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General => General Discussions => Topic started by: Phaedrus on December 17, 2017, 10:37:27 AM

Title: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 17, 2017, 10:37:27 AM
Based on a post in Questions, about Advanced Auto Playlist options, I am switching to MusicBrainz Picard for Tagging.
Thought I'd share thoughts as I go. Feel free to chime in with resources, or pointers.

1. If your files are already sorted into directories, don't drag the root folder to MusicBrainz, and let it sort them out. You will be disappointed. Drag the Root of the folders to the left side and then "Cluster." It will be much better.
2. Picard is incredibly powerful, and can be customized with scripts. You can get pretty good information without resorting to them.
3. Work with a copied subset of your library until you are comfortable with the results. (Should be common sense, but I'm not taking anything for granted.)
4. The Album Art is fairly disappointing compared to Discogs.
5. Maybe it's just me, but the documentation is only adequate at best.
6. It is not "Set it and forget it" for updating an existing library. There will be some manual checking. Plan accordingly.
7. Once the IDs are all set from the first cycle, subsequent cycles will be faster.
8. I am not a coder, and trying to create scripts is really driving that point home.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on December 17, 2017, 02:09:17 PM
4. The Album Art is fairly disappointing compared to Discogs.

Art is a weak spot for Picard for sure.  I only ever do front covers, so my response here might not apply to your specific needs, but there are ways to improve the retrieved art.

1. Install and activate the fanart.tv plugin.  You will need a free fanart.tv API key, which you can get by registering on their site
2. Options->Options->Cover Art and adjust the rankings.  Fanart.tv and Cover Art Archive have large cover art (1000x1000 and above, generally) and a wide selection between them.  Amazon has almost everything as you would imagine, but sizes vary wildly.  You can adjust the allowed size by for Cover Art Archive by...
3. Clicking the right-facing arrow next to "Cover Art" at the left and setting the size.

One HUGE caveat - if your file already has art and Picard cannot find updated art for it, it will DELETE YOUR CURRENT ART IN THE FILE when you save your tags.  There is no way to preserve your current art.  If you notice there is no new art listed, you should click "Show More Details" under the art, double-click your current art in the new window, which will open it in a photo viewer, and save a copy to drag and drop back into Picard to save.

If you don't embed your art, this is not an issue.  It will not delete local cover files it finds, it just replaces the tag for embedded art.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 17, 2017, 04:28:46 PM
I haven't even started on figuring out the art. This will be very helpful. I'm not married to having all the available art for each album, but I have to have a cover. I suspect that this will be the biggest time sink when I start going through my full library.

I'm working on the script to format tags "Properly." It's only a few lines, but then, I haven't even gotten to any of the specific exception cases yet.

I can add to my list that tagging a library with both MP3 and FLAC files is a major pain.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on December 17, 2017, 07:45:04 PM
Tagging in general is tedious, which is how I wound up with thousands of files with genres representing types of music I couldn't explain in a million years. :) 
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 17, 2017, 08:45:56 PM
Tagging in general is tedious, which is how I wound up with thousands of files with genres representing types of music I couldn't explain in a million years. :)

I made the mistake of adding all the genre tags from last.fm to my library. Now I have 518 different genres many of which are just variable spellings. And that was using a pretty extensive blacklist, and ignoring Mood, Occasion and Category. After that, it was game over. I remember throwing my hands up when a Barry Manilow track showed up under "Hard Rock."

I have a foolish hope that MusicBrainz will save me.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Penn on December 20, 2017, 02:57:31 PM
I would love to get my genres sorted out, made the same mistake with Last FM.

I just need to separate dance, rock, pop, ballads with reasonable accuracy and I'd be happy.

You doing it with MusicBrainz?
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on December 20, 2017, 03:50:28 PM
Warning when it comes to Genre and MusicBrainz.  There's a plugin called Wikidata-Genre. It may just be me and YMMV and all that, but it completely locked up MusicBrainz every time I tried to tag an album.  It would start downloading album data and then freeze.  Took a lot of time to figure out which plugin was doing it, that was the one.

I honestly haven't found a good solution for Genre data anywhere besides the two things at the sides of my head.  There's too much variation in peoples' perceptions and descriptions.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 22, 2017, 02:06:57 AM
Quote
I would love to get my genres sorted out, made the same mistake with Last FM. I just need to separate dance, rock, pop, ballads with reasonable accuracy and I'd be happy. You doing it with MusicBrainz?

There was so much promise with genres in Last.FM. I'm giving it a go with MusicBrainz; see below.

Quote
Warning when it comes to Genre and MusicBrainz. There's a plugin called Wikidata-Genre. It may just be me and YMMV and all that, but it completely locked up MusicBrainz every time I tried to tag an album. It would start downloading album data and then freeze. Took a lot of time to figure out which plugin was doing it, that was the one. I honestly haven't found a good solution for Genre data anywhere besides the two things at the sides of my head. There's too much variation in peoples' perceptions and descriptions.

I don't think there is a "Good" solution for genres. I can't even say that the stuff between my ears is any good. I found that order and frame of mind affected how I perceived tracks. I couldn't even be consistent within my own head. I spent hours researching genres, and trying to come up with a system, and ultimately failed. This was one of the things which led me to Discogs. Their Genres for the album are usually a really good starting point. I may well end up sticking with a combination of Picard, and my old MM/Discogs Plugin. (Great, instead of simplifying, I've made my process longer, and more complicated; unless I can figure out how to script scraping Discogs from within Picard.)

MusicBrainz does have a newer plugin for using Last.FM that works, and I've been using the Wikidata with no problem. I'm working out how to let it use Last.FM for Decade, Mood, and Ocassion; while I use Wikidata for the Genre. Somehow, I have an "Album Genre" which should be nice. I'm experimenting with a batch of albums and trying different combinations before I start importing into MusicBee, and I now have a few tracks by Toby Keith listed as "Emo."

I found the Picard forum to be right next to useless, unless you already have the answer you want. I hate the interface, and I can never find anything useful using the search. I've just been reading random posts, and hoping it points me to an answer.

So far the only real positive is that I've learned that I'm better at scripting than I give myself credit for.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 22, 2017, 08:05:26 AM
So, after writing that last post, and poking around the albums I've already tagged; I'm just gonna go with it.

1. Once the track has the MusicBrainz information in it, I can run through them again without breaking anything. The best part is that I can do the second run-through largely unattended.

