Picard 1.4 released

Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 1.4 is now out, containing many fixes and new features!
The last time we put out a stable release was more than 2 years ago, so a lot of changes have made it into this new release. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

Picard 1.4

2 years is a long time for software, and Picard has been the subject of a couple of Google Summer of Code projects and plenty of developments required by changes in dependencies and the MusicBrainz project itself. Overall, the changes would be too numerous to list. If you’re curious to read it all, a complete list of changes can be seen on the website. Here are at least a few of the highlights:

Some of the most notable new features:

• AIFF support
• Support for local files as cover art source
• In-app search and display (for releases, artists and tracks)
• Plugin manager allowing to download and install plugins directly from Picard
• Configurable toolbar
• Configuration file is now using ini format on all platforms
• Support for multiple tagging scripts
• Added Norwegian (bokmål) translation:

Some of the improvements:

• Much better handling of formats and tags
• More information is given to the user about what is going on (new indicators, new tooltips, better labels, better logging, …)
• It is now possible to restore the default options in Options pages
• A few additions to the scripting language: $startswith() and $endswith() string functions and support for an arbitrary number of arguments to some of the current functions.

It is also worth noting that the Picard dependencies have increased a bit. Python should now be at least version 2.7, and Mutagen should be 1.22 or newer.

To report any issue concerning this release, please use our bug tracker. As usual you can also get help on the forum or on IRC (freenode, #musicbrainz).

We would like to thank all contributors, from all around the world, who helped for this release: Sambhav Kothari, Rahul Raturi, Suhas, Wieland Hoffmann, Philipp Wolfer, Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Sophist, Lukáš Lalinský, Ohm Patel, Michael Wiencek, Ville Skyttä, barami, Alex Berman, Simon Legner, Christoph Reiter, Jeroen Kromwijk, Mark Trolley, Rui Pinheiro, and also all of our translators!

Future development and Picard 2.0

We hope we’ll never go 2 years without a release again. Our immediate plans are to do a 1.4.1 follow up release as an improved maintenance release, mostly because a number of pull requests were not ready in time for the 1.4 feature and string freeze. After 1.4.1 we will likely only do bug fixes for 1.4.x releases, as we have decided to move on, and change focus to Picard 2.0.

Picard 2.0 will be based on Python 3 and Qt 5, with its main initial goal being support of HiDPI devices, but also to give the user interface a complete overhaul. We’re hoping to improve the experience for the new users (and hopefully also the old ones!). If you’re interested in following along with the plans and development, and maybe giving a hand yourself, Picard 2.0 development is tracked via the Picard 2.0 version in our ticket tracker.