Stick MP3TAG into your toolbox and use them together. Picard’s big strength is the database it has available and ability to have a pretty good educated guess at which version you have. MP3TAG is then there for bulk fine tuning and changes.
It is better to see Picard as part of MusicBrainz. It is the part that brings the database and its details to your music files. Whereas MP3TAG just lets you change your tags. If you want accuracy, you need Picard. If you just want to hack your tags, then MP3TAG
Warning - Picard+MusicBrainz can be addictive.
And always do initial tests on COPYS of your music while you are learning. Make a backup of everything to an external drive before you start in case you make mistakes.
thanks @IvanDobsky mp3tag is the tool I’m coming from and that has already tagged all flacs to perfection. apart from the original release year thing. but that’s more deezer/tidal’s fault, if any.
it probably would have been easier to start with picard and then clean up in mp3tag but at least for this round, it’ll be the other way around.
let’s see how that goes
everything’s always backed up twice in the cloud and twice on nas separated by mountains and pretty lakes.
btw, does anyone know of an app that is capable of displaying ANY and ALL tags of files (flacs) selected?
I’ve just spent hours and apparently no one but me seems to need this.
metaflac and mp3tag let me dump this info into files but I want this editable in an app. I might get mp3tag there if I add every possible comment/tag variation as a column but that just seems unnecessarily cruel.
anyone know of an app that displays all stored meta data and lets me manipulate it?
For FLAC Picard will load and show all the Vorbis tags stored in the file.
Similar to Picard it won’t show you everything for ID3 tags, it doesn’t support all of the available frames there. Not sure how it behaves for MP4, probably similar situation.
Like Picard it will show you everything for Vorbis and APE tags.
MP3TAG can use the Extended Tags button. Can also change tags in that window. If you have 20 tracks selected, you can change the value of all of them.
Picard shows you everything by default. It is why it is such a king of details. The right hand side will be prefilled by values from the database, but you can always override that. And once you find Scripting you have a TON of control
@chaban how/where? do I need to install a plugin? all I can see is default tags or add manually columns for additional tags. but that’s not helpful since I want to see all present tags and not guess and manually add columns. but chances are, I just dont know where to look in foobar…
@IvanDobsky mate, I can’t see any of the musicbrainz tags or the source tag in the extended tags pop-up of mp3tag. and I know they are there since I load the same file in picard and they show.
I know picard shows me everything, and I LOVE IT for that, but I wanted to replicate that behaviour (showing all and any tag) in mp3tag so I can continue mass-tag-manipulations in that app after picard filled all the metadata.
And yes, I’m going through this over there and see where it leads me.
I just dont get it how it’s so hard to open a flac file in any of the meta data editors and none, I mean none of the 30 or so I tried, even displays remotely a complete meta data picture.
Okay, weird. I just tagged an album in Picard and here is one track in MP3TAG using Extended Tag button (and yes I had to cheat and tape two together as bigger than screen… lol):
Picard is also showing the data is not there. it says “missing” The WHITE text is in place. Notice how the WHITE matches your MP3TAG categories. Have you hit SAVE on that file in Picard yet?
In VLC load the track. Right click and select INFORMATION and then METADATA tab.
I think you are not writing the metadata you think you are.
Let me guess. In Picard you had highlighted a whole album of tracks. So the image on the left is showing you that some of the tracks were tagged like that, but others were not.
Edit:
I deleted all the tags and tried again on the WHOLE album with zero tags:
This is why when you are trying to tag ONE track from the album the Picard GUI is trying to tell you about the ALBUM because you have the highlight on the ALBUM
You pasted the last picture for me. In that image you are highlighting just the TRACK so Picard talks to you about just the one TRACK and the tags it finds.
Picard is trying to do so much in one small GUI it takes a bit of time to learn… but soon you’ll be flying with it.
Always good to learn a new trick each day. There is help file for Picard if you click in the menus. And you can see plenty of people also on here to help as we all use it in different ways.
