u/aerozol

#MusicBrainzPicard 3 is now available for download 🥳

The Picard team is happy to announce the new major version 3.0 of MusicBrainz Picard. Featuring:

• UI improvements
• New plugin system
• Cover art processing
• Tag + scripting enhancements
• Improved built-in player
• Save/restore user session
• Export/import option profiles
• OS support
• CD disc lookup and log file import options
• Synched lyrics
• Artist, release and track title translations
• Improved release matching
• ISRC lookup/submission
• Command line utility “picard-cli”
• Updated Picard User Guide
• Performance and memory optimizations
• And more…

Thank you for all your help testing, and of course to the open source developers who gave their time and expertise to this project. Happy tagging!

Presenting Sreehari's (owlpharoah/op3kay) Google Summer of Code project, working on the foundations of a #GraphQL server in #Rust that sits over the MusicBrainz #PostgreSQL database.

Mark the calendar and think up some questions!

Forum thread will go live on 5th October 2026
17:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST)

We are very close to final release, but we fixed a bunch of bugs and decided on another RC. Thank you to everyone who reported issues!

If you use Picard please try this release.

Blog post: https://blog.metabrainz.org/2026/09/22/picard-3-release-candidate-4/

We are very pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has appointed Silona Bonewald as Executive Director, following the unfortunate passing of our Rob at the beginning of the year.

Please read the blog post for more about Silona, and to comment and give her a warm welcome!

"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."

Bugs have been squashed, and a new release candidate is out for all users to test test test. These release candidates are feature-complete, so testing is simple - install, tag as normal, enjoying early access to the new Picard 3.0 features, and let us know if something breaks.

Thank you very much to all the testers so far. Your contribution and work is very important and much appreciated!

As with many of our peers, we are starting to feel and show the strain from AI scrapers up the wazoo (and also increased legit/good traffic 🥳❤️) and double to quadrupled server costs.

If you have a rich aunt or uncle please consider asking for a MeB server or two this xmas: metabrainz.org/donate

"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."

Note that these release candidates are near-complete and suitable for all users to test, not just experts. Please install and use it for your usual workflow, and report back and help us iron out any bugs before release.

"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." - Picard users, please download and test!

ATTENTION: The November #MusicBrainz search update will contain breaking changes. In particular, if you have a tool/app that uses MB please make sure to check (and feedback on) what might be changing.

Presenting Md Waqib Sk's Google Summer of Code 2026 project, developing a calibre plugin for BookBrainz.

We are aware of current issues with the MusicBrainz search. This affects anything that utlises the search (/ws/2/query?), including Picard and other third-party applications.

For a change, we don’t think this is related to scraping! The issue and solution is proving difficult to pinpoint, thank you very much for your kindness and patience.

Presenting Garv Thakre's Google Summer of Code 2026 project, bringing Internationalization (i18n) to BookBrainz! This allows the community to translate pages and the UI into different languages.

Presenting Yateen's Google Summer of Code 2026 project, adding playlist sorting and organisation to ListenBrainz!

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.

Implementing a good back off when they receive a 429 error will help avoid blocks too. For example, extending the waiting time between resubmissions, if the service repeatedly returns a 429. Note that some of the blocked services had this implemented already, but it can help.

Developers, you are always welcome to talk to us on the dev channel in ChatBrainz (Matrix/IRC/Discord) if you have any questions.

Presenting Nirvan Jain's Google Summer of Code 2026 project, moving the ListenBrainz app to Kotlin, a codebase that can be shared between Android and iOS.