Maybe it would be a good idea to divide the functions into: beginner and advanced.
Beginner mode could only have three commands:
Add, Scan, Save.
Of course, you need to ask the user before starting whether he agrees to Picard’s 99% effectiveness.
AcoustID is already a huge mess.
Add, Lookup, Save
Scanning should not be the default workflow.
Would be nice if Picard 3.X would support Win7 and Win8.1 (but I know the plan is to move to QT6, which drops support for those better systems along with some Mac systems). Hopefully the QT6 Windows 7 fix will work for Picard 3 when its released.
Simplifying the interface might be a good idea as a option for beginners, I remember it took me a bit to learn it back in 2018, but now seems very logical.
Lastly, the Scanning feature should have a warning of the effects if it hasn’t yet been added (As I initially messed up my music library)
I have over 14000 MP3s.
If I do: Lookup and Scan (in that order) I end up with about 400 unclustered files on the left side of Picard.
If I do: Scan and Lookup (in that order) I end up with about 10 unclustered files on the left side of Picard.
In my case, Scan returns 99% correct tags.
There is the existing ticket PICARD-2315: Basic Mode/Display for this with some ideas. But it is unlikely this will come for Picard 3.0, rather for a later version.
It’s unlikely to work. It is not only Qt6 but also Python. We stuck to Python 3.8 for the Windows build to maintain compatibility. Python 3.9 dropped support for Windows 7 (and 8 I think as well). Current version is 3.13, with 3.14 approaching.
3.8 finally went out of support recently, so it becomes unsuitable for us to further support it. We will still build the next Picard 2.x releases with Python 3.8 for now, though.
I use 1 Win 8.1 laptop, 4 Win 7 machines (with one as my main desktop), 3 Vista PC’s, 3 XP machines and a Win98 computer (Along with some other older computers). Although all are connected to the internet when they’re on, I have proper measures in place (and then some). I view modern operating systems as more dangerous than the older ones.
There is also a fork of Python 3.12 (3.13 is in development) that adds support for Win 7, so that shouldn’t be a problem once Picard 3.X comes out.
We won’t officially support Win 7 if it isn’t supported by both Qt6 and Python 3. Anyone can however attempt to run Picard from source on Win 7 or provide builds for it. If someone volunteers and is willing to put the effort into providing, maintaining and supporting such builds I think we could also link to them from the Picard website download page.
I’ll give it a shot if I have time. When is Picard 3.X planned to be release? (Is it like 2025Q1, 2025Q2 or sometime in 2025H2?)
Your help would be highly appreciated, really.
There are two major goals for Picard 3: Upgrade to Qt6 and new plugin system. The first is done, the plugin system needs more work. Once this is ready we’d like to put out a alpha version. Ideally I would have liked to have this done until end of year, but work had stalled over the last weeks due to lack of time. So hopefully sometime Q1 next year.
There are more tasks to do, like providing the ARM builds for macOS or supporting the new MetaBrainz OAuth and smaller tasks.
I think once we are at a state of having that alpha version it would also be a good time of looking into building this for Win7.
