata. This turned out to break people’s workflow who relied on this data for comparison with the actual new metadata loaded from MusicBrainz. For those of you who do not want Picard to automatically guess these tags from file names we will add an option in Picard 2.7 to completely disable this behavior.
Picard 2.6.1 is a maintenance release for the recently release Picard 2.6. It brings bugfixes, performance improvements and some scripting enhancements.
[PICARD-2160] – Switching dark mode in macOS preferences does not change list elements leading to mix of light and dark mode
[PICARD-2166] – “Use original values” for a tag on a large selection takes very long with a high CPU usage
[PICARD-2168] – Keyboard shortcut to trigger script editor auto completion does not work on macOS
[PICARD-2170] – Title and track number guessed from filename should show up as changed metadata
[PICARD-2173] – “Search for similar tracks” is enabled by default, causes crash if used without selection
[PICARD-2187] – Scripting error in file naming options is not displayed properly
New Features
[PICARD-2161] – Add script function $unique to remove duplicate values from multi-value variables
[PICARD-2177] – Add script function $replacemulti to replace entries in multi-value variables
Improvements
[PICARD-2157] – Reduce comparison overhead of logging window
[PICARD-2162] – Coverart box is slow to update when many files are selected
[PICARD-2185] – Remove empty elements from $map() output
Acknowledgements
This release contains code contributions by Gabriel Ferreira, Bob Swift, Laurent Monin, Philipp Wolfer, Wieland Hoffmann and Adam James.
Many thanks also to all the translators and everyone who tested the beta releases and provided feedback on the community forums, IRC and the issue tracker.
The Picard team is happy to announce that Picard 2.6 is now available. This release fixes issues where the user interface could freeze and contains many new features, bugfixes and improvements.
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback.
Download
Picard 2.6 can be downloaded from the Downloads section on the Picard website.
For macOS users there are now two separate builds available. If you are using macOS Mojave 10.14 or later, including macOS 11.0 Big Sure, please use the download for macOS 10.14+. If you are still on macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13 you should use the download for 10.12+ instead.
Only the 10.14+ builds support the macOS dark mode. This build also uses newer versions of Qt5 and Python and is hence recommended, but won’t run on macOS before 10.14.
Users who have installed Picard on Windows 10 from the Windows Store will receive the update automatically once it has been approved by Microsoft.
Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.
What’s new?
Fix for user interface freezes
Since the release of Picard 2 we had some reports of some users experiencing Picard’s UI completely locking up. This mostly happened when adding or removing tags or toggling the “Show changes first” in the metadata view. As this was a timing issue not all users on all systems were affected by this issue the same.
The root cause for this has been now identified and Picard 2.6 comes with a fix to prevent those freezes.
Dark mode switching on Windows and macOS
On both macOS and Windows it is now possible to switch to dark or light UI independent of the system setting. By default Picard will follow your system settings.
This is also the first stable release which supports the dark mode on macOS Mojave 10.14 and later in the official app packages. Previously this was only available when running Picard from source or installing via PyPi. Please note that you need to use the Picard app build for macOS 10.14 or later for this feature to work (see above).
Reworked cover art options
The cover art options have been rearranged to be easier to understand their meaning. Some options that previously had been shown in the Cover Art Archive options but actually affected all cover art sources have been moved to the general cover art options.
Please note that there was no change in functionality, all the options are still available and behave as before.
Support for track-level original release date
The MusicBrainz server since recently supports returning a first release date per recording. This information is based on the earliest release on which this recording appears on according to the MusicBrainz database.
Picard makes this date available in the variable %_recording_firstreleasedate%. If you want to have this date set in your files for the original release date you can use the following script:
$set(originaldate,%_recording_firstreleasedate%)
Please note that this means that each track on a release can have a separate date. In this case you should not use %originaldate% as part of a folder name in your file naming script.
By default %originaldate% will still be filled with the first release date of the release group. To be more flexible this date is also now available in a variables %_releasegroup_firstreleasedate%.
Improved script editor
The auto completion in the script editor has been improved to not popup unnecessarily and to provide better suggestions. It also is now possible to trigger the autocompletion anytime by pressing Ctrl+Space.
