Exploring open waters - Picard 1.4

During the winter holidays of December, I decided to finally step into the world of open source. I made a list of organistions that I wanted to contribute to and the top three were Mozilla, Metabrainz and GNOME. Mostly because of the excellent community around these organisations. I had made this small note after I decided to start contributing to Picard, Metabrainz:

Metabrainz on the other hand, I only recently discovered when I used Picard - an automatic music tagger. It comes out as my first choice because I’m currently doing research at IIT Guwahati on the ‘Entity Disambiguation’ problem, they seem to be solving the same issue in the Music community. And another reason, Python! Mostly I use Python for Machine Learning projects as it simple yet powerful. Python is widely used in Metabrainz, this will help nourish my pythonic skills.

And with that, I started with a simple fix of adding tooltips to improve user-experience. I really liked the idea of ‘tagging presets’ which would allow a user to change the tagging options for different requirements. I started working on PICARD-404 to extend tagger scripting.

The extension was rather intuitive thanks to the super organised codebase of Picard. Being new to pyqt, I implemented a simple UI interface for this change. The upgrade was quickly merged into the master. I then worked to improve and perfect the UI. PR 542 is one of the most beautiful pieces of code that I’ve written.

samj1912 will be working during this summer to give a complete make-over to Picard which will jump from 1.4 to 2.0 because of this. I plan to continue contributing after this change.