2. My Genre tags are already so useless that anything different would be an improvement.

3. Once I start re-tagging my existing library, I can have specific tags kept. I don't have to lose anything.

Then again, what do I know? I'm the idiot that imported the Last.FM genre information into my library.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 22, 2017, 08:13:39 AM
Nice reads, and I can relate to pretty much everything you are experiencing.
Keep 'em coming ;-)

And if you come up with scripts that you think that might be useful, perhaps share them here?
I also agree that the MusicBrainz forum somehow doesn't work well in sharing thoughts and ideas.
Something like form over function?
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 22, 2017, 11:13:32 PM
Nice reads, and I can relate to pretty much everything you are experiencing. Keep 'em coming ;-)

Thank you kindly. -blush- I figure I can at least be entertaining.

And if you come up with scripts that you think that might be useful, perhaps share them here?

I thought I was good with my pretty simple Naming script;
Code
$if2(
    %_secondaryreleasetype%,
    %_primaryreleasetype%,
    %_secondaryreleasetype%
    )
/%albumartist%
/%album%
/$pad(%tracknumber%,3,0) - %artist% - %title%

This gives me
<Library Root>
\release type (Album if it isn't a Compilation, Soundtrack, etc.)
\Artist
\Album Artist
\<Track No. 000> - <Track Artist> - <Track Name>.<Extension>

Now, I think I'm fancy;
Code
$if(
    %_secondaryreleasetype%,
    $upper($firstalphachar(%_secondaryreleasetype%))$rreplace(%_secondaryreleasetype%,.\([^;]*\).*,\\1),
    $upper($firstalphachar(%_primaryreleasetype%))$rreplace(%_primaryreleasetype%,.\([^;]*\).*,\\1))
/%albumartist%
/%album%
/$pad(%tracknumber%,3,0) - %artist% - %title%
This gives me the exact same thing, except now the Secondary and Primary "albumtype" directory is properly capitalized.

The first script took me 5 minutes. The second iteration took me like 5 days. I just couldn't be happy with all lower case, could I?
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 23, 2017, 12:42:24 AM
And now, because it fits with everything I've done with MusicBrainz so far;

I have totally forgotten that Windows directories are not case sensitive. I could have accomplished the exact same thing by renaming the folders I'm saving to.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 23, 2017, 01:43:34 PM
So, I have spent the last week fighting the tagging script to bend the tags to my will, and I find myself re-evaluating why I'm using MusicBrainz. (Great, more self-examination.) On an unrelated note, my S.O. asked me what I was doing as I sat at my computer staring into space, and I got to throw her one of my movie quotes; "Self realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said; "I Drank What? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7YEeIdZBGc&t=0m16s)" She rolled her eyes and walked out. Love her to pieces.

I had a really long script that did all kinds of cool things; only Year for release, strip prefixes from sort order (not move to the end, strip) strip out total tracks/discs, etc. Then, I got to the part where I tried to set Album Artist for soundtracks to be "1Soundtrack" and standard compilations to "1Various." "Various" gets buried in the Album Artist list if I don't add the "1." I can't for the life of me figure out how to do this in a script without resorting to some strange gymnastics. I got this sorted, and realized that I still had some other things like that I wanted to do, and started thinking that this was way too complicated.

Finally, the white-hot blast of realization came to me; "I'm doing it wrong." I was trying to use MusicBrainz to make my tags work the way I wanted them to work. I should be thinking of MusicBrainz as a way to tag my files consistently so that I can use my media manager to make my library work the way I want it to.

Suddenly it all makes sense. Now I understand why there was so little talk about tagging scripts; they shouldn't do much. File naming is more important, because the tags are canon, but the operating system is capricious. There is so much talk about custom tags here in MusicBee, because the tag is immutable, and the view is changed to suit desires.

So, I had a huge script that took into account potential tag variance, and changed all kinds of information. I was up to 100 lines of text in Notepad++ at one point. And now I have this;
Code
$noop((Number Padding Track to nnn, Disc to NN)
$set(tracknumber,$pad(%tracknumber%,3,0))
$set(discnumber,$pad(%discnumber%,2,0))
$noop(strip out embedded lyrics)
$unset(%lyrics%)
$noop(Going off the rails)
$set(%PicardRate%,%_releasecomment%)

I did not realize how prescient my title would be.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on December 23, 2017, 02:24:56 PM
Welcome back from the edge.  :)

FWIW, here's my tagger script in total.  It just gets tags where I want them, removes things I don't use, and takes care of things that I can't handle in bulk in the library manager.  I also use the "feat artist in titles" and "Standardize performers" plugins.

Code
$if($eq(%totaldiscs%,1),$unset(totaldiscs);$unset(discnumber))
$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),$set(discnumber,$num(%discnumber%,2));$unset(totaldiscs))
$set(tracknumber,$num(%tracknumber%,2)),$unset(totaltracks)
$set(date,$if2($left(%originaldate%,4),%date%)),$unset(originaldate)
$copymerge(composer,writer)
$copymerge(composer,lyricist)
$unset(writer)
$unset(lyricist)
$setmulti(composer,%composer%)
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 23, 2017, 02:33:03 PM
FWIW, here's my tagger script in total.

Could you elaborate a bit what your 'date' part does exactly?
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 23, 2017, 03:27:42 PM
Welcome back from the edge. :)

I spent too much time in Perdition, but I'm OK, now. I see your "$setmulti," and "$copymerge," and I realize I should run through the tags again to see if there are any others I need to check. In the excitement of my paradigm shifting without a clutch, I forgot I wasn't done looking through all the tags I wanted to work with.

Could you elaborate a bit what your 'date' part does exactly?

I had something very similar in my script. In fact, I had to check what I posted, because I thought I had pasted an older script. He's stripping out the Month and Day; if it's present in the %originaldate%, making that the "date" tag, and then getting rid of the "originaldate" tag in the file.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on December 23, 2017, 03:29:24 PM
Could you elaborate a bit what your 'date' part does exactly?

Sure, if I can remember (I did it so long ago!  ;D )

When a "classic" album is reissued, MusicBrainz uses the reissue date as the year.  I want to have the album's original year of release in my "Year" column (I put things like [2017 Deluxe Remaster] in the album title in my library to differentiate between different versions).  So I use the "Original Date" to do this.  The only problem is, sometimes people put the full release month, day and year in "Original Date", so I only use the Year from that field if there's more info there (the left-most 4 characters).