Support WebP images for cover art
Picard now supports cover art in WebP format. Please note that support for this depends on your playback software. Also WebP images will not be embedded into MP4 files as those do not support this format.
Other changes
There are many more bugfixes and improvements since the last stable release 2.5.6, such as support for a director tag (for videos), the release annotation being available as a variable %_releaseannotation% and fixes for cover art drag and drop from browsers
For a complete list of changes since the last stable release please see the full changelog below.
Notes for package maintainers
If you are maintaining packages of Picard for a Linux distribution or another OS please note the following changes:
The minimum supported Python version is now Python 3.6
Qt 5.10 or later and PyQt5 5.10 or later are now required
The newer Qt5 versions are necessary in order to work around the dead lock issues (see above). If possible it is recommended that you use PyQt5 5.15.3 or later, as those versions actually fix the root cause for the deadlock. But Picard applies a workaround that should also prevent this in earlier versions. Please see the discussion on PICARD-2088 for details.
Acknowledgements
This release contains code contributions by Philipp Wolfer, Laurent Monin, Gabriel Ferreira, Sophist, Bob Swift, RomFouq and petitminion.
Many thanks also to all the translators and everyone who tested the beta releases and provided feedback on the community forums, IRC and the issue tracker.
Changelog
This is the complete list of changes since Picard 2.5.6:
Bugfixes
PICARD-1528 – “Search for similar albums” causes crashes if the selection includes clusters and files
PICARD-1689 – Freezes when adding tags to large album
PICARD-1747 – macOS: Tearing when scrolling list of plugins
PICARD-1926 – “Show changes first” in tag preview window leads to freeze
PICARD-2088 – Picard hangs when adding new tag to multiple tracks in an album
PICARD-2091 – Loading images from cover art via drag and drop from browser only loads PNG and JPEG images
The Picard team is happy to announce that Picard 2.6 Beta 3 is now available. We decided to do a third beta after the recent Beta 2 release as there have been additional changes that required updates to packaging and translations.
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback.
Download
Picard 2.6 Beta 3 can be downloaded from Picard website Downloads section.
For macOS users there are now two separate builds available. If you are using macOS Mojave 10.14 or later, including macOS 11.0 Big Sure, please use the download for macOS 10.14+. If you are still on macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13 you should use the download for 10.12+ instead.
Only the 10.14+ builds support the macOS dark mode. This build also uses newer versions of Qt5 and Python and is hence recommended, but won’t run on macOS before 10.14.
Linux users might want to install the beta version using Snap. If your Linux distribution supports Snap you can install Picard from the beta channel using:
snap install --beta picard
Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.
What’s new?
Apart of some bug fixes this release improves handling of dark UI on Windows and macOS. This is the first official release of Picard which supports the dark mode in macOS Mojave 10.14 and later. Please note that you need to use the Picard app build for macOS 10.14 or later for this feature to work (see above).
On both macOS and Windows it is now possible to switch to dark or light UI independent of the system setting. By default Picard will follow your system settings. Special thanks to Gabriel Ferreira for his work to enable this.
Below is a complete list of changes since Picard 2.5.6.
Bugfixes
[PICARD-2135] – Tags “license” and “website” cannot be deleted and get duplicated on update for ID3
[PICARD-2136] – macOS: File browser does not use user’s home folder by default
[PICARD-2138] – macOS: After saving options the toolbar style changes
Improvements
[PICARD-1357] – Support dark mode on macOS Mojave 10.14 and later
[PICARD-2095] – Allow the user to choose between light or dark theme on Windows and macOS
Helping out
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.6 release is using and testing this beta release. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
Please also help translate Picard. There have been changes to the user interface and inline scripting documentation and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.6 release. 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, and “picard_installer”, which contains the translations for Picard’s Windows installer.
If you 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.
The Picard team is happy to announce that Picard 2.6 Beta 2 is now available. This is a pre-release to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.6 release.
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback.
