Music Tagger MusicBrainz Picard 2.0 Ported To Python 3 And PyQt5, Brings Improved UI And More

MusicBrainz Picard version 2.0 was released after more than 6 years since the previous major release (1.0). The new version was ported to Python 3 and PyQt5 and includes Retina and HiDPI support, improved UI and performance, as well as numerous bug fixes.

MusicBrainz Picard 2.0

MusicBrainz Picard is a free and open source music tagging software developed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit company that also operates the MusicBrainz database, an open music encyclopedia.

The application can use your local music tags and acoustic fingerprints (AcoustID) to automatically compare it to records in the MusicBrainz database. When a match is found, MusicBrainz Picard can update the tags of your local music with metadata from their database, like the artist, album, track name, album cover, and so on. The application can also tag audio files based on filenames.

What's more, MusicBrainz Picard's functionality can be extended through scripts and plugins.

MusicBrainz Picard 2.0 was ported to Python 3 (requires at least version 3.5) and PyQt5 (>= 5.7). The release announcement mentions that a side effect of this is that "Picard should look better and in general feel more responsive". Also, many encoding-related bugs were fixed with the transition to Python 3, like the major issue of not supporting non-UTF8 filenames.

Other changes in MusicBrainz Picard 2.0 include:

  • Support for Retina and HiDPI displays
  • Support for tagging .dsf and .dff files
  • Added keyboard shortcut for deleting scripts from Options > Scripting page
  • Distinguish in UI between unclustered and release unmatched files
  • Improvements to UI for Lookup CD
  • Added option to ignore track duration difference
  • Added a command-line option to not restore persisted UI sizes or positions
  • Fixed dragging images from Google Chrome
  • Fixed saving tags for files on MTP devices (so you should now be able to use Picard to tag music files directly on your Android device)
  • Fixed saving tags for files on NAS devices
  • Picard will no longer automatically overwrite existing coverart
The MusicBrainz Picard 2.0 changelog is available here.

With this release, the developers decided to no longer support Windows 32bit due to lack of resources. Also, the macOS requirements were also increased to macOS 10.10 or newer.

If you need help on how to use MusicBrainz Picard to tag your music files, see its documentation.

Somewhat related: Use Custom Themes For Qt Applications On Linux With Kvantum

Download MusicBrainz Picard



For Linux you'll find MusicBrainz Picard binaries for Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE and Ubuntu, as well as a generic Flatpak. Not all the binaries were updated to the latest Picard 2.0 though. The Flatpak for example is still using version 1.4.2. The Ubuntu PPA already includes MusicBrainz Picard 2.0, for Ubuntu 18.10, 18.04 (and Linux Mint 19), and 17.10.