Then I clear original date.  Not sure why I did this except that I don't use it for anything.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 23, 2017, 03:51:11 PM
When a "classic" album is reissued, MusicBrainz uses the reissue date as the year.

Thnx. I asked because I am still contemplating how to address years and dates in regards to MusicBrainz/Picard.
I am trying out the Classical Extras plugin, which has some great features, but it hasn't (yet) implemented extensive handling of recorded/released/re-released dates.
So I might wait what the developer comes up with (it's on his todo list), or I might do some scripting for that myself.
But one small challenge I am having is learning how scripts, plugins, mappings etc. work together (or work against each other).

I might end up with some personalized scripts for non-classical, and deactivating them, and activating the CE plugin for classical.
The less scripts, switching, plugins the better, but that's still a bit of a challenge.

@Phaedrus:
You really stopped worrying?
So you have now mastered Zen and the Art of Metadata Maintenance.
I'm jealous.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 23, 2017, 05:13:44 PM
When a "classic" album is reissued, MusicBrainz uses the reissue date as the year.
Dagnabbit!
@Phaedrus: You really stopped worrying? So you have now mastered Zen and the Art of Metadata Maintenance. I'm jealous.
I was Clean and sober until I saw the preceding quote.  :-X Seriously, though, I think I am.

I am going to go through all the tags on the "Tags Documentation" page. I'll figure out how I really want to use each one, and make a decision. But it's full-steam ahead on the rest of library after that.

I am relying heavily on the fact that once my album is tagged with the "MusicBrainz" information, going back through is a snap. Based on experience going through the same couple hundred albums several times, I trust this to be the case.

(Barring losing MusicBrainz information, of course.) The worst thing that can happen is that I may miss a few tracks here and there when I create my auto-playlists. I figure I have a pretty good idea what should be where, so if it doesn't show up, I can search for it, figure out why, and fix the individual album. I oughta be able to figure out how to fix it with my MusicBrainz script, and re-process albums. Then, when I find the next one, I'll already have a solution. Easy-Peasy.

Now, I do have some "albums" which I won't run through MusicBrainz. I have a bunch of compilations which I won't run through because I don't care so much, and it would be too hard to re-create what I want in them. These are all pretty much taken care of already. I have a system to fix the tags on these, and I don't get new ones very often.

I have come to the realization that my library will always be a journey. Now that I have found a solid, easy to use "home base," if you will, I can spend my time exploring what I have instead of spending my time preparing for the trip.

And, now that I have realized the sound of one hand clapping, I must return to my perch on the mountaintop. Feel free to visit anytime. ;)
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 23, 2017, 05:33:27 PM
Just a random brain pop-up, and maybe not applicable to your projected workflow/interests, but before running the Bulk through the Brainz, you might want to take a look at MusicBrainz concepts of 'aliases'.
Making some decisions about that beforehand might be useful and avoid some time wasting later on.
This makes it possible to get some uniformity in artists names, and is especially useful in getting some uniformity in stuff like this:
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9ddd7abc-9e1b-471d-8031-583bc6bc8be9/aliases
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 23, 2017, 06:03:12 PM
Just a random brain pop-up, and maybe not applicable to your projected workflow/interests, but before running the Bulk through the Brainz, you might want to take a look at MusicBrainz concepts of 'aliases'.

Hadn't really put much thought into this right now. Hmmm, If I could get my "ABBA" albums tagged properly as; "ᗅᗺᗷᗅ," that would be pretty cool... I do have a few artists that would be affected by aliases. I have a pretty good idea who they are and what I want them to be. I was going to handle that in MusicBee, but it might be better, as you say, to tackle it sooner rather than later. I shall meditate on this. Although I am leaning towards starting the journey, and blowing up those bridges as I get to them.

So, you have reminded me that I have totally forgotten about the cluster-puck that is the Classical portion of my library. I'll be using the tagging of my regular library as a training-montage to prepare for the opening of that particular can of Whoop-A**. My Classical tags there are FUBAR. Combinations of Composer as Artist, performer as composer, and all manner of things that make it impossible to search for multiple versions of the same piece. I do have one complete multi-disc compilation of Beethoven that I spent a lot of time getting straight. And now, I realize I set "Beethoven" as the Artist. Great.

As a "Brain-dump" of my thought process; I save my tracks to the path; <AlbumType>\<AlbumArtist>\<Album>\<Track#> - <Artist> - <Title>. That should make it easy to recognize strange, unexpected Album Artist names. It has in the past. Maybe switching that around would be good. <Album Artist>\<AlbumType>\<Album>\<Track#> - <Artist> - <Title>. Again, I shall have a good think about that.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 23, 2017, 07:54:58 PM
Combinations of Composer as Artist, performer as composer, and all manner of things that make it impossible to search for multiple versions of the same piece.

That's where the concept of the 'canonical' title ('work' title) that MusicBrainz has available comes in handy.
If you have that written to the title tag, you can more easily achieve some uniformity in that.

That can also solve some issues with titles differing between album releases for different markets.
E.g. Das wohltemperierte Klavier vs. The Well-Tempered Clavier, Le quattro stagioni vs. The Four Seasons, Symphonie vs Sinfonie vs Sinfonia, etc. etc.



I have disabled Picard writing 'album artist'
Especially for classical music they often result in a very long-winded summary of composers, directors, performers.

I prefer them brief, and usually have them something like this:
Fauré (Herreweghe)
Satie (Thibaudet)
Shostakovich (Previn, Mullova)
etc.

I haven't tried to automate that through scripting, because A. it's not a lot of work to do it by hand. B. In case there is no conductor, or his value for that album is not paramount (in my opinion), I will choose or add the 'main performer'.
That is subjective, and difficult to automate. (until machine-learning has reached the point it can do that for me)

Similar for album titles.
Beethoven, Bach et al. never came up with album titles, so I feel free to construct my own, short versions.

So for classical music I don't care much for accuracy or 'correctness' of tags such as Artist, Album, Album Artist.
Those are concepts that don't really resonate with classical music and it's compositions.
I try to keep them all short and simple, and only may have some purpose for them for occasional grouping or sorting.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 23, 2017, 08:50:21 PM
That's where the concept of the 'canonical' title ('work' title) that MusicBrainz has available comes in handy. If you have that written to the title tag, you can more easily achieve some uniformity in that.

That is wonderfully helpful bit of information right there. I will be sure to keep that in mind when I start navigating that minefield.

