Author Topic: MusicBrainz Picard q & a thread  (Read 89829 times)

psychoadept

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MusicBee uses MusicBrainz for its CD lookup and auto tag by album features. Picard is a separate program that can do more advanced and customized tagging from MusicBrainz.
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MTVhike

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Thanks, that's what I thought but it doesn't work. I had to reinstall my OS a couple of weeks ago and my installation of both MB and MB-P got lost, so I reinstalled MB, noticed that autotag didn't work. I then realized what had happened and downloaded and installed MB-P, but the connection still seems to be broken.

psychoadept

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There is no such connection. If auto-tag isn't working maybe you need to whitelist MusicBee in your firewall. It has nothing to do with having Picard installed.
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MTVhike

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I noticed that when I rip a CD, the tags are frequently wrong. I checked the firewall settings and MusicBee was not included, so I changed that, restarted MB, and ripped the same CD again and the tags were still wrong. All the tracks are labeled "2016.flac", the artist is the composer, and the album is blank.
Last Edit: November 30, 2020, 05:01:42 PM by MTVhike

psychoadept

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You said auto tag isn't working, that's different from cd lookup. I thought you meant you weren't getting results in auto-tag by album.

Can you give an example of a cd that gets incorrect results? What happens if you manually set album and album artist, then use auto tag after ripping it?
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MTVhike

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I was still editing my response when you responded. Is cd lookup what happens when I rip a cd? That's what I was doing just now. I haven't tried your suggestion, so I will now.

I had previously checked several of my tracks which were already tagged (usually by iTunes, since they were imported from my iTunes library), and often the tags were completely wrong.

psychoadept

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Again, a specific example would be really helpful. What is an album that MusicBee finds incorrect tags for? And is it when you're ripping, or looking for tags on already ripped tracks?
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MTVhike

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I'll have to get back to you  (I have to go to a Zoom meeting), but it's looking for tags on the just ripped tracks. The CD set I just ripped is Andre Previn conducts Vaughan Williams, a 6 CD set. RCA/Sony

psychoadept

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Is it this one? https://beta.musicbrainz.org/release/3ea8c72c-cf82-48ae-9de0-cae8dabc2cb0
Or maybe this one? https://beta.musicbrainz.org/release/9ab63aeb-d6dd-44c2-94ff-f2095ac51fee

Classical is a challenge, though. You're definitely better off using Picard for that, so you can just point it to the release you want. Case in point, the two above are actually the same 6-cd set, just with different packaging and title. The two CDs I checked were also released separately at some point, and only later combined into the larger collection.
Last Edit: November 30, 2020, 05:45:14 PM by psychoadept
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MTVhike

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How do you use Picard (stand alone)? Do you have it read the disc? If so, where to the tags go?

psychoadept

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Picard has some really good documentation here: https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/index.html

You can look up by disc id (if the CD is in the drive), or use "lookup" to search by tags, or "scan" to search by acoustid (audio fingerprint). If you still don't get the results you want, you can use lookup in browser to search the database in your browser, which should let you use the green Tagger button to open the release in Picard when you find it. Or as a last resort you can copy & paste the URL in the search box in Picard.
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MTVhike

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One of the options was to put in the barcode, which I did and it could not be found.

psychoadept

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One of the options was to put in the barcode, which I did and it could not be found.

Well, that depends on the barcode being in the system already. The barcode on the release that looks most like yours is 888751269521. What's your barcode?
Last Edit: November 30, 2020, 07:25:53 PM by psychoadept
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MTVhike

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Is it this one? https://beta.musicbrainz.org/release/3ea8c72c-cf82-48ae-9de0-cae8dabc2cb0
Or maybe this one? https://beta.musicbrainz.org/release/9ab63aeb-d6dd-44c2-94ff-f2095ac51fee

Classical is a challenge, though. You're definitely better off using Picard for that, so you can just point it to the release you want. Case in point, the two above are actually the same 6-cd set, just with different packaging and title. The two CDs I checked were also released separately at some point, and only later combined into the larger collection.
Those both are correct (I don't know what the difference is). I did end up using this, but I had to edit the tags in MB. The usual problem, as in this case, is that the Composer is put in the Artist field. I also tried using Exact Audio Copy (on a different disc), which uses the Music Brainz database, but still errors. EAC has other problems, including being very slow and not putting the file in Flac format, as I had specified.
Also, what is the year of the year tag? It is clearly not the year of the performance!
Last Edit: December 01, 2020, 01:00:06 PM by MTVhike

psychoadept

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Those both are correct (I don't know what the difference is). I did end up using this, but I had to edit the tags in MB. The usual problem, as in this case, is that the Composer is put in the Artist field. I also tried using Exact Audio Copy (on a different disc), which uses the Music Brainz database, but still errors. EAC has other problems, including being very slow and not putting the file in Flac format, as I had specified.
Also, what is the year of the year tag? It is clearly not the year of the performance!

Like I said, the difference is pretty much packaging/marketing.

Composer as Artist is a very common convention in tagging classical music, so much that it's written into MusicBrainz' classical style guide. If you want to automate a different tagging system for classical, you might be able to do something with Picard and the Classical Extras plugin. Hiccup is more of an expert on tagging classical with Picard than I am.  It's not 100% in line with your needs, but he wrote a tutorial.

The year is the year that the specific release you're tagging was published,  so for this set 2003 or 2016. You might be able to find the year of performance by looking at the recordings in MusicBrainz but I don't know of an automatic way to tag it. (This is the same way a compilation CD will have the year the CD was published, not the years the specific tracks were released - although sometimes iTunes will give you the latter, which can be a handy shortcut.)
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