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Development of Picard

The PicardTagger is being actively developed, mostly by LukasLalinsky and RobertKaye.

This page NeedsUpdating: the next version of PicardTagger will be PicardQt, written using Qt as the GUI toolkit and including implementations of a few new ideas, such as IntuitivePicardInterface or TaggerScript. Read more...

How to Get Involved

• ToDo: Explain how people can get involved in the development of Picard.

The following pages on the BugTracker should give you an idea what is currently being worked on:

• Active tickets for Picard

• Milestone: Picard 0.7

• Milestone: Picard Qt

Source Code

• http://svn.musicbrainz.org/picard/ - main Subversion repository ( Trac source code browser).

• http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~vcs-imports/picard/main - Bazaar-NG mirror of trunk from the Subversion repository.

Roadmap

The following roadmap is a bit out of date, but it should still give you an idea of the state of Picard and what is being worked on.

Soon: Automated tagging

Currently the cluster identification process is completely manual -- in the future Picard will automatically download albums for all the artists it finds during the cluster phase. Picard will then go through the unmatched files and attempt to match them against album information that was downloaded.

But for right now, Picard is a little more 'do it yourself' -- however, I think that Picard will let you tag files faster than the old tagger -- you just need to get used to the new way of doing things.

Unfortunately, the current version of Picard is also not very user-interface friendly. The tagging/matching/association works well if you have just a few albums, but as soon as you have several hundred clustered albums, dragging them to associate with the TRM identified real album data gets too unwieldly. Future versions of Picard will have a much more IntuitivePicardInterface. Besides that, though, Picard works great!

What works now?

• 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 files 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 various languages. See list of translations at Rosetta for more details.

• 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 things to fix:

• 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 onto "New Files" -- use the Cluster button to cluster these unmatched files into album clusters.

• 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.

Misc

• /ReleaseChecklist

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