I have disabled Picard writing 'album artist' Especially for classical music they often result in a very long-winded summary of composers, directors, performers.

The bulk of my music is non-classical. I'm a fan of the genre, but I don't get all the way to aficionado. I live and die by Album Artist. Once I start working over the classical, I plan to create a separate database. Hopefully that makes it easier to maintain

 
I prefer them brief, and usually have them something like this: Fauré (Herreweghe) Satie (Thibaudet) Shostakovich (Previn, Mullova) etc. I haven't tried to automate that through scripting, because A. it's not a lot of work to do it by hand. B. In case there is no conductor, or his value for that album is not paramount (in my opinion), I will choose or add the 'main performer'. That is subjective, and difficult to automate. (until machine-learning has reached the point it can do that for me) Similar for album titles. Beethoven, Bach et al. never came up with album titles, so I feel free to construct my own, short versions. So for classical music I don't care much for accuracy or 'correctness' of tags such as Artist, Album, Album Artist. Those are concepts that don't really resonate with classical music and it's compositions. I try to keep them all short and simple, and only may have some purpose for them for occasional grouping or sorting.

Pretty much where my head is for classical music. I actually have very few performances of each piece. Mostly, I find a favorite I rate, and the other one just sits in the library. (Losing, or destroying data goes against everything I stand for as an IT professional. I cringe when people say they delete tracks they haven't listened to.) I can tell you about the major differences between performances, but I'm not at a level where I could discuss the finer points of one conductor's interpretation over another anyway. All I care about for my tags is that I can differentiate between versions in my library. I also want to be able to scroll through, and see the same artist, album, track, etc. spelled the same way with the same capitalization.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 24, 2017, 03:55:59 PM
I went through everything, and I think I'm done pondering now. I have transcended and I am just going to let MusicBrainz run pretty much have it's way with my library.

I added this section in because I really don't like trying to think of artists by their last name. I also really really don't like having to think about groups that may or may not have "A" or "The" as the beginning of their name. I always mentally drop those. I look for the boys from Liverpool under "B" not "T." I had a heck of a time until I realized that for some reason I have to $unset albumsort first. all the others seem to play nicely.
Code
$noop(Set Sort orders to something useful)
$set(artistsort,$delprefix(%artist%,prefixes=A,An,The))
$set(albumartistsort,$delprefix(%albumartist%,prefixes=A,An,The))
$set(titlesort,$delprefix(%title%,prefixes=A,An,The))
$unset(albumsort)
$set(albumsort,$delprefix(%album%,prefixes=A,An,The))
$set(composersort,$delprefix(%composer%,prefixes=A,An,The))

The final piece is going to be how I import to Musicbee. Now, I send to a single folder from MediaMonkey using the "<Root>\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#> - <Artist> - <Title> format. When I import to Musicbee, I go through each album, tag it as "Studio" "Compilation," etc. I rate songs I already like, and I import to the library by renaming files to my library structure which includes the "Album Type" directory. I think I'm going to get rid of the step where I tag it with an "Album Type" and just use the MusicBrainz "Release Type" instead of my "Album Type" assessment. My only concern is that I may end up at odd with what MusicBrainz calls a "compilation." I used the Wikipedia Discography to determine the album type, and I've seen a few albums go through that did not match that assignment. I'll just see where that takes me. It should also let me keep track of where I am in the re-tagging process.

I'm still giddy, I feel like a great weight is being taken off me with my library. All my experiments so far have had positive results. My tags have way more information for way less work. Artists and albums are way more consistent. I haven't actually gotten to my existing library, so I'm going to have a challenge there, but the only tags I'm really concerned about are my Musicbee ratings, and possibly my static playlists. All the Auto-Playlists should be no problem to tweak, and may end up better than they are now. A lot of them can probably be removed because most of them were about fixing inconsistencies instead of playing music. I had a huge stack of albums that were waiting for import because it was such a pain to import properly. I would just import the tracks I wanted into a separate folder so I could listen to the track I wanted. That changes, now.

Of course this will not be quick. Musicbee shows 6,753 albums. My "Separates" section which contains all the single tracks not associated with an album in my library will be a challenge, but I have them dealt with for now. I also have some "albums" I've created which, while they are realistically just playlists, I like having the files physically separated the way they are. Once I get my backlog cleared up, I can get to listening instead of tagging.

Now, maybe I can start getting a bit more serious about my DAC, headphone amp, and cans. Maybe I can even start realistically dreaming about being able to setup a usable system with Musicbee as the base. I have been kind of putting that off because I wanted my library solid before I released to the rest of the house.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 24, 2017, 06:03:12 PM
I also really really don't like having to think about groups that may or may not have "A" or "The" as the beginning of their name.

Ouch. You don't do that with book titles do you? ;-)

Just curious, what will happen with the band 'The The' if you also set MusicBee to ignore 'the' and 'a'.
Will that band get sucked into some vortex and disappear into an unknown universe?
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 24, 2017, 08:51:30 PM
Ouch. You don't do that with book titles do you? ;-)

My dead tree carcass books are on a shelf by order they were put on the shelf. My book library is limited to the books that I really love. All the "Fluffy stuff" books are on my Kindle, and stored however Amazon does that.

Just curious, what will happen with the band 'The The' if you also set MusicBee to ignore 'the' and 'a'. Will that band get sucked into some vortex and disappear into an unknown universe?

It's funny that you say that, because my last batch of albums would have included "The The" as the last artist. I was letting the files save from Picard, and figured I'd check my mail. I'll let you know. I'm also curious about "A-Ha." I haven't processed an album by them yet.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 24, 2017, 08:55:19 PM
OH MY GOD! My computer disappeared into a puff of logic! I'm typing this on my phone as I'm floating in a sub-space bubble surrounded by nothingness. I seem to have fallen into a wormhole.

Send help!
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 24, 2017, 08:57:07 PM
Just kidding.  ;D  ;D

It didn't do anything to A-Ha. "The The" comes out as "The."

Phew, crisis averted.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 26, 2017, 12:39:44 PM
So, just as I thought everything was unicorns and rainbows, I've run into my first problem.

In Discogs, I found a few releases that I couldn't tag because there was a problem with the "release code." A couple of releases would let me use the code, but there were some characters that the plugin couldn't deal with (I didn't really pursue the matter. They were oddball albums I don't really listen to very often.) I also found some that weren't associated with the release on the page. I found work-arounds for both of these situations; I ignored them.