If you wonder why this is beta 2 and there was no announcement of beta 1: We had prepared beta 1 for release last week. But then AcoustID got into serious technical trouble. Asking for wider testing of a new Picard release when such an important service was unavailable seemed not a good option, so we decided to delay the announcement. But since AcoustID has now recovered we are now ready for testing the beta version, and we even could get some improvements in over last week’s beta.
Download
Picard 2.6 Beta 2 can be downloaded from Picard website Downloads section.
For macOS users there are now two separate builds available. If you are using macOS Mojave 10.14 or later, including macOS 11.0 Big Sure, please use the download for macOS 10.14+. If you are still on macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13 you should use the download for 10.12+ instead.
Functionality wise both are the same, but the 10.14+ build uses newer versions of Qt5 and Python and is hence recommended, but won’t run on macOS before 10.14.
Linux users might want to install the beta version using Snap. If your Linux distribution supports Snap you can install Picard from the beta channel using:
snap install --beta picard
Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.
What’s new?
This release fixes Picard becoming unresponsive on some systems, especially when editing or adding tags to multiple selected items. This issue has been around since Picard 2.0 and we are happy to have it now fixed.
Apart of that there are also several new features and improvements, such as support for original release date per track, support for a new “director” tag, WebP support for cover art images, improvements to the script editor and the script documentation and more.
Below is a complete list of changes since Picard 2.5.6.
Bugfixes
[PICARD-1528] – “Search for similar albums” causes crashes if the selection includes clusters and files
[PICARD-1689] – Freezes when adding tags to large album
[PICARD-1747] – macOS: Tearing when scrolling list of plugins
[PICARD-1926] – “Show changes first” in tag preview window leads to freeze
[PICARD-2088] – Picard hangs when adding new tag to multiple tracks in an album
[PICARD-2091] – Loading images from cover art via drag and drop from browser only loads PNG and JPEG images
[PICARD-2124] – Add MB release annotation field as %_releaseannotation% variable
Tasks
[PICARD-715] – Chrome to block browser access to localhost
[PICARD-1950] – Fix macOS builds with PyQt > 5.13.2
Improvements
[PICARD-2084] – Use TLS for AcoustID web service requests
[PICARD-2090] – Reenable TIFF support for cover art images
[PICARD-2092] – Improve script editor function/variable auto completion
[PICARD-2105] – Improve script function popup descriptions
[PICARD-2110] – Add %originaldate% and %originalyear% to file naming examples
[PICARD-2114] – Show disambiguation comment in CD Lookup popup window
[PICARD-2125] – Enable CAA Release Group cover art provider by default
[PICARD-2126] – Allow cross origin access to browser integration
[PICARD-2130] – Restructure cover art options to make them easier to understand
Helping out
The easiest way to help us getting a great Picard 2.6 release is using and testing this beta release. Please report bugs on the Picard issue tracker and provide feedback in the community forums.
Please also help translate Picard. There have been changes to the user interface and inline scripting documentation and existing translations need to be updated for the final 2.6 release. 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, and “picard_installer”, which contains the translations for Picard’s Windows installer.
If you 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.
Picard 2.5.6 is a maintenance release. This fixes issues with the context menu of the metadata view and long standing problems with the app signature on macOS Sierra and High Sierra.
Picard 2.5.2 is a maintenance release, fixing some bugs and providing minor improvements to the recent 2.5.1 release. Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.
Picard 2.5.1 is a maintenance release, fixing some bugs and providing minor improvements to the recent 2.5 release. Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback and reported issues.
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback.
What’s new?
This release contains few fixes and improvements over previous beta version. A complete list of changes since the beta release is available below. New packages can be downloaded from Picard website Downloads section.
As usual, please report any issue through our bug tracker.
Bug
[PICARD-214] – Take case insensitive filesystems into account when renaming files
[PICARD-1978] – Add keyboard shortcut for Tags From Filenames and allow to place it in toolbar
The whole Picard team would like to thank everyone involved in this project, whether they are developpers, users, translators, documentation contributors.
Since some time the whole Picard documentation is better than ever, thanks, mainly, to the fantastic job rdswift did. With the help of the community we should be able to provide translations for this documentation in upcoming future (tests were done recently). If you want to help, read Contributing page.
You can also discuss new features or usage on our forums.
