Musicbrainz Picard On Ubuntu

Music nerds love music.  Music nerds with OCD and a large MP3 collection love when those music files that are perfectly organized.  Luckily, the people behind the MusicBrainz database have also released a very good MP3 tagging tool called Picard.

While the Picard developers do provide a PPA for software installation, it currently officially supports versions up to Xenial Xerus (Ubuntu 16.04) and contains an older version of Picard.  To install the latest Picard on newer versions of Ubuntu, we can install from source.

Prerequisites

First, check which version of Python is installed - you will need 2.7 or higher, but not Python 3 (which doesn't work with Picard.)

python -V

Next, we'll install the Picard dependencies.

sudo aptitude install python-libdiscid python-pyqt5 python-qt4-dev python-mutagen build-essential gettext fpcalc libpicard-java med-cloud med-bio libpicard-java libpicard-java libhtsjdk-java ffmpeg

Download the latest version of Picard's source code from https://picard.musicbrainz.org/downloads/.  In this example, I have downloaded the TAR file for version 1.4.1.  Now, navigate to the directory containing the download and extract its contents.

tar zxvf picard-1.4.1.tar.gz

Installation 

Lastly, navigate into the newly created directory and run the setup/install script.

cd picard-release-1.4.1 && sudo python setup.py install

Links & Info

Picard Download: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/downloads/
Additional Picard Plugins: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/plugins/
Official Ubuntu Repo: https://launchpad.net/~musicbrainz-developers/+archive/ubuntu/stable
Manually Updating Cover Art: https://superuser.com/questions/918550/musicbrainz-picard-how-to-manually-set-a-cover