Today, we have released MusicBrainz Picard 3 beta 7. This new versions brings several fixes over the last beta 5 (yes, we have skipped a beta number again), but also improvements and some new features. Among the highlights are:

• Option profiles can now be exported and imported as TOML files. This makes sharing options much easier. We are excited to see how this will be used by you all.
• Artist name standardization can now be set to one of three values: no standardization, standardizing only variations of the artist name (“Beatles” vs. “The Beatles”) or standardizing also actual artist name changes (“Diddy”, who previously performed under the names “P. Diddy” and “Puff Daddy”). Standardizing name variations is the new default setting. See also the documentation.
• Plugins can now implement custom CD ripper log file support, and there is built-in support for Cyanrip log files.
• Picard can now much better handles wrongly or differently encoded filenames when loading files.
• The setup wizard got some improvements, allowing users to configure their update notification settings for the app and plugins. Also the setup wizard can now be started again from the help menu. This is not yet the final version of the wizard, but it’s getting closer.
• The User Guide was updated to document the latest changes.

Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 5 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.

While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.

Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the beta version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.

• PICARD-3330 – Config upgrade hooks do not update profile overrides for value transforms
• PICARD-3331 – Encoding error when saving file metadata
• PICARD-3332 – Enums are not stored as values in option profiles
• PICARD-3333 – Cover art provider plugin option pages cannot have profile highlights
• PICARD-3334 – Enabling track title translation always uses the recording title
• PICARD-3336 – Can not go back to main app window after viewing Picard > About Picard
• PICARD-3338 – PICARD_PLUGIN_REGISTRY_URL env var ignored when official registry cache exists
• PICARD-3339 – Plugin boolean options show up in quick settings, but are not usable as such
• PICARD-3342 – Profile highlights broken if same option name is used by different plugins
• PICARD-3344 – Crash when refreshing collections list
• PICARD-3345 – Exception when reading SYLT tag with newline

• PICARD-30 – Add _artistcomment and _albumartistcomment variables
• PICARD-3328 – Support TOML-based exportable/importable profiles
• PICARD-3346 – Cyanrip log support

• PICARD-2673 – Standardize artist name variations by default
• PICARD-2845 – Add wizard illustration to first run information dialog and setup wizard
• PICARD-2999 – Automatic update check should be opt-in
• PICARD-3335 – Replace picard-plugins with picard-cli subcommand architecture
• PICARD-3337 – Add a picard-cli plugins compile-ui command
• PICARD-3343 – Allow starting the setup wizard again from the help menu
• PICARD-3347 – Add a plugin v3 extension point to register a custom CD ripping log parser

We appreciate your interest in trying this new version. Use with care, backup your files and please use the MetaBrainz community forums and the ticket system to give feedback and report bugs.

For Windows and macOS you can download the beta version from the Picard download page. Linux users can run from source or try the beta channel of the Picard snap package.

Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub.

Code contributions by Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer.
Translations were updated by Marc Riera (Catalan), rez00 (French) and zatto13 (Japanese). Documentation updates by Bob Swift, Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer.