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?" 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;
$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.