MusicBrainz Picard is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

software application Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

for identifying, tagging, and organising

digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, sa ...

recordings. It was developed by the

MetaBrainz Foundation The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California that operates the MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the f ...

, a non-profit company that also operates the

MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for sof ...

database. Picard identifies

audio files An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, ofte ...

and

Compact Discs The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October ...

by comparing either their

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

or their

acoustic fingerprint An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database. Practical uses of aco ...

s with records in the database. Audio file metadata (or "tags") are a means for storing information about a recording in the file. When Picard identifies an

audio file An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, o ...

, it can add new information to it, such as the recording artist, the album title, the

record label A record label, or record company, is a brand or trademark of music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the produ ...

, and the date of release. In some cases, it can also add more detailed information, such as lists of performers and their instruments. The source of this information is the MusicBrainz database, which is curated by volunteers. The more information the database has about a recording, the more Picard can embed in users' audio files. MusicBrainz Picard has tag editing features, and is extensible with plug-ins. It is named for

Captain Jean-Luc Picard Jean-Luc Picard is a fictional character in the '' Star Trek'' franchise, most often seen as the captain of the Federation starship . Played by Patrick Stewart, Picard has appeared in the television series '' Star Trek: The Next Generation'' ( ...

, a character in the US television series '' Star Trek: The Next Generation''.

Development

Picard began as a

tag editor A tag editor (or tagger) is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content. These are mainly taggers for common audio tagging formats like ID3, APEv2 tag, APE, and Vorbis comments ...

called the MusicBrainz Tagger, which was the work of MusicBrainz founder Robert Kaye and other volunteers. It was developed in the

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

programming language, and ran only on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s. This early incarnation of the program could identify songs based on tags or

MusicDNS AmpliFIND is an acoustic fingerprinting service and a software development kit developed by the US company MusicIP. MusicIP first marketed their fingerprinting algorithm and service as MusicDNS. In 2006, MusicIP reported that the MusicDNS database ...

acoustic fingerprints. However, Kaye saw that it needed cosmetic and functional improvements.

Streaming media Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

company

RealNetworks RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of artificial intelligence and computer vision based products. RealNetworks was a pioneer in Internet streaming software and services. They are based in Seattle, Washington, United States. The company also p ...

took an interest in MusicBrainz, and gave the developers a

grant Grant or Grants may refer to: Places *Grant County (disambiguation) Australia * Grant, Queensland, a locality in the Barcaldine Region, Queensland, Australia United Kingdom *Castle Grant United States * Grant, Alabama *Grant, Inyo County, C ...

to improve the Tagger software. As a sponsor of the development project, RealNetworks asked Kaye to come up with a

project code name A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in industrial c ...

. Since Kaye was trying to make a "next-generation tagger", he thought of the science fiction television series '' Star Trek: The Next Generation'', in which

Patrick Stewart Sir Patrick Stewart (born 13 July 1940) is an English actor who has a career spanning seven decades in various stage productions, television, film and video games. He has been nominated for Olivier, Tony, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Screen Actor ...

plays the role of

. Although Kaye intended the name ''Picard'' to be temporary, ''MusicBrainz Picard'' remains the official name of the program. With funding from RealNetworks, MusicBrainz developers designed a new

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

for Picard. When the new software identified tracks, it grouped them by album in a collapsible

tree view In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are u ...

. The developers also switched from a

software library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subr ...

called

wxPython wxPython is a wrapper for the cross-platform GUI API (often referred to as a "toolkit") wxWidgets (which is written in C++) for the Python programming language. It is one of the alternatives to Tkinter. It is implemented as a Python extensio ...

to another called

PyQt PyQt is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt, implemented as a Python plug-in. PyQt is free software developed by the British firm Riverbank Computing. It is available under similar terms to Qt versions older than 4.5; this m ...

, and

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

Picard to the operating systems

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

. In 2009, Picard's developers replaced the MusicDNS acoustic fingerprinting system with

AcoustID AcoustID is a webservice for the identification of music recordings based on the Chromaprint acoustic fingerprint algorithm. It can identify entire songs but not short snippets. By 2017, the free service had 34 million "fingerprints" in store an ...

. In 2017, Picard's development version was made available on

PyPi The Python Package Index, abbreviated as PyPI () and also known as the Cheese Shop (a reference to the ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' sketch " Cheese Shop"), is the official third-party software repository for Python. It is analogous to the C ...

, supporting

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

. In 2018, Picard 2.0 was released with support for

Python 3 The programming language Python was conceived in the late 1980s, and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to ABC capable of exception handling and interfacing with the ...

, PyQt5 and a new and improved UI.

Supported file formats

Picard supports these

audio file format An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, o ...

References

External links

*
MusicBrainz Picard
entries in the MusicBrainz Blog {{DEFAULTSORT:Musicbrainz Picard Online music database clients Picard Acoustic fingerprinting Tag editors Multimedia software for Linux Windows multimedia software MacOS multimedia software Free software programmed in Python Audio software that uses Qt