One of the best music tagging apps just got a major update

The MetaBrainz Foundation announced a major update to MusicBrainz Picard this past weekend. Version 3.0 of the free and open source music tagging app adds several big improvements. Here are some of Picard 3's highlights.

What's new

• Initial setup wizard: Now when you run MusicBrainz Picard for the first time, you'll be greeted by a setup wizard that walks you through commonly changed settings, like whether you want files renamed or not.
  • Small dialogs showing tutorial help also pop up as you do things for the first time, unless you turn the tips off.
• Session saving: When you're working on tagging music and need to step away but don't want to save your edits yet, you can now save your session entirely. That way, your in-progress work gets saved but actual metadata changes don't.
• Option profile export: If you have customized option profiles, you can now share them or back them up with Picard's new profile export and import functions.
• Custom columns: In the cluster and album panes, you can now create your own columns for viewing and sorting data. For example, if you want a column for bitrates, you can create that using the custom column dialog with a %_bitrate% expression. With know-how, you can do more advanced scripting for your columns.
• Cover art processing: You can now configure Picard to automatically process cover art collected from art providers in several different ways. For example, you can have Picard ignore artwork that doesn't meet a minimum size or specific aspect ratio. Or, have Picard automatically convert images to your preferred file format.
• More tags: There are several more tag options, including tags for time-synced lyrics, broadcast dates, file sizes, and album or artist-specific countries.
  • Speaking of synced lyrics, there's initial support for loading and saving synced lyrics. The function is basic now, but expansion on the feature is planned for future Picard updates.

What’s new in Jellyfin 12.0: Themes, books, and more

On the way for the open source media server is a new default theme, vastly improved book support, plus fixes for long-standing bugs with TV schedules and more.

New In LinuxJordan Gloor

What's getting better

• The plugin system: There's been a major overhaul of the plugin system in this version of Picard. Plugins now have a system of trust levels (official, trusted, community, untrusted), and you can manage them from Picard's command line interface. The graphical plugin manager now visually separates installed and not-installed plugins, and they're also searchable.
  • For plugin developers, there's now a git-based versioning system and support for independent translation systems.
• The built-in player: Depending on the platform you use, you may see better format support and pitch controls in the built-in player. Listens can now be submitted to your ListenBrainz account, too.
  • On Linux, specifically, there's new MPRIS2 support, which makes it easier to control playback using other parts of your desktop, like a taskbar media player.
• The Qt framework: Picard 3 brings the app up to Qt 6 from version 5, which reached end-of-support last year. The upgrade means a lot of things, but it generally improves the way Picard windows are rendered.
• Dark mode support: Previously, dark mode wasn't supported on all platforms, and it required an app restart to switch. Neither is true any longer, with full dark/light mode switching on any platform without need to relaunch.

Zooming out

Why this update matters: Picard is one of the powerful tagging apps available that's also totally free and open source, and it integrates with the rest of the MusicBrainz metadata system. As people increasingly leave streaming services and go back to self-managed media, metadata managers like Picard will probably tick upward in usage.

• This update has been a long time coming after the last update to version 2 over a year ago.

My take: I'm looking forward to cover art processing and timed lyrics editing in particular.

Diving in

The fineprint: This was a huge update with tons more improvements, including in memory management and architecture support. See the official Picard 3 release announcement for more, or dive into the complete changelog for a granular look at Picard 3.

Get it now: You'll find Picard 3 available on Flathub and other rolling release software repositories soon. It's already available from Snapcraft and in Fedora Rawhide repositories.