Preparing your files for MusicBee. Picard? Mp3tag? Tag&Rename? Something else?

[hiccup]

I'm curious:

Many MusicBee users seem to be using other software tools to prepare their files before allowing them into MusicBee.
I myself use MusicBrainz' Picard for that. (and Tag&Rename also plays a small but important role in this, credit where credit is due)

Others are using Mp3tag, which I am sure is a good option also. (it just never appealed to me, so I may be missing something there)

So I guess this topic is intended to boil down to:
- what other software tools are you using to prepare your music files before allowing them into heaven?
- what do you believe to be the advantages of the tool that you are using over other tools that you have tried?

[Gendji]

1. Mp3tag for tagging. Mainly because of the Actions you can create yourself, but also the possibility of creating tags from filenames and the build in tag resources for example. Besides all that, the program has a simple no nonsense GUI solely based on tagging.

2. dBpoweramp for ripping and file conversion. I used Exact Audio Copy for a long time to rip cd's but it hasn't been updated for a while and according to several posts i read on different forums, the ripping with dBpoweramp is on par with EAC. I still use EAC every now and then if i have a cd with a lot of errors.

3. CUETools for those rare occasions a cd is 1 wave file with a cue file.

On a side note i also use MusicBrainz Picard sort of but in script form within Mp3tag for classical music.

[hiccup]

On a side note i also use MusicBrainz Picard sort of but in script form within Mp3tag for classical music.

That's interesting.
Does that mean you can retrieve the exact same information from MusicBrainz as Picard can?

[Gendji]

That's interesting.
Does that mean you can retrieve the exact same information from MusicBrainz as Picard can?

I am not sure about all but in my search for tagging Classical music, i came across this script: MusicBrainz Roon Recording Tags. B.t.w. it says Roon but they are normal tags as far as i can see.

The standard MusicBrainz script in Mp3tag doesn't retrieve tags like ENSEMBLE, CONDUCTOR, SOLOIST etc. but this script does.

It is easy to install. Mp3tag keeps the (standard) scripts in %appdata%\mp3tag\data\sources, that is where you can also put your own scripts and use them directly under Sources in Mp3tag.

Here is list of scripts: Latest Web Sources Scripts topics - Mp3tag Community, which contains some interesting ones i think.

[alec.tron]

So I guess this topic is intended to boil down to:
- what other software tools are you using to prepare your music files before allowing them into heaven?
- what do you believe to be the advantages of the tool that you are using over other tools that you have tried?

Roughly:

First to Foobar2000 (mostly for it's discogs plugin, whjich I've used for a good 10+ years, so to stay true to the formatting/field names etc from there, and a few mass edits that are more difficulkt to do in MB than foobar,)
Then Musicbee for self set/authored tags (rating, and a few custom tags like genre, instruments, instrumental/riddim/version, energy, etc)
The off to DJ programs if needed (i.e Traktor & Serato) for BPM & Key analysis & beatgridding.
Then back to Musicbee (which then gets fed the BPM & Major Key info)
that woul dbe the general workflow.

There was the odd case where I useed mp3tag for functions that were easier in there, compared to Foobar & MB.
Also - I'd love to add Picard to the mix, but, there's no way I will add another hand-holding step to the above... it's borderline as it is already... so I'm hoping that one day I can derive/cross link picard releases from discogID fields, and shove the musibrains data into custom fields from there... but there's still a fair few bits missing to make that possible afaik.

Churs.
c.

[Dizza17]

I use Picard for tagging prior to importing into Musicbee. I’m unfortunately not overly good with script language but try and modify ones I find on the forums to format the tags I’m interested in. MP3Tag I use for formatting Performer & involved people tags to split them correctly across my Musicbee custom tags.

[Raznurok]

I use Kid3 to add/remove my tags, then foobar2000 to re-encode all my FLAC files as I prefer them to be encoded by the reference encoder and not third-party ones. Once that's done, they get transferred to my NAS and it's read-only from then on. MusicBee used to add an ENCODER tag without prompting which I found extremely annoying so I don't trust software to have write access to my files any more.

Everything I tag is done manually - as handy as tools like Picard are, there's always an inconsistency somewhere.

[klh]

I had used Kid3 when I was on Mac, but have switched back to PC and I really like MP3Tag. The built-in tools with MB are pretty good for most tasks, but the file rename tool for MP3Tag is really great, that's what I mostly use it for.

As previously mentioned, the custom actions with MP3Tag are really great, I like to get a backup cover image for my library and I created an action that 1) pulls the album cover image from the file as album_name.jpg; 2) resizes and re-embeds the image at 500x500 px; 3) pulls the resized image as Cover.jpg. You can click on the file to see how large the embedded image is in the album area of the edit interface, and I run the action if the embedded image is crazy large.

[MTVhike]

I found it's easiest to just use MB for both ripping CDs and tagging. I get the information for the tags off the CD itself. If the files are digital downloads, then (usually) the tags are already there. Vinyl - that's a different issue!