"Picard" naming [LWN.net]

"Picard" naming

Posted Apr 14, 2026 22:08 UTC (Tue) by kepstin (subscriber, #72391)
Parent article: Tagging music with MusicBrainz Picard

So, the reason for the current musicbrainz tagger being called "Picard" is that it is the "next generation" tagger.

The original musicbrainz tagger ("classic tagger") was a windows-onlu c++ application. The rewrite that created the "next generation" tagger made it cross platform, among other improvements.

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"Picard" naming

Posted Apr 14, 2026 22:18 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah. Thales for clearing that up. They still could’ve gone with Data, then. But he didn’t have a good catchphrase I guess.

"Picard" naming

Posted Apr 14, 2026 22:24 UTC (Tue) by kepstin (subscriber, #72391) [Link]

"Data" would have also been a search engine nightmare.

"Data tagger" - what kind of data?
"MusicBrainz Data" - yes, the musicbrainz database is full of (meta-)data.

"Picard" naming

Posted Apr 15, 2026 16:34 UTC (Wed) by andrewsh (subscriber, #71043) [Link]

I’ve always explained the name to myself as a reference to its ability to magically make it so that the tags are all in place without having to manually enter them 🙂