MusicBrainz Picard 3.0.4

MusicBrainz Picard fixes the names, albums and cover art of your music files by matching them against the free MusicBrainz database.

It can even recognise songs with no tags at all by listening to them, then give the files proper names and sort them into tidy folders.

Version 3.0.4 arrived on 1 November 2026, and Picard is free and open source for Windows, macOS and Linux.

What Picard Actually Does

Drag a folder of music into Picard and it groups the files into albums, looks each one up online, and shows you the match next to what your files say now. You check it, press Save, and the correct tags and cover art are written into every file.

• Audio fingerprints - AcoustID identifies a song by its sound, so even files called track01.mp3 get the right title.
• Whole albums - Picard thinks in releases, so every track gets the same album, year and artwork.
• Cover art - pulled from the Cover Art Archive and embedded or saved next to the files.
• Renaming and sorting - a simple script decides folder and file names, such as Artist, then Album, then track number and title.
• CD lookup - put in an audio CD and Picard finds its exact release.

It works with MP3, FLAC, Ogg, M4A, WMA, WAV and most other common audio formats.

What Is New in Picard 3

Picard 3.0, released on 4 October 2026, is the biggest update in years. It moves to Qt6 for a better dark mode and sharper display on high-resolution screens, and adds a setup wizard that walks new users through the main choices.

There is a rewritten plugin system with a central plugin list, plus custom columns, synced lyrics and saved sessions.

The small updates since then are bug fixes. Version 3.0.4 stops .webp images being mistaken for WAV audio, fixes a match indicator that wrongly flagged freshly ripped files, and cures two crashes, one of them on macOS whenever you switched apps.

Version 3.0.3, three days earlier, fixed cover art not embedding in FLAC files from the side panel and Grouping tags that could not be deleted from MP3s.

Which Download to Pick

For Windows 10 and 11, take the 3.0.4 installer from the download page, or the portable version if you would rather run Picard without installing it. Picard 3 is 64-bit only.

Mac users get separate builds for Apple Silicon and Intel, both for macOS 13 or newer. The Linux file is the source package, and most Linux users install Picard from Flathub or their distribution instead.

Getting Good Results

Start small: tag one album, check the matches in the right-hand panel, and only then load the whole collection. Picard never changes a file until you press Save.

Back up your music first if you plan to let Picard change file names and move files. A naming script that looks right on screen can still spread a large library across folders you did not expect.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

If you want to edit tags by hand rather than match them to a database, Mp3tag is the standard on Windows.

TagScanner and Kid3 are good free alternatives for manual tagging.

If your music is mostly bootlegs, DJ mixes or recordings that were never released, MusicBrainz will not know them. A manual editor is the better tool there.

For a player that manages a tagged library well, foobar2000 and MusicBee both read the tags Picard writes.

Before and After Tagging

Ripping CDs? Exact Audio Copy makes accurate rips, and the LAME MP3 Encoder or FLAC turn them into files Picard can tag.

To check what is inside a file once Picard has finished, MediaInfo shows every tag and the audio format, and VLC Media Player plays the result.

Quick questions

More taggers, rippers and players are in our Audio Codecs section.

Download MusicBrainz Picard 3.0.4 and tidy your first album, or tell us how it handled your library.