MusicBrainz Picard

Picard Tagger

The PicardTagger is the next generation MusicBrainzTagger. This version of the tagging application is album oriented, as opposed to track oriented as the old tagger was. This new application is also cross platform, which means the same code runs on Windows and on Linux. Before too long we will add Mac OS X support as well. The PicardTagger will implement most of the MBTaggerImprovements. See also the project page https://musicbrainz.helixcommunity.org/ for more details on Picard.

Download Picard

Latest Release - 0.5.0

• Linux tarball picard-0.5.0.tar.gz 192Kb
• Windows installer picard-setup-0.5.0.exe 4.6Mb (NT/2000/XP Only!)

Twice Daily CVS Snapshots

• http://musicbrainz.org/~dave/picard-snapshots/

If you're building Picard from source, make sure you have libmusicbrainz 2.1.1 and libtunepimp 0.4.0. If you're using earlier versions of these tools, Picard will not run!

Picard Documentation

Please see PicardTaggerDocumentation for the current documentation.

Mailing List, Bugs, Feedback

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE PAGE BEFORE REPORTING BUGS/PROBLEMS!

It is now time to use a real bug tracking system for keeping track of bugs and feature requests. Please go here to submit bugs/feature requests:

• Bugs: report new (use category Picard)
• Enhancements: new RFE (use category Picard)
• Mailing list: subscribe archives

Running Picard Tips

Tip 1

On Linux, make sure to set your BROWSER environment variable to point to your browser. Mine looks like:

BROWSER="firefox '%s' &" 

If your application freezes when the browser is active, make sure you have the & at the end of the BROWSER variable. If your browser takes you to a wrong page, make sure you have single quotes around your %s (e.g. '%s' )

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What works?

• Open files into [new files] by double clicking files
• Drag files, and directories into [ Drag tacks to identify here ]
• Drag files into specific album slot to associate file with the track.
• Drag files/dirs onto an album line and picard will auto match tracks to the album. Tracks that don't match the minimal matching threshold, will go into a special[ Unclustered files ] folder that gets created under the album.
• Saving filesm with move and rename support, with support for UNICODE filenames and tags.
• Remove files/albums
• Cluster unmatched files into album clusters and automatically matching clusters to albums when albums get opened.
• Preference dialog features
• Cover art is shown for albums that match CDs on Amazon.com. The user can click on info and buy links right from the tagger.
• Looking up Audio CDs
• Searching for artists/albums/tracks from the toolbar
• Localized to Norwegian, German, French, Russian and Slovak.
• Some multi-select support in the album panel.

What is planned to work in the future?

The following is a non-exhaustive list of all the things that don't work yet:

General

• The edit menu isn't hooked up yet.
• No keyboard shortcuts for drag and drop operations
• All files that have no MB ids in their tags will always end up in the unclustered tracks folder when dropped ontonew files -- use the Cluster button to cluster these unmatched files into album clusters.
• The application exits without asking the user to save unsaved files
• Add Helix Community support by using PyPlayer for music preview and for mp3 decode support.

Album Panel

• Multiple select in the album view works only in a limited fashion

File Browser

• The file details should show up in Local mdata when file clicked
• Files should have appropriate icons

Metadata Information Panel

• The artist and album combo box drop downs do not populate with correct data
• Even though the metadata for a track can be edited, it still can't be saved.

Menus

• The menu is still sparse and needs more items
• The edit menu cut, copy and paste options are not functional yet.
• The application needs (more) context menus.

Browser launching

• For each lookup a new browser window is opened -- the user should have more control over this process.

Platform Specific Issues

• The application has not been tuned for Mac OS X -- wxPython still has some serious bugs that prevent Picard form running well. We'll have to wait for further releases before we can attempt to release a version for Mac OS X.