The Participatory Culture Foundation has released the final build of Miro 5.0, its cross-platform open-source music and video player. Version 5 provides a new tool for looking up missing music information and artwork from the internet, providing the user with a quick means of cleaning up their music databases.

Version 5.0 also introduces a new view options for music and video, faster device synchronising and conversion, support for purchasing music from eMusic, the ability to download HD video from Vimeo feeds and major updates to the Windows backend.

Miro 5.0’s headline new features concern its music cataloguing and organising capabilities. The new tool for sourcing missing track information and album artwork utilises the Echonest and 7Digital databases respectively to automatically fill in the gaps.

Let Miro automatically fill in the gaps in your music collection's metadata and artwork.

The feature will be offered the first time a user switches to the Music tab after upgrading to Miro 5.0 – an option for cleaning up all song titles and albums is provided, or the user is provided with instructions for performing a cleanup on selected content only. It also appears during the New User Configuration wizard that appears when Miro is launched for the first time, and can be both run and configured via Miro’s Preferences pane under the General tab as well as the File and context menus.

Other changes include a new Album View, which groups together all songs by album and artist, plus a simplified view to allow video to be viewed by kind, such as movies, clips or podcasts. Miro’s device sync support is also improved, offering a Quick Fill option to speedily transfer content to the currently connected device. Syncing is now automatic, and an option to convert media only when necessary has also been added to further speed up the process.

Other minor changes include the addition of the eMusic website to the Stores section of the program, allowing users to purchase content directly from here, which automatically adds it to their library. Vimeo podcasts now also come with HD video support where available.

Rounding off the update are massive changes and updates to the Windows backend, covering all aspects including playback, the user interface and libtorrent.

Miro 5.0 is a free and open-source download for Windows, Mac and Linux. An iPad version is also currently in development, although no release date has yet been announced.