Now, I've found several releases in MusicBrainz Picard that will crash the application. Lovely. I just spent several hours tracking this down, because I've found several, and I'm still just getting started. I've only processed a hundred and some-odd albums! So I posted a pretty detailed post about my issue, and I'll see what the community comes up with.

In the meantime, I guess I just move past the problems, and keep on truckin'.

Maybe it's time to start trying to figure out my MusicBee process. I'll just push the clutch in, and see what gear I can find.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 30, 2017, 03:07:48 PM
About the challenge of 'genres' you mentioned earlier, and how yours got f'ed up somehow:
I let no software auto-fill the genre tags.
Not MusicBee, nor Picard, nor Tag&Rename etc.

When e.g. using Picard, I have the offered genres remapped to a custom tag.
That's very useful to get some quick and usually reasonably sensible suggestions, but I will decide myself how to populate the actual genre tag.
That keeps it more structured, and is also important because of the dependency that 'genre category' has on 'genre'.

It's still a ridiculous amount of work, but the whole matter is also quite interesting and useful to me to discover music and refine my tastes.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 30, 2017, 06:42:59 PM
About the challenge of 'genres' you mentioned earlier, and how yours got f'ed up somehow: I let no software auto-fill the genre tags. Not MusicBee, nor Picard, nor Tag&Rename etc.

Yeah, that was a mistake. I have been paying for it ever since.

I started maintaining my digital music library back in the late '90s If I had been able to keep up with it from the beginning, people would envy my library. As it is, I've gone through ripping my core library several times. First to 128k, because that's all the space I could afford, and it took so long to rip and compress a CD. Then 320k when I could afford it. Now, I'm on FLAC. I can theoretically recreate the CD if I want to. Add in the losses along the way because I didn't back up properly, and here I am.

I tried tagging by Main genre first, and figured I'd refine as I went along. The problem was that I couldn't use multiple levels of genre, like I can now. (This was in the early '00s.) So I just lived with it. Once I could use multiple levels, I tried to go crazy with mood, and occasion. This is where I went wrong and tried to cheat with Last.FM.

The reason I went with the Last.FM tags is that they were the first place that offered this option. It was reasonably accurate at first too. My other problem is that I can't really decide for myself what genre something should be. My perfectionist tendencies get the better of me. I end up with almost a separate genre per track. Maybe I focus too much on the differences rather than the similarities.

Now, if I can just get a skeleton to start from so that I can use my library while I work on it, I'm good. Nothing will touch my genres after this. I have learned my lesson. I'd like to do it all manually. With hundreds of Album artists, multiple thousands of albums, thousands of individual tracks, and hundreds of "Various Artist" albums to sort through, it just ain't gonna happen.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 30, 2017, 07:43:20 PM
I tried tagging by Main genre first, and figured I'd refine as I went along. The problem was that I couldn't use multiple levels of genre, like I can now. (This was in the early '00s.) So I just lived with it. Once I could use multiple levels, I tried to go crazy with mood, and occasion. This is where I went wrong and tried to cheat with Last.FM.

Over the years my focus on genres and sub-genres have shifted a bit more towards other classifiers.

While 'genre' is certainly important, it is much too rough and subjective to be the ring that rules them all.
You could even engage in battle with somebody about some song being pop or rock.

And personally I have never found good usage for 'mood' and 'occasion' tags.
They are also quite subjective and personal in my opinion.

Nowadays, as main entities besides 'genre' and 'sub-genre', I use tags such as: energy, valence, danceabilty, style, voicing. (voicing can be things such as male, female, choir, instrumental, etc)
Those are very useful for creating all sorts of playlists for different moods and occasions.

e.g. for when reading, 'instrumental', 'low energy' is nice.
Or, depending on your mood, certain combinations of 'energy' and 'valence' will give specific results.
etc.

I wish metadata providers would provide such info. That would be more useful than trying to classify a song or an album by only determinating some (invented) genre name.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on December 30, 2017, 11:21:24 PM
And personally I have never found good usage for 'mood' and 'occasion' tags.
They are also quite subjective and personal in my opinion.
I actually have one for "Occasion" after a couple decades staring at the field! - That's where I put my "Explicit" tag so I can filter stuff out when my kid is around.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 31, 2017, 12:14:58 PM
I want you all to know that I spent way too much time on this post. I chewed on this all day, wrote twenty different posts, re-visited the "Music Genre rabbit hole," -shudder- and edited to not sound like an a$$. (might have failed here) This is where I end up, for better or worse;

Over the years my focus on genres and sub-genres have shifted a bit more towards other classifiers.

While 'genre' is certainly important, it is much too rough and subjective to be the ring that rules them all.
You could even engage in battle with somebody about some song being pop or rock.

And personally I have never found good usage for 'mood' and 'occasion' tags.
They are also quite subjective and personal in my opinion.

Nowadays, as main entities besides 'genre' and 'sub-genre', I use tags such as: energy, valence, danceabilty, style, voicing. (voicing can be things such as male, female, choir, instrumental, etc)
Those are very useful for creating all sorts of playlists for different moods and occasions.

e.g. for when reading, 'instrumental', 'low energy' is nice.
Or, depending on your mood, certain combinations of 'energy' and 'valence' will give specific results.
etc.

I wish metadata providers would provide such info. That would be more useful than trying to classify a song or an album by only determinating some (invented) genre name.

I'm with you. Mostly?

You've invented your own set of names to classify your music; a personal taxonomy for your music. That's pretty cool, and I'm actually a bit jealous that you've been able to develop your library to that level of precision. That is waaaaaaayy too much effort for my musical use cases.

If I'm using music for background, I don't care about the details of the song, only the overall feel. I figure there's a fairly short list of moods I'd care about in this case. Should be fairly easy to get this close. The Last.FM tags I've seen with this are pretty much close enough for government work, and for me.

Sometimes I'm paying attention to the music. I'm either listening critically, or I'm doing something that doesn't require my full attention, and I want to listen to some music to help pass the time. Here, I either know what specific type of music I want to listen to, or I find it by flipping through my list. Once I find one, I want more of the same genre. I'm finding that if I don't agree with the Picard wikidata genre, I'm refining my understanding of the genre more easily than adjusting the tag.

My third method for using music is setting it up as a jukebox. Let people pick the tracks. I have now clue what criteria they use to pick. In this case, I can see your taxonomy being confusing. (Most of my friends have put zero thought into music genre. They just know what they like.)

