Comment by CharlesW
2 days ago
MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember. If you're not sure how to get started, try this:
• Drag your album folders (one at a time so it doesn't get confused) into the pane that initially shows "Unclustered Files (0)" and "Clusters (0)".
• Select the "Clusters" folder in that pane and click "Lookup". This will find any close matches, and in my experience works ~25% of the time.
• For albums that weren't auto-matched, right-click the album folder name and choose "Search for similar albums…". As long as you're sorting by "Score", often you'll find a reasonably-good match in the top 5 options.
• NEVER use "Scan", basically.
For matched albums, carefully review things like album covers, titles, etc. before you "Save" the updated metadata. After using it to rebuild my personal music library, including ~200 contributions to the MusicBrainz database, I still haven't cracked (for example) how to stop Picard from defaultly replacing a perfect, 1500px album cover with a less-good, 1000px cover from its database.
> MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember.
Seconded, it's the best specialised UI I've seen in a while.
By "specialised" I mean it's entirely bespoke to a specific task and no other, with a small amount of dedicated jargon, like those industrial control panels full of buttons, toggles, and blinkenlights.
At first it's completely alien and appears to do weird stuff, possibly counterintuitive even (the mentioned "Scan" usage†, "what are clusters?", "why do I even need to cluster first?", "how do I save changes?")
But once you get the hang of it it's incredibly efficient with a ton of small niceties, like dragging a selection of entries from the left side will apply whatever candidates you have on the right side to the selection in order starting from the first.
† I use scanning only when album matching fails for whatever reason, it does sometimes unearth entries that wouldn't appear otherwise.
I gave up and use Lidarr since it's a really easy interface ...until the metadata is missing from the API database then it's a hair pulling experience to learn the quirks of the culture that runs either of those cd databases.
For cover art you can control it from options->options->cover art. There are also a couple of plugins for other sources.
There are a few items in there to control if it scans external or overwrite. Recently went thru this as apparently for some reason I had totally disabled it. Think I was trying to speed up scanning as it would download every artwork for a large group into the temp folder. I usually force it to make an external file. I pick what it suggested 'cover'. Then use something like fileoptimizer to recompress the jpg/png it comes up with. I do that because I like to embed the images. And much of what is out on the net is optimized for fast editing not 'archive'. I use mp3tag to put it back into the tag.
Scan is hit or miss. I have fed it whole albums and it will somehow find 3 other albums with some of the songs from that one. That could be because of how I have options->options->metadata->Prefered Releases set. That slider bar thing for some reason I can not wrap my head around. It is good for when you come across one of those items where someone else tagged it as 'weird al' (everything is weird al if it is funny). I have been slowly getting rid of that stuff but want to find the original album to buy. Musicbrainz can be good for that sort of thing. I have also had decent luck with it if I pre-add the albums then scan. It seems to find things better.
I just went through an exercise fixing up tags on my music collection and it surprised me how bad the landscape is (and still better than book tagging, video tagging, etc).
MusicBrainz has an amazing database, but a huge amount of stuff from bandcamp/beatport isn't there. Why wouldn't you automatically import that?
So I ended up using OneTagger which I really wouldn't recommend to anyone, but was still marginally better than tagging by hand after I learned the footguns and restored from backups several times.
> MusicBrainz has an amazing database, but a huge amount of stuff from bandcamp/beatport isn't there. Why wouldn't you automatically import that?
This is why Harmony is life-changing. Ideally, it would become an official MusicBrainz project and be integrated into the site, and into Picard.
For example, here's what happens when I search for a Brandcamp release by its Bandcamp URL: https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/release?url=https%3A%2F%2F...
By clicking the "Import into MusicBrainz" button at the bottom, you can very quickly (usually ~2 minutes, once you get over the MusicBrainz learning curve) add this release as a new "release group", or as a new release in an existing group.
>NEVER use "Scan", basically
never use "scan" because it will never work? or because it is somehow destructive and will mess up your "cataloging"?
I have no doubt that it sometimes works, and would be happy to accept a verdict of "skill issue" if the problem is me.
Scanning a Cluster should (IMO) cause Picard to generate a series of AcoustID fingerprints/IDs from the tracks, then use that series to identify the best match (with extra points for handling missing tracks, etc.). But especially in the case of collections/compilations, the end result often resembles a transporter accident. Thankfully it's non-destructive, so it's straightforward to "Remove" all of the tracks you dragged in earlier along with the various albums that MusicBrainz created during the discombobulation process.
To be clear, my overall opinion of MusicBrainz and MusicBrainz Picard is that they are unappreciated triumphs. It would be nice if Wikipedia and Internet Archive diverted 0.01% of their fundraising to them. Google is the primary hero in their story, supporting them with over $500K so far. https://metabrainz.org/sponsors