[SOLVED] MusicBrainz Picard doesn't work anymore with Ubuntu 20.04

Hi,

I’ve been using MusicBrainz Picard with Ubuntu for many years now, at least since LTS version 16.04, perhaps even before. It has always worked great.

But since I moved to the last LTS version of Ubuntu (20.04), it crashed while starting. However, the Ubuntu I run is quite ordinary, installed from scratch with the official DVD distribution, and with other applications always installed from the official Canonical repositories.

I requested some help in a Ubuntu forum but it seems I’m the only one to experience such crashes at start. That’s why I’m now asking help here…

Here are the logs when I run “picard -d” :

$ picard -d
D: 15:02:32,789 /usr/lib/picard/picard/tagger.init:232: Starting Picard from ‘/usr/lib/picard/picard/tagger.py’
D: 15:02:32,790 /usr/lib/picard/picard/tagger.init:233: Platform: Linux-5.4.0-29-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.29 CPython 3.8.2
D: 15:02:32,790 /usr/lib/picard/picard/tagger.init:235: Versions: Picard 2.3.1, Python 3.8.2, PyQt 5.14.1, Qt 5.12.8, Mutagen 1.44.0, Discid discid 1.1.0 (compat layer from python-libdiscid 0.4.1), libdiscid 0.6.2, astrcmp C, SSL OpenSSL 1.1.1f 31 Mar 2020
D: 15:02:32,790 /usr/lib/picard/picard/tagger.init:236: Configuration file path: ‘/home/lionel/.config/MusicBrainz/Picard.ini’
D: 15:02:32,790 /usr/lib/picard/picard/tagger.init:238: User directory: ‘/home/lionel/.config/MusicBrainz/Picard’
D: 15:02:32,792 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:83: Using locale ‘fr_FR.UTF-8’
D: 15:02:32,792 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:85: Loading gettext translation, localedir=’/usr/share/locale’
D: 15:02:32,798 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:87: Loading gettext translation (picard-countries), localedir=’/usr/share/locale’
D: 15:02:32,800 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:89: Loading gettext translation (picard-attributes), localedir=’/usr/share/locale’
D: 15:02:32,807 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:101: _ = <bound method GNUTranslations.gettext of <gettext.GNUTranslations object at 0x7fc3d41dfa60>>
D: 15:02:32,807 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:102: N_ = <function at 0x7fc3d8d321f0>
D: 15:02:32,807 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:103: ngettext = <bound method GNUTranslations.ngettext of <gettext.GNUTranslations object at 0x7fc3d41dfa60>>
D: 15:02:32,807 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:104: gettext_countries = <bound method GNUTranslations.gettext of <gettext.GNUTranslations object at 0x7fc3d41dfbb0>>
D: 15:02:32,807 /usr/lib/picard/picard/i18n.setup_gettext:105: gettext_attributes = <bound method GNUTranslations.gettext of <gettext.GNUTranslations object at 0x7fc3d41dff70>>
D: 15:02:32,843 /usr/lib/picard/picard/webservice/init.set_cache:303: NetworkDiskCache dir: ‘/home/lionel/.cache/network/’ current size: 0 B max size: 100 MB
D: 15:02:32,844 /usr/lib/picard/picard/pluginmanager.load_plugins_from_directory:219: Looking for plugins in directory ‘/usr/lib/picard/picard/plugins’, 0 names found
D: 15:02:32,845 /usr/lib/picard/picard/pluginmanager.load_plugins_from_directory:219: Looking for plugins in directory ‘/home/lionel/.config/MusicBrainz/Picard/plugins’, 0 names found
D: 15:02:32,855 /usr/lib/picard/picard/ui/playertoolbar.init:91: Internal player: QtMultimedia available, initializing QMediaPlayer
Erreur de segmentation (core dumped)

Other interesting logs :

$ dpkg -l | grep python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia
ii python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia 5.14.1+dfsg-3build1 amd64 Python 3 bindings for Qt5’s Multimedia module
$ dpkg -l | grep libqt5multimedia5-plugin
ii libqt5multimedia5-plugins:amd64 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 Qt 5 Multimedia module plugins

Deleting the current config directory or Picard, nor reinstalling it, didn’t fix the problem.

Thank you for your help !

Fellow Ubuntu 20.04 user here. How did you install it? I’m using the developers’ PPA (https://launchpad.net/~musicbrainz-developers/+archive/ubuntu/stable) and installed via apt. Copied my old configs over and it’s working great.

I also have the same versions of those other packages installed. Very odd.

1 Like

Could be some issue with python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia on your system.

Try uninstalling this package if possible, for Picard it’s optional anyway.

Otherwise both the version from Ubuntu’s repositories and the one from our PPA works here on my Ubuntu 20.04 setup.

1 Like

First, sorry for replying so late, but I was waiting for notifications of replies to my question, but I didn’t receive any (don’t know why…).

MusicBrainz Picard installation was from from Canonical repositories.

As suggested, I tried to remove python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia package and … it worked ! I also tried to reinstall after python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia, but no surprise, it made the problem reappear.

If living without python3-pyqt5.qtmultimedia package is the solution for MusicBrainz Picard working, I will live without !

Thank you for the help :+1:

1 Like

You need to enable notifications and emails in your user’s Preferences.

On one system I could now reproduce this. Here it turns out it was related to VAAPI support with Intel video. My Totem player also crashed. Qt Multimedia in this case fails early when initializing. It is a bit stupid, because obviously Picard does not need hardware video acceleration, but Qt Multimedia is more generic so also supports video playback.

Workaround was to uninstall gstreamer1.0-vaapi.

UPDATE: Maybe even the better solution if you still want to have the hardware video decoding: I could fix it by installing intel-media-va-driver-non-free, which replaced the package intel-media-va-driver I had installed previously. Interestingly I can no longer find intel-media-va-driver in the Ubuntu package repository.

2 Likes