from http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/4595

I believe Picard would benefit from a progress indicator for each task of the operation, maybe in a second window, that would load after choosing "lookup", "scan", "cluster" or "save", with a list of events that are being processed and a cancel button, kind of like a virus scanner. There could be more detailed progress messages in the job window (rather than "looking up ID for [file]" or "searching MusicBrainz for [album]" being quickly displayed at the bottom of the application window.) The messages could be appended to the list like "creating fingerprint for ...", "looking up [album] on MusicBrainz", "looking up [album] on [plugin search engine such as FreeDB]" and "song was/was not successfully identified", all with progress indication at each step (or in some cases estimated progress indication) or just activity indication to let the user know the program is working and not debilitated by a fault.) It can be frustrating when I want to know what just happened or the events that I've already processed with Picard.
Having error messages displayed in the progress list would be helpful too. Currently, Picard saves a log file of the errors for debugging purposes, and doesn't seem to give too much meaningful information to the user. Each step could be added with a small icon, a character indication or color representing the message type in each line of the event list. The event log could perhaps be implemented as another panel below the two main panels for easy viewing and integration into a single form environment.