[mb-devel] Actually Active?

[Jan van Thiel]

Hi Ryan,

I am not a Picard developer, but will try to answer your questions.

On 1/4/07, Ryan Cross <ryan.cross at student.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> Appologies first, because I really appreciate the work that everyone has
> done. I know that tagger is supposedly dead (though, I often find it better
> for my needs). I'm just curious if picard is actually being developed. It
> seems like it's been 9-10 months since 7.2 has been released, and I know
> there are supposedly a lot of big UI changes that people want to make and
> lots of other missing/desired features. But it seems like there is no
> progress on any of it.

I believe Picard 0.7.2 was released somewhere end of October. It is
still being developed, and new UI ideas are under investigation.
Unfortunately, there is only one developer, Lukáš Lalinský, and he
only has so much time.

> My appologies if I begin to rant, but I've been
> slowing going through a very big collection of mp3s to get worked out. I got
> to a point where I had groups of full albums for a lot of things so I
> started feeding it through picard thinking this was what it was for. More or
> less, I got things working - I thought. And after quite a bit of time, I got
> a good chunk of the albums done and decided to import them into iTunes to
> check things out, as well as media monkey and winamp (since I have yet to
> find a player/organizer that works for me). I was really upset when I
> started to notice that seemingly randomly, the tags I had thought picard was
> applying didn't actually seem to be saved. What's even worse is that I'm
> fairly sure most of the previous tags were at least there - though slightly
> wrong. So now I've got huge holes in my tags - some files have blank
> artists, some have blank album titles, some seem to have changed comments
> and genres (which I tried testing along time ago and didn't think
> picard/tagger changed those fields). So, as you can imagine I'm upset about
> the lost time and effort but I'm also surprised that (if this is a bug)
> hasn't been worked out before the 0.1 release. Secondly, I keep feeling like
> I'll be patient and wait for the next big release but this doesn't seem to
> be happening. So, my appologies for the long email but I guess it boils down
> to - what's the status? And what's holding things up?

I haven't heard of Picard removing only some tags. Picard has an
option to keep old tags if they're there, or remove all tags before
writing new ones. If you can describe the problem in more detail,
possible recreate it, it will be helpful to add a bug report to
http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ .

If you want Picard to mature faster than currently is the case, you
can of course donate at http://metabrainz.org/donate/ .

Regards,
Jan van Thiel