1 Topic by culinko (edited by culinko 2012-06-23 21:26:25)

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Topic: need assist with few things

hello. first of all, i want to thank you for this amazing program called MusicBrainz Picard!

i decided to correct the tags in my music collection, mostly missing track number, genre and year fields. i have few basic questions. didn't find the settings for them and i think some of the settings are required to be in the options.

1. is there any way i could disable (or even better, to toggle) the album view on the right side? i have many full albums, but also single mp3 files. now, when i search for the tag online, it displays the whole album with all songs on it, eventhough i have only one song (marked with green rectangle). i don't want the songs grouped by any pattern.
2. how can i reorder, add or remove the main fields on the both sides? now there are "title/length/artist" on each side, plus the track number when you expand the album. for example, i would like to have it something like "artist/title/album/track number/year/genre". hope you understand what i mean.
3. why i can't remove "length" field from tags at the bottom?
4. is there any way i could set the release date pattern for all files to have the classic 4 digit format? (tag field "date" in "new value" at the bottom right) i mean, when comparing with the database, my year "2007" is incorrect because the database one is "2007-11-13"
5. (not so important) any way i could remove some fiels permanently, so they won't appear when adding a new track? i mean the field tags at the bottom

would this be possible without scripting? because i only want to compare the tags with the internet sources, not automatically tag them. (and change some layout)

many thanks for your responses, anything will be appreciated.

2 Reply by mfmeulenbelt (edited by mfmeulenbelt 2012-06-23 22:14:51)

  • Registered: 2008-04-25

Re: need assist with few things

1. That's not possible. You can only view new metadata for those files in that part of the interface.
2. You can reorder the columns in the top panel, but you can't add or remove them.
3. Length is not a tag, but a property of the audio file, so you can't remove that (why would you want to do that anyway?)
4. $set(date,$left(%date%,4)) in Advanced -> Scripting should work. The bottom panel is updated without saving. You do have to reload the release after changing the scripting for the changes to take effect.
5. $unset(tagname) should work. Note that lines that have no original value and are unset by the scripting are removed from the list, but others aren't. So this will remove some unwanted lines, but not all.

mfmeulenbelt's Website

3 Reply by culinko (edited by culinko 2012-06-23 22:50:19)

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Re: need assist with few things

thank you so much for your quick response. i already tried your script for 4. and it's working! i will play with the 5. later to see which lines can be removed, but it's not so important because i can remove them after music lookup/scan (except length). regarding length, i just want to remove it temporarily, so i can quickly see which songs have wrong tags (if i see orange text). i wanted to sort out tags first, then wrong lengths (there are plenty). regarding the first 3 things, it's a shame i can't do much about it, especially 1. is essential for me. i hope devs would consider adding some of the suggestions to the program, picard would outrun the competition programs even more and will be an ultimate tagger for me. many thanks again.

  • Registered: 2010-09-09

Re: need assist with few things

For 1, you can load individual recordings from MusicBrainz into Picard (either drag the URL onto Picard, or click the tagger button on the recording page after opening a browser window from Picard). They'll show up in the panel on the right, but not as part of a release. I think you'll need to load the tracks individually though, since it's a fairly new option and Picard is really designed for albums.

5 Reply by culinko (edited by culinko 2012-06-24 11:31:20)

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Re: need assist with few things

nikki: thanks for your reply. unfortunately, when i click "tagger" in MusicBrainz, it'll add the song as a part of the release, too. and it's not worth it if i need to add the songs one by one. i was thinking of something like program mp3tag has (picard is much better for online tagging btw.). something like this: http://kopasite.net/up/v8n6tls77f6k7r8/columns.png . i sorted it by "track" first, then by "album" and finally by "artist", so it's good for single songs as well for albums, because albums will be together, but not together in one release entry, like in picard. i miss this feature so bad. anyway, thanks for your replys once again.

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2007-02-13

Re: need assist with few things

culinko wrote:

unfortunately, when i click "tagger" in MusicBrainz, it'll add the song as a part of the release, too. and it's not worth it if i need to add the songs one by one.

You need to do it from a recording page (not the search results), but it does work.

culinko wrote:

i was thinking of something like program mp3tag has (picard is much better for online tagging btw.). something like this: http://kopasite.net/up/v8n6tls77f6k7r8/columns.png . i sorted it by "track" first, then by "album" and finally by "artist", so it's good for single songs as well for albums, because albums will be together, but not together in one release entry, like in picard. i miss this feature so bad. anyway, thanks for your replys once again.

You got to the heart of the problem when you said  "picard is much better for online tagging". It's extremely difficult to get a UI that satisfies all needs. Comparing to mp3tag is, IMO, largely pointless - since it's an adhoc manual tag editing app. It doesn't have to present to you possible matches; show differences between metadata and such - and when it does, it's in useless wizard-style windows which don't work for tidying collections of any reasonable size (and is also album-oriented, for what it's worth). It doesn't seem to solve the problems Picard solves, so its UI is different and doesn't do much to inform ways to make Picard's UI better without making it more complex/cramped.

voiceinsideyou's Website

7 Reply by culinko (edited by culinko 2012-06-28 19:16:04)

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Re: need assist with few things

well, i have 600+ albums and 2k+ separate songs, so with picard i can nicely correct the tags in those albums, but not in the separate files, unfortunately. because if i have the album/compilation for every song, i will end up with having 1500 albums with mostly 1, 2 or 3 songs in it, which will take me ages to correct (because i don't want any autocorrects). i just need to figure out some other ways of doing so.

8 Reply by culinko (edited by culinko 2012-06-29 21:06:22)

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Re: need assist with few things

sorry for double posting, but i found out one little thing and don't want to create a new topic for that. when the "original value" and "new value" tag differs, there is the brown color to distinguish that. when the tag is missing and it's found in musicbrainz db, the color is green. but when the tag is not found in musicbrainz db and found in the local music tag, there is no color distinction. i think for missing track numbers, there are question marks, but not for release date, don't know situation about other fields. i would like to suggest, if it's artist, title, album, track number or release date missing in musicbrainz db and present in user tag, distinguish it in "new value" tag with different color. because if the user (like me) will see that, he can easily fill the missing values to the musicbrainz database. what do you think?

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2007-02-13

Re: need assist with few things

The colours represent what will happen to your tags before and after. The reason there's no distinction is because after tagging this tag will not change in the files.

But you're right that there's no easy way to see whether there is going to be no difference before/after because MB has no data or because MB has the same data. See http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/PICARD-250

voiceinsideyou's Website

10 Reply by culinko (edited by culinko 2012-06-30 19:29:25)

  • Registered: 2012-06-23

Re: need assist with few things

thanks for filling the ticket for me, but you just linked my profile instead of my post;) and i prefer the little icon too instead of changing the color, it's better solution.

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2007-02-13

Re: need assist with few things

Ahh thanks; copy+paste error :) Fixed now.

voiceinsideyou's Website