I guess I have to include "Special use cases." The lists I've curated. Neither of our methods of classifying music would ever put these lists together. These are things like "my frisson list," "tracks that I think a specific person might like," "Tracks that remind me of particular things," or the one that just grows and never seems to shrink; "songs that I want to take a more detailed listen to." Almost forgot the all-important "Road Trip," and the "Kid-safe" list I refer to below.

I'm curious about how you use your secondary tags with new music. It seems like you have to listen and analyze every new track you introduce to your library. Maybe if I stopped getting bulk disc dumps I could do this too.
 
I actually have one for "Occasion" after a couple decades staring at the field! - That's where I put my "Explicit" tag so I can filter stuff out when my kid is around.

I've been using a "Whitelist" concept for playing music around the little one. I only listen to music that has been manually added to a playlist, or is from before the '80s. I haven't heard enough "coarse" language or overt enough themes in music from the seventies and before to be concerned. (Yes, I know it's there, but I feel like it's buried far enough under double-entendre to be acceptable.)

Anything from the '80s on needs a quick listen for swearing, and possibly content. Just because it doesn't have swear words, doesn't mean I want my little girl hearing it. I certainly don't want to have to answer her questions about what a particular lyric means, or have her repeat it at school. "Adam Ant" is a perfect example. While I love the "Strip" album, I really don't want to deal with the fallout if she starts singing the title track on the playground.

Then there's the whole "Clean" vs. "Explicit." I can't stand some of the "Clean" versions of explicit songs. P!nk did it right with "F***** Perfect." The worst is the obvious "Bleep" over the word, always jarring. Ideally I'd use lyrics, but I'm not going through all my tracks, getting lyrics and verifying "Clean" vs. "Explicit" in case I mis-tagged the track.

Besides, she'll be old enough, soon enough.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on December 31, 2017, 12:49:15 PM
That's pretty cool, and I'm actually a bit jealous that you've been able to develop your library to that level of precision. That is waaaaaaayy too much effort for my musical use cases.

You can curb your jealousy.
I don't have this scheme applied to a large part of my library.
It's mainly so that at least I am able to turn on a playlist that will play a reasonable amount of diverse artists/music that fall under the confines of these tags.
Most of the time my brain is master of what gets played.
But when e.g. I grab a book, it's nice not to need to put too much effort in considering what to play, and also get to hear stuff I wasn't specifically thinking of at that moment.

So my objective is certainly not to taxonimize my whole library.
Just having it possible to have some useful playlists, which are allowed to grow very slowly over time.

And for most of the music I owned a long time, my brain will be helpful enough for choosing what I want to hear, but especially for music and artists that are completely new to me, I put a little bit more effort in populating these tags, so also to help me 'learning' the music/artists/genres faster and better.
So all in all it's partly useful, and partly just a fun waste of time.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on December 31, 2017, 04:08:01 PM
You can curb your jealousy. I don't have this scheme applied to a large part of my library. It's mainly so that at least I am able to turn on a playlist that will play a reasonable amount of diverse artists/music that fall under the confines of these tags. Most of the time my brain is master of what gets played. But when e.g. I grab a book, it's nice not to need to put too much effort in considering what to play, and also get to hear stuff I wasn't specifically thinking of at that moment. So my objective is certainly not to taxonimize my whole library. Just having it possible to have some useful playlists, which are allowed to grow very slowly over time. And for most of the music I owned a long time, my brain will be helpful enough for choosing what I want to hear, but especially for music and artists that are completely new to me, I put a little bit more effort in populating these tags, so also to help me 'learning' the music/artists/genres faster and better. So all in all it's partly useful, and partly just a fun waste of time.

Cool. We're still on the same page. I've made the mistake of just putting my entire library on shuffle, and that can be pretty jarring. Nothing draws attention to the music like going from "Brian Eno" to "Slayer."

For now, I'm sticking with my current philosophy of "going with it." I'l let Wikidata populate my genres, and Last.FM populate Mood and Occasion. With all the tags I've done so far, my results are vastly better than what I've got. I'll reserve final judgement for when I've got everything transferred over to MusicBee.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 02:12:56 AM
I now have my next two challenges, because Picard is working the way I want it. (With minor exceptions.) I'm ready to start processing my real library.

1. How do I transfer ratings to my new, and improved library?
2. I really need to figure out how to handle my album subfolders.

My ratings don't seem to be stored in the tags in my files. I really need this to happen. This is literally the only bit of information in my library I really care about.

Many of my albums have subfolders which contain files associated with the album. Mostly these are cover art scans, but there is some other useless information I want to maintain. I want to move my files in Picard to a new location so that I can keep track of what albums I have processed. I also want to use the folder structure I've created with my Picard naming script. I have reasons, and they are all perfectly logical.

The first one is probably pretty easy, but I haven't started it yet. The second one is going to be harder because there is no naming consistency. I really don't want to cycle through all 7k subfolders manually. That sounds like no fun at all. Not the end of the world, but not preferred.

I'm open to ideas. the Picard forum did not have any assistance to offer on the second one.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 04:13:36 AM
So I ran my first experiment, and getting everything back into MusicBee seems like it is going to be the hard part.

I set MusicBee to save the rating information to the file. I found the tag in Mp3tag, it's called "POPULARIMETER." Picard does not see that tag. (After the panic subsided, I'm still mildly concerned about this.)

So, I've discovered that if I don't set Picard to clear tags first, the "POPULARIMETER" tag is preserved. If I set Picard to clear tags first, I get rid of the duplicate information I don't want.

The only tag that seems like I might want to preserve would be for some of my more esoteric albums which may not have details in MusicBrainz, but did show up in Discogs. Those are probably rare, and I guess I don't really care that much. I'll take it on a case-by-case basis as I go through the re-tagging.

So, it seems I have a couple of possible deal-breakers.
MusicBee does not see the new files as the same because I am changing my naming scheme. I guess if I split up the move between Picard and MusicBee I'll be alright. I'll tag the files in Picard, and then move them in MusicBee. Don't want to split it up like that. This will require more thought.

Losing ratings is major. As I've said, this is literally the only piece of information I really care about. Any work I've done for other tags has been about fixing problem names. This should all be taken care of in Picard. I don't want to go back through my library track by track to re-rate them. So many songs to miss.

I over-reacted. If I don't save the files to a different location, all the data in Music Bee is preserved.

This does bring up another point that I will wrestle with another day. An over-arching goal of mine is to make my library totally software agnostic. I want to be able to take my files, import them into any other application, and lose nothing. I want all my static playlists to work, and my dates, play counts, and ratings to transfer over. I know this is not an insignificant task, and I understand that it may not all be possible, but I said it was a goal, didn't I?

We shall see how things develop.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 05:25:38 AM
Well, here's an interesting wrinkle.

I have, in the first album in my copied library I'm trying to tag with Picard, and extra track, with a .bak extension. (<Title>.mp3.bak) Windows does not recognize it as an mp3 file, and neither does MusicBee, or any other application I've used to date to work with my library.

Picard does. Just doing a standard lookup, it finds twelve tracks in my 11 track album because it recognizes this renamed file as an mp3. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I think mostly irritated, it seems Picard is just looking for the first period? Now I have to be careful about any file that may have a period in the name.

I don't know where those would be, but now I have another thing to watch out for.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on January 01, 2018, 06:20:12 AM

I actually have one for "Occasion" after a couple decades staring at the field! - That's where I put my "Explicit" tag so I can filter stuff out when my kid is around.

I've been using a "Whitelist" concept for playing music around the little one. I only listen to music that has been manually added to a playlist, or is from before the '80s. I haven't heard enough "coarse" language or overt enough themes in music from the seventies and before to be concerned. (Yes, I know it's there, but I feel like it's buried far enough under double-entendre to be acceptable.)

Anything from the '80s on needs a quick listen for swearing, and possibly content. Just because it doesn't have swear words, doesn't mean I want my little girl hearing it. I certainly don't want to have to answer her questions about what a particular lyric means, or have her repeat it at school. "Adam Ant" is a perfect example. While I love the "Strip" album, I really don't want to deal with the fallout if she starts singing the title track on the playground.

Then there's the whole "Clean" vs. "Explicit." I can't stand some of the "Clean" versions of explicit songs. P!nk did it right with "F***** Perfect." The worst is the obvious "Bleep" over the word, always jarring. Ideally I'd use lyrics, but I'm not going through all my tracks, getting lyrics and verifying "Clean" vs. "Explicit" in case I mis-tagged the track.

Besides, she'll be old enough, soon enough.

I didn't mean to listen to with her (I have a playlist that we listen to together, or we listen to her stuff), I meant around her - like I'm in a room and she's in the next room and I don't want f-word travelling through the walls so I filter out explicit stuff when she's around.  :)

I don't think I have a single "Clean" version in my library.  "Clean" versions are stupid bastardizations.  I'd rather just skip it than hear a version from some alternate "Clean" universe..
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 03:44:12 PM
I didn't mean to listen to with her (I have a playlist that we listen to together, or we listen to her stuff), I meant around her - like I'm in a room and she's in the next room and I don't want f-word travelling through the walls so I filter out explicit stuff when she's around. :) I don't think I have a single "Clean" version in my library. "Clean" versions are stupid bastardizations. I'd rather just skip it than hear a version from some alternate "Clean" universe..

Exactly what I meant, as well. And don't even get me started on the "Kidz Bop" garbage. I got a whole rant I can do about that.

Yea, verily, I say unto thee. The "Radio Edit" is an abomination, and should be cast into the pit.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 07:11:51 PM
So trying to run my Library through MusicBrainz, and I have hit a major stopper. Maybe even a deal-breaker.

I got all the way to "AC/DC" in my studio albums, and I'm stuck on an album which has made me re-reconsider. It seems that my version of "Let There be Rock" is not in the MusicBrainz database. My version has one extra track. I can't find the right version listed anywhere in MusicBrainz. I was able to locate it in Discogs. I took a look at some other albums that I though might have that kind of problem, and I found a couple more. This is not an isolated issue for me.

Now, I'm not so sure now that this is something I want to do. I'm going to spend some time back in MusicBee, and take a long hard look at my library to see if I can find some commonality in my problem albums. Maybe I just have some particular albums, or album types making it look like my library is worse than it really is. Maybe I need to just go one level higher, and accept my library for the way it is.

Back to the mountaintop.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: frankz on January 01, 2018, 07:51:09 PM
Add them!  There's even an "Add Cluster As Release" plugin that makes it dead easy.

OK, it's a little work, but part of using the database is contributing to and improving the database IMO.  You're exactly who they need to fill it out - the guy with an obscure version.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 08:24:47 PM
Add them! There's even an "Add Cluster As Release" plugin that makes it dead easy. OK, it's a little work, but part of using the database is contributing to and improving the database IMO. You're exactly who they need to fill it out - the guy with an obscure version.

It did not even occur to me to even consider editing the database.

I took a quick trip through the process, and it seems like it should be mostly painless enough. Without reading anything, I'm concerned that I don't necessarily have all of my jewel cases and media. I noticed a bit about the UPC as I breezed through the pages to submit.

I will read the documentation, and do my part to improve the database.

I'm back, baby. Excelsior!
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: psychoadept on January 01, 2018, 08:33:47 PM

I took a quick trip through the process, and it seems like it should be mostly painless enough. Without reading anything, I'm concerned that I don't necessarily have all of my jewel cases and media. I noticed a bit about the UPC as I breezed through the pages to submit.

I will read the documentation, and do my part to improve the database.

I'm back, baby. Excelsior!

Fantastic!  Don't worry too much about media and packaging.  The general sentiment among MusicBrainz veterans is "any data is better than no data" but "no data is better than bad data".  So as long as whatever you do enter is correct, whatever you don't enter can be added by you or someone else later.  Don't sweat it.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 01, 2018, 10:34:49 PM
The general sentiment among MusicBrainz veterans is "any data is better than no data" but "no data is better than bad data".

I respect that. Database Boyz, Represent!   ;D
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on January 02, 2018, 08:25:09 AM
Add them!  There's even an "Add Cluster As Release" plugin that makes it dead easy.

And if you become a MusicBrainz editor, you could use user scripts for your browser to import Discogs releases.
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Guides/Userscripts

F.y.i. almost 20% of my album releases are at this moment not present in the MusicBrainz database.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 27, 2018, 11:01:16 PM
Update on my process.

I'm working on the "Js" in my list of studio albums, and the process is so much better than when I was running them through the Discogs plugin in Media Monkey. I regret all the time I wasted doing that. I'll go a step further, and say that I really regret all the time I wasted using Media Monkey as a tag manager. To be fair, my tags are more consistent than I realized, at least in the Studio album section of my library. I can credit some of that to Discogs.

