Picard 3 Release Candidate 3

Today the Picard team is making available a third release candidate for Picard 3. We received good feedback on the previous release candidate 2, thanks to everyone for testing and providing feedback. The final 3.0 release is planned to happen in a few weeks.

Please test, test, and test, report any issue on forums, matrix, or, ideally, on the ticket system.

When reporting an issue, always provide details about your environment and a full debug log helps us a lot.
Also that’s (always) a good time to review and improve translations.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 release candidate 2 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

If you are updating from Picard 2, note that some of the changes are backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying this version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

Picard 3 Release Candidate 2

Today the Picard team is making available a second release candidate for Picard 3. We received good feedback on the previous release candidate 1, thanks to everyone for testing and providing feedback. The final 3.0 release is planned to happen in a few weeks.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 release candidate 1 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

The super special (lousy) shirt plan

Editors are by far MetaBrainz’ biggest and most irreplaceable resource.

They (you) spend countless hours entering data for free, be it for the love of music, to tidy their own collections and listen histories, to support their scenes, to archive historical and cultural data, to apply the cool and soothing editing brain-balm, or a combination of all of the above and more.

Some of the top editors have provided the backbone of MusicBrainz for years, decades, and often perform the more tedious data maintenance and checking tasks.

A few summits ago, the question was asked – can we give these editors, say those with 1 million+ edits, some recognition without getting into the quagmire of things like gamifying?

Enter super special (lousy) shirt plan.

reo showcasing his super special lousy shirt – a *real* and rare image of a top MusicBrainz editor **outside**!?

Picard 3 Release Candidate 1

The Picard team is excited to announce the first release candidate for Picard 3. With this release we are confident that Picard 3 is now suitable for testing by a wider audience. The final 3.0 release is planned to happen in a few weeks.

Since we are near a final release, we tried to focus on bugfixes, final changes to the Plugin API and further UI/UX improvements. On the UI side, Picard now fully supports dark / light mode across all supported operating systems, with the ability to change the theme without a restart.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 9 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

Search upgrades: Nov 30, 2026

MusicBrainz is announcing a set of upgrades for its search service on November 30, 2026. The main change will be upgrading Solr from version 9 to 10. Fixes and improvements will be released alongside this. Some of these changes may break some specific search requests. Finally, a new feature will be released making it possible to use the search service to search for (musical) genres. See below for more information.

Breaking changes

The following tickets may break search requests in some way.

SEARCH-444: Improper ‘relation-list’ in ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be a breaking change for accessing related entities in area and URL search results.
SEARCH-642: Drop ‘id’ fields for cdstub and tag. This will technically be a breaking change, but it was broken by design as the values for these search fields are not documented and have never been intended for public use anyway.
SEARCH-666: Use quality names rather than numeric IDs. This will be a breaking change for release searches that use quality search field.
SEARCH-752: Relationships have an extra ‘target’ property in JSON output. Fixing it by removing the redundant property target will be a breaking change if you are accessing it in search results. The “proper” way to do this is to use the property target-type and access the property id under the property named after this target type.
SEARCH-764: Upgrade to Solr 10. This will be a breaking change for mirror owners only, not for search requests. More specifically, it is advised to change the Solr configuration and to re-index the whole MusicBrainz database.

Soft changes

The following tickets will improve search with breaking any requests:

SEARCH-452: Index all URL relationships. So far, only URL relationships to Artist and Release were indexed. URL relationships to all other entity types will be indexed too.
SEARCH-646: Return exact match first for tag search. It should improve tag search results using indexed Solr search compared to direct Postgres search.
SEARCH-677: Include disambiguation of event’s place and work’s recording. Places related to searched events and recordings related to searched works will now be outputted with disambiguation comment, in the same way other related entities are outputted in search results.
SEARCH-680: Index genre annotations. It will add genre annotations to the results of annotation search which is already supported for all other annotation-able entity types.
SEARCH-681: Support indexed search of genres. It will add “Genre” as a target type for search, just like most other searchable entity types.
SEARCH-751: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘event’ and ‘work’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.
SEARCH-753: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.

Miscellaneous

A MusicBrainz Server release is also expected to go with some of these changes.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.

GSoC 2026: Development of a new Calibre plugin for BookBrainz

Hello, Everyone!

I am Md Waqib Sk (waqib2992 on IRC), an undergraduate student at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code 2026 with MetaBrainz, where I worked on developing a calibre plugin for BookBrainz.

I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC). This post summarizes my project, its outcomes, and my experience over the course of the program.

Project Overview

Calibre is a free, open-source e-book manager used to organize and read digital books. My project was about introducing a new plugin that connected calibre with BookBrainz.

The main proposed features of the plugin were:

1. Metadata update: Search selected book from calibre in BookBrainz database and update it’s metadata accordingly.

2. Browse BookBrainz: Search editions/public collections by name/bbid through the plugin and add or download the corresponding metadata.

