Current state for MKV/MKA files

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Hi i wand to know what is the current status is of MKV/MKA support in Picard?

2

Have you checked the documentation?

3

I know that current is not working but i wand to know will be change with the next release.

4

That wasn’t what I asked?

I asked whether you had checked the documentation? Because…

  1. We don’t know without checking the documentation whether it is supposed to be supported yet it isn’t working (which would make it a bug) or whether it isn’t supported (which would make it a feature request).
  2. Before expecting anyone to volunteer their time to help you need to have demonstrated that you have done your own due diligence and tried to find the answer.
  3. If a bug needs fixing or a feature adding then it probably won’t appear like magic unless someone reports a bug or logs a feature request.
  4. And even when it is logged, several people will then need to volunteer their time to code a fix/feature, to review that code, to merge it and create a new executable version, to update the documentation etc.
5

Took me 1 minute to find https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/about_picard/introduction.html#limitations and see:

Picard currently supports most music file formats, with Matroska (.mka) being one notable exception.

I suspect that the reason for this is that Picard uses Mutagen for tag reading and writing and AFAICT Mutagen doesn’t support Matroska tagging or EBML which Matroska uses to store tags.

So for Picard to support Matroska files, Mutagen would need to support them first, and this makes the complexity and effort to achieve it at least 100x greater.

TL;DR answer to your original question: Unsupported now and for the foreseeable future.

My recommendation to you (if you want this) is for you to:

  1. Raise enhancement requests to support Matroska files on both Picard and Mutagen.
  2. Code and submit a PR to Mutagen to support Matroska files (including automated tests).
  3. Once that is accepted and merged, then it should be fairly simple to add support to Picard.
6

Matroska support in Mutagen was first requested in July 2014.

I suspect that the lack of support over 11 years later is due to the effort required to add it.

7

I made a plugin to do this via MkvToolNix.

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8

Matroska tagging has been implemented in Foobar2000. But the tagging format is very complicated. It has various nested levels that may loosely correspond to “album”, “track” and “chapter” and more named fields than Vorbis/Ape. What one player writes might not show up as expected in another player.

Matroska is very rarely used format for audio without video. I use it for containing TrueHD and E-AC-3 (Atmos). With chapter marks and the right muxer it provides gapless playback that separate tracks don’t.

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