Picard 3.0 released – MetaBrainz Blog

The Picard team is happy to announce the new major version 3.0 of MusicBrainz Picard, now available to download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with data from MusicBrainz. This release brings many changes, including an upgrade to Qt6, a completely new plugin system, several improvements to the user interface, cover art processing, ISRC submission and many more. More details below. What’s new? User interface improvements Qt is the application framework Picard is built upon. Qt simplifies the implementation of cross-platform desktop applications as it abstracts away many of the differences between various operating systems. Picard 2 was based on Qt5. With Picard 3 we have updated to Qt6. Besides ensuring that Picard stays up-to-date and available on modern desktops, this version change also brings some advantages like much improved support for screen scaling and better support for a dark mode. Specifically on Windows the old issues of having fonts scale inconsistently are now resolved. The UI now also supports a dark mode across all operating systems and switching between light and dark mode does no longer require a restart of the application. Picard already supported customizing the file and album list views by selecting the columns to display. In previous versions this was limited to a couple of pre-defined columns, though. New contributor knguyen1 implemented full custom column support. You can now define your own columns, where you can define the actual column content using scripting. This gives a lot of flexibility showing exactly the information you need. There is also a new pre-defined “Match” column that allows to sort releases by match quality. For more details see the chapter Custom Columns in the documentation. The columns context menu, allowing you to customize the columns being shown in the main list views. Another new feature, implemented by jpmsousa03, is the ability to filter the list views. You can select the fields to search and enter a search term. Only items matching this filter will be shown. It is now possible to select and copy multiple tags in the metadata view and paste them on e.g. another tag, updating all corresponding tags. It is also possible to paste multiple copied values into a spreadsheet tool. This feature was provided by StevilKnevil. The metadata view now also shows the actual differences between existing tags and the new tags being written. On a first start Picard now shows a setup wizard, that guides new users through some essential configuration. Setup Wizard showing the File Organization settings. Also some essential functionality, such as loading files and clustering, gets explained by a tutorial mode when a feature is first used. Both the wizard and tutorial can be disabled or re-enabled in the user interface options. The tutorial being shown when a release is loaded for the first time. New plugin system Apart from the Qt6 migration the new plugin system is the most significant change in Picard 3. While the previous plugin system enabled a lot of flexibility in Picard, it has a couple of limitations. For example, Picard would load, and partially run, the code of each installed plugin on every start, whether the plugin was enabled or not. This could lead to unwanted side effects and unexpected behavior. On the development side it proved also difficult for third-party developers, especially for more complex plugins, as all code had to be checked into the central picard-plugins Git repository. The new plugin system provides: Separation of plugin metadata and code: MANIFEST.toml is mandatory A defined plugin API with typing support Git based versioning and updating of plugins Plugins can be installed and updated from a central plugin registry, from third-party Git repositories, or from a local directory Several trust levels (official, trusted, community, untrusted) The ability to blacklist plugins centrally allows us to react on security issues A picard-cli command line tool to manage (install, uninstall, update…) plugins Plugins now support their own translation system (optionally manageable via Weblate), so their user interface texts can be translated Plugins have their own configuration namespace All the extension points known from Picard 2 to register metadata processors, context menu actions, cover art providers, file formats, option pages etc. are still available. But there are several new extension points; plugins can now register cover art filters and processors, custom variables, actions in a global “Plugin Tools” menu and CD ripping log file formats. As a user, the new plugin management under Options → Plugins now clearly separates installed plugins from plugins available for installation. Both the list of installed and available plugins can be searched, and it is possible to install plugins from third-party developers. See the Plugins Options documentation for a more in-depth description. The new Plugins option page, showing a list of currently installed plugins. This also means that Picard v2 plugins are not compatible and need to be migrated to the new system. There are already 30 plugins available, both plugins migrated from v2 and brand new ones. Have a look at the plugins v3 list on the Picard website. If you are a developer and want to update your plugins to Picard 3 or maybe write a new one, please see the Plugin overview in the Picard User Guide and the detailed Picard Plugin v3 Documentation. Cover art processing It is now possible to both filter and process cover art loaded from cover art providers. The new options in Cover Art / Processing allow you to ignore images below a certain size or automatically resize loaded images or convert them to a specific file format. Cover art processing can be extended by Plugins, which can register their own cover art filters and processors. Filters can restrict what cover art gets loaded, while processors can perform image processing on the loaded cover art. Cover art processing was implemented as part of Google Summer of Code 2024 by twodoorcoupe. You can read more about this in twodoorcoupe’s blog post GSoC 2024: Picard image processing. New tags and scripting enhancements As full support for synced lyrics was added, there is now a new %syncedlyrics% tag. The MuicBrainz Artist ID of a composer is available as a new tag %musicbrainz_composerid%. There are also several new variables, that provide data for tagging and naming scripts, but are not written as tags to the files by default. The new %_genres% and %_folksonomy_tags% variables give you access to the raw list of genres or folksonomy tags as loaded from MusicBrainz. For recordings with a broadcasted relationship the broadcasting date is available as %_broadcast_date%. If a recording has a linked work with a ISWC, the ISWC is now available as %_iswc%. The variables %_albumartists_countries% and %_artists_countries% contain all country codes for all credited album artists / track artists. Likewise the disambiguation comments for artists and album artists are available as %_artistcomment% and %_albumartistcomment%. The %_filesize% variable contains the file size in bytes (if the script is running in a context where a file is available, i.e. on tracks with a matched file or in a file naming script). There are now two new functions $get_new() and $get_original(), which allow to explicitly request the original or new value of a variable. The $rsearch scripting function gained a new optional parameter, which can be used to specify the capture group inside the regular expression to be returned. Please see the documentation of the $rsearch function for an example. Improved built-in player The built-in player received several improvements. As before the player is based on QtMultimedia. With Qt6 this component brings better cross-platform support for various audio formats and pitch-adjustment if playback speed changes (requires Qt 6.10). The player has also been internally refactored to better separate the player and UI. This allows better integration with the OS. The player now supports macOS “Now Playing” and on Linux can be controlled by MPRIS2 compatible tools. It can also submit listens to ListenBrainz. Both OS integration and ListenBrainz support can be configured in the new Audio Player Options. Save and restore user session Picard can save and restore your current workspace state as a session file under the main File menu. Sessions preserve file placement (unclustered, clusters, albums, specific tracks, and standalone recordings), your manual metadata edits, and selected configuration options so you can resume work later. Thanks to knguyen1 for this feature. See the chapter Sessions Management in the documentation for more details. Export / import option profiles Option profile support was already available in Picard 2. Option profiles allow you to create multiple different set of configuration options and quickly switch between them. With Picard 3 such option profiles now also can be exported and imported, both as a backup or to share them with others. If an option profile is exported in order to share it, the export will exclude any configuration options that are considered secret or private (such as authentication data). For details see the User Guide under Backing Up and Sharing Profiles. Exporting and importing option profiles can also be done using the new picard-cli command line utility, see below. We are excited to see how this feature will be used by the community. Operating system support Picard is now available for macOS ARM64 aka Apple silicon. While it was previously possible to run Picard on such systems using Apples Rosetta 2 emulation layer, the native builds offer better performance. Please note that there are separate downloads for the ARM64 and Intel versions of Picard. Please make sure to download the file appropriate for your hardware.