So, here's what I'm doing;
1. I'm selecting artists in the file structure in the left pane based on how many tracks I have by that artist as shown in MusicBee. Artists that have well over a hundred are processed separately.
2. Keeping the total tracks processed at a time to under a thousand, I drag them to the "Unmatched Files" section, and let them process.
3. When the albums are all loaded, I select all in the left pane, and drag them back to the "Unmatched Files" section, and "Cluster."
4. With the files all clustered, I do a "Lookup."
5. Go through all the results, and delete the albums that have zero tracks listed, and make sure that all of them are "Gold."
6. "Expand all" and scroll through the entire list and check out all the tracks that are dark red.
7. "Collapse all" and scroll through each label to make sure I like the cover art.
8. "Select all" and add them to my processed collection, and then save.

As I go, I'm finding some troublesome albums that don't seem to fit. I'll make a quick effort to fix it. If I can't, I create a shortcut to the folder in a "difficult" folder. Once I'm done with the first pass, I'm going back to see what I need to do to make them work. This is where I will add them to the MusicBrainz database.

I did have to keep MusicBrainz from modifying the Album Artist. I have several Album Artists that I change to be more generic, for example; Frankie Valli. I really don't want to care if he had the Four Seasons with him or not when I'm looking for a track he did. I was going to try to code that in, but I already had it in place in the Album Artist tags in my files, so why would I needlessly over-complicate it?

In all, I'm happy with the results of my little experiment. I've only played a little bit with auto-playlists on my processed tracks, and the results seem better. Not much difference in my browsing, but that just tells me I had done a pretty good job before. Nothing has jumped out as being outright wrongly titled, so I've got that going for me. Which is nice. I would definitely encourage anyone on the fence to just jump in. The learning curve is there, but it's nowhere nearly as bad as I had thought. Next time through will be way faster now that I have acoustids, and MusicBrainz info embedded.

So thanks for listening, and thanks for the encouragement. I wouldn't have done it without you.
Rock On!
\m/  ;D  \m/
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: hiccup on January 28, 2018, 09:55:11 AM
Instead of creating links to troublesome folders, you could setup one or more custom tags to populate MusicBrainz ID's for album, track etc.
That will make it easy to filter which albums/tracks still need work in that respect.
And then you could also use these tags to create custom links in the details tab to directly open the release page for the playing/selected track/album.

Another tag frame I wished I prevented Picard to (over) write earlier, is 'original year'.
I care for that one being the original release date for singles, or the first date an album was released to the public. (irrespective of it being a record or a cd)
But that doesn't always seem to be the aim of MuBr for 'original year'.
When it finds a compilation album for a single, it will probably write the first known date for that compilation album.
Or when it matches an original album to it being present in full in some box-set (which even might be correct), I believe it always writes the first known date for the box-set, not the date of when that album was first released to the public.

So while it will often will give good results, there are also situations where it might overwrite your carefully maintained 'original' years.

From that follows a piece of advice I would give other users starting to use Picard.
Begin with excluding most tags to be written (perhaps even start with only writing the MuBr ID tags), and then (slowly) learn which ones you need and then allow those.
That's probably better, and could save you from some regrets compared with starting the other way.
Title: Re: The Road to Perdition, or how I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love MusicBrainz
Post by: Phaedrus on January 28, 2018, 11:18:00 PM
I have my compilations separated from my studio albums in my folder structure. My first level of folders under my Music folder looks like this;
- C (Classical music; have to maximize the number of characters for files.)
- Christmas (Any Christmas music album)
- Compilation (Includes Various artists, and greatest hits albums)
- Live (Anything album that is all live recordings)
- Separates (Any single track that I did not get as part of a full album, or doesn't fit anywhere else. Kind of my "Untamed section," that gets sorted through half-heartedly now and then to remove tracks I've since got the whole album for. Everything here has an "Album Artist" of Separates to keep it separated from the rest of the library. This one will suck to "Picard.")
- Singles (Anything labelled as a Single in Wikipedia)
- Soundtracks (Currently including single artist soundtracks and scores, but I'm rethinking that.
- Studio (Albums recorded in studio as a single work, with above exceptions. This also includes EPs) The full path to music is; Studio\<Album Artist>\<Album>\<Track#> - <Artist> - <Track>

(I use a custom tag in MusicBee for <Album Type> that I set when I add the music from the Inbox. This corresponds to the first level so I can automate file organization.

I'm doing all my retagging in Picard outside of MusicBee. This is the reason I designed my folder structure the way I did. I can work with one type of album at a time. I also have the advantage of finding music easily outside of a Media Manager. For my Studio albums; I only deal with full albums. If a single track is off, I'll come back to it later. (I now keep my library entirely software agnostic. I use my Media Manager for playing, and other software for tagging. And never the two should meet. Media Monkey taught me that one.) It's way easier for me to work with Explorer shortcuts to get to single albums that may need to be entered in the database. So far there is only a handful.

I hadn't really considered the ramifications of release date until you mentioned it. I had to go through some gymnastics to get the "original year" to be the release year, because I don't care when the media was made; I care when the work was released. If I'm honest though, I never used the year, only the decade. It doesn't seem like much of an issue for the studio albums I'm processing now, but I will certainly need to deal with it for compilations. Lucky for me, I have a while before I'll get there. Glad I can avoid your trouble with compilations and Box sets.

Truly sound advice to keep everything, and add more later. Once you have the basics, it's really easy to go back through. The only reason I'm not following that is that Media Monkey really monkeyed with my tags, and they are a mishmash of versions, and the "Involved People" tag was pretty much hosed. The patch Steven did for Involved people worked great on almost all of my tags, but the tags where the Monkey wrote really weird stuff I have no hope of fixing. I liked the idea of stripping everything out, and starting fresh with good frames. I may have lost a few good bits of information in some of my tracks, but for the most part, I haven't lost anything I really use. (I'm also taking the opportunity to strip out the embedded lyrics. All of my lyrics will be separate files from now on.) Really, my only regret is not using Picard when I found it a few years ago.

I've found that this first pass is only taking as long as it has is because I'm getting album art. My second pass on Picard Processed tracks is way quicker, and I can do way more than several hundred tracks at a time.

I appreciate your insights. And as always, Thank you for your support.