History:How to Build Picard for Windows

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Note Note: See up-to-date docs at the dedicated Picard site.


This page explains the process of building MusicBrainz Picard and the installer for Windows. It only works for Picard 1.2 and newer, which no longer supports AmpliFIND.

Requirements

Running Picard From Sources

Before you can run Picard from sources, you need to build the C extension. Start the VS console using "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt", go to the source directory and run these commands:

python setup.py build_ext -i
python setup.py build_locales -i

After you have done this, you can run Picard directly from the sources using:

python tagger.py

Building the Installer

To build the installer executable you need additional Tools:

Then you need to copy msvcr90.dll and msvcp90.dll from "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\redist\x86\Microsoft.VC90.CRT" to the source code directory, so that py2exe can find them. You also need copy discid.dll (libdiscid) to the picard source.

Then you can build the installer using this command:

python setup.py bdist_nsis

The setup is installer\picard-setup-1.x.exe and an executable for your system is dist\picard.exe, which you can use to create a desktop shortcut.

Known Issues

It is possible that the resulting picard.exe does not show the proper file icon. This is probably a bug of py2exe on Vista. You can fix the icon with the tool Resource Hacker or any other tool, that can edit the resources in executables.