Plugin Repository: https://github.com/bookbrainz/CaliBBre

GSoC 2026: Bringing Internationalization (i18n) to BookBrainz

Introduction

Greetings, everyone!

I am Garv Thakre (@garvthakre:matrix.org on Matrix), an Agentic-AI FullStack Developer . This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code 2026 with MetaBrainz, where I worked on the internationalization (i18n) for BookBrainz.

I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (@monkey:chatbrainz.org on Matrix). This post summarizes my project, its outcomes, and my experience over the course of the program.

Project Overview

BookBrainz aims to collect information about every book ever written, but until now, the interface was only in English. Since books exist in thousands of languages, having an English-only UI made it tough for non-English contributors to navigate, read, or add metadata.

My main goal this summer was to get BookBrainz ready for translation and set up the foundation so the community can actually start localizing it. Here is what that involved:

Blocked ListenBrainz services/User Agent strings

Unfortunately some legitimate services got caught up in our recent attempts to mitigate (yet another) bot-net attack on ListenBrainz.

You may find that a service you use is now being blocked, including Navidrome. We have also had reports of multi-scrobbler submissions being blocked, and there may be other affected services that haven’t yet been reported to us.

These services got caught up in recent blocks because they are/were not setting a proper user agent when calling the LB API.

Navidrome and multi-scrobbler are already pushing fixes!

If you are experiencing issues on another service, we would like to let you through, but without a user agent (UA) string we can’t identify the service’s traffic. Please ask your service to add a meaningful UA string (in a format like described in https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_API/Rate_Limiting) so we can get you back up and running.

GSoC 2026: Playlists Sorting and Organization

Helloo Everyone!
My name is Yateen, a final year cse student at Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. My matrix username is (@yateen) and GitHub. I started open source at the beginning of this year. I was selected as a GSoC contributor and worked on the Playlists Sorting and Organization project. It was a wonderful experience working on a tech stack of React, Databases, APIs, Jest + Testing Library, etc. What was more amazing was to work under the mentorship of Ansh Goyal (Github), Monkey (Github) and Jade (Github) and be a part of the wonderful MetaBrainz team.

Pre-selection Contributions

Before GSoC officially started, I contributed to ListenBrainz through several smaller PRs that helped me learn the codebase and review process. Firstly I started with exploring some small UI/UX issues such as preventing duplicate error toasts and fixing toast overlap with the YouTube player, accessibility improvements like adding aria-labels to icon-only playback buttons. Then I started solving tickets which are feature-oriented like including auto-save for settings, showing artist name relationships. This pre-selection period helped me get comfortable with ListenBrainz patterns and mentor feedback before taking on the larger GSoC features.

Project Overview

Over the summer I worked on the playlist features and improved the existing playlist structure. I shipped four related features that turn ListenBrainz playlists from a flat list into something you can search, tag, sort for listening, and import from MusicBrainz collections.

GSoC 2026: Compose Multiplatform Migration of ListenBrainz-Android

Hi everyone,

I’m Nirvan Jain (nirvan_jain on IRC, nirvan73 on GitHub), I’m currently a pre-final year student at IIIT Jabalpur. This summer I was offered this opportunity to work with MetaBrainz through Google Summer of Code on migrating the ListenBrainz android app to Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, so that most of the same codebase can eventually run on iOS under the mentorship of Jasjeet Singh (jasje on IRC).

This post covers what the project was, everything I worked on, the parts that went wrong, what’s still left, and what the summer was actually like.

How I got here

I started contributing to ListenBrainz in December 2025. It was the first external open source project I’d worked on. Everything before that was coursework, side projects, or intra-college events.

My first PRs were small work which helped me a lot to understand the codebase from the ground, the shimmer effect across the Feed and Profile tabs, then extending search to cover playlists, artists, albums and tracks, plus some bug fixes. Small changes, but they taught me the codebase and how review works when nobody knows you and the code has to stand on its own.

I picked ListenBrainz because music is a constant in my day, whether I’m coding or not, and because I like that it treats your listening history as something you own.

The Problem

ListenBrainz has an Android app but no iOS version. A previous Swift attempt just duplicated the codebase, so every bug fix had to be written twice.

This project solves that by migrating to Kotlin Multiplatform, one shared codebase for both platforms. A large part of the work is replacing Android-only libraries with multiplatform equivalents across navigation, dependency injection and paging. Media playback is the harder case. ExoPlayer and WorkManager are tied too closely to Android to share, so both go behind common interfaces, with ExoPlayer on Android and AVPlayer on iOS underneath.

Getting this foundation right is what makes the rest cheap. Once it’s in place a feature or a bug fix is written once, instead of the same business logic being implemented twice and two apps being kept in sync by hand.

One thing genuinely can’t move. The notification listener that reads what’s playing in Spotify depends on an Android-only permission, and iOS has no equivalent to offer. Those screens stay Android-only. Everything else runs from one codebase on both platforms.