A Picard (plugin) request/wish

MusicBrainz Picard
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I’d like to leave requests maybe for some adventurous plugin writers to enhance Picard with tag handling that would make my life a thousand times easier :slight_smile: I’d be so thankful if this could ever come to fruition!

I. Fetching artist info

There are currently four internal handles/tags that allow for fetching artist info as credited in fully formatted text. These are artist, albumartist, artistsort and albumartistsort. At the same time there’s only one counterpart for actual separate entities - artists. Without the other three I have to resort to some elaborate exercises and sometimes simply manual correction, since my foobar library operates on separate entities, just like Musicbrainz does.

To give some examples, the artist info from the first track on this particular release can be fetched with Picard as:

  1. artist: A Macaca, Gama & Agartha
  2. albumartist: A Macaca & Gama
  3. artistsort: Macaca, A, Gama & Agartha
  4. albumartistsort: Macaca, A & Gama

But I need it pretty much as separate entities in multi-value tags, which currently can be only achieved with:

  1. artists A Macaca; Gama; Agartha

It would be really helpful if I could fetch it the same way for the other three, for example as:

  1. albumartists: A Macaca; Gama
  2. artists_sort: Macaca, A; Gama; Agartha
  3. albumartists_sort: Macaca, A; Gama
Another example

From this release, formatted tags:

  1. artist & albumartist: Vainio & Vigroux
  2. artistsort & albumartistsort: Vainio, Mika & Vigroux, Franck

Multi-value tags:

  1. artists & albumartists: Vainio; Vigroux
  2. artists_sort & albumartists_sort: Vainio, Mika; Vigroux, Franck

The cherry on top would be yet another two handles for acquiring release and track artist join phrases as separate tags :wink:

II. Fetching label/publisher MBID

I can pull so many MBIDs with Picard, but somehow with labels it’s impossible. Again, I arrived at a point where I have some labels in my collection that share the same name and the only way to properly separate them is with musicbrainz_labelid.

III. Fetching series info

Now this one’s much rarer and pretty much a relationship rather than internal release data - but still - it would be great to have a way to get this information, e.g. with series and musicbrainz_seriesid (and maybe series_no?).

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To answer (I), there is no need for a plugin - just use the hidden variables _artists_sort, _albumartists and _albumartists_sort in a tagger script to place them in your artsistsort, albumartists and albumartists_sort tags.
I’m not sure I fully understand (II), but it may be like (III) which I suspect needs a plugin to do a lookup. My Classical Extras plugin does work lookups but excludes series. I could look in to adding it, but I have a few other things that I want to put in the next release as a priority.

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Thanks, this really helps!

As for my second point - I just want to be able to fetch MBID for labels, so yeah, it’s similar to the third point with series