With today’s announcement of Picard 3 rc1 availability, I’ve finally addressed some issues with the Picard 3 version of a couple of my plugins.
Additional Artists Details
There has been a long-standing problem where the plugin failed to populate the new variables initially, and required an album to be refreshed for that to happen. The reason was that the album was being “finalized” before all of the api calls for the additional information (usually area information requests) were completed. The plugin now blocks the finalization until all of the requests have completed, so no more need to refresh (although the album may now appear to take slightly longer to load initially).
The second issue was that the cache used to reduce the number of additional api calls was being deleted each time Picard was closed, causing all the api calls to be repeated as required in the next session. I’ve now added a new option (enabled by default) for the plugin to retain a copy of the cached information in a JSON file on your hard drive, and reload it when Picard is started. This allows the cache to persist between Picard sessions, and means that area (and optionally artist) information only needs to be retrieved once. In my testing here, a various artists compilation album that initially took over 20 seconds to load (because of the area lookups for all of the different track artists) took under 2 seconds for subsequent loads, even after closing Picard and starting a new session. Not only will this speed things up for the user, it should help reduce the load on the MusicBrainz api by eliminating duplicate calls for the same information.
There are actions in the plugin’s options page to allow importing and exporting copies of the cache from/to external files to allow for backup and transferring to another system.
For more details, please see the plugin’s user guide.
Additional Artists Variables
The main change with this plugin is to add more variables! Specifically, there are now variables exposing artist names and sort names based on your preferred locale and name translation settings in Picard’s MetaData Options. These variables will only be created if you have enabled translation of artist names, and there is at least one artist alias for a locale matching one of your preferred locales.
List of new variables
Album Variables
- _artists_album_additional_alias - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias names) except for the primary / first artist, separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_album_additional_alias_multi - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias names) except for the primary / first artist, as a multi-value
- _artists_album_additional_alias_sort - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names) except for the primary / first artist, separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_album_additional_alias_sort_multi - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names) except for the primary / first artist, as a multi-value
- _artists_album_all_alias - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias names), separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_album_all_alias_multi - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias names), as a multi-value
- _artists_album_all_alias_sort - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names), separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_album_all_alias_sort_multi - All album artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names), as a multi-value
- _artists_album_primary_alias - The primary / first album artist listed (locale-specific alias name)
- _artists_album_primary_alias_sort - The primary / first album artist listed (locale-specific alias sort name)
Track Variables
- _artists_track_additional_alias - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias names) except for the primary / first artist, separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_track_additional_alias_multi - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias names) except for the primary / first artist, as a multi-value
- _artists_track_additional_alias_sort - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names) except for the primary / first artist, separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_track_additional_alias_sort_multi - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names) except for the primary / first artist, as a multi-value
- _artists_track_all_alias - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias names), separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_track_all_alias_multi - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias names), as a multi-value
- _artists_track_all_alias_sort - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names), separated by strings provided from the release entry
- _artists_track_all_alias_sort_multi - All track artists listed (locale-specific alias sort names), as a multi-value
- _artists_track_primary_alias - The primary / first track artist listed (locale-specific alias name)
- _artists_track_primary_alias_sort - The primary / first track artist listed (locale-specific alias sort name)
The other change is that all variables created by this plugin are registered so that they appear in the scripting autocomplete, mouse-over descriptions, and scripting documentation. This is new functionality that was added as part of Picard 3.
For more details, please see the plugin’s user guide.
As always, if you run into any issues with these or any of my plugins, please let me know by entering a ticket in the appropriate repository on GitHub. The easiest way to do this is by right-clicking on the plugin in the list in the “Plugins” page under “Options”, and select the “Report a Bug” action.
). I’ll try sending him an email to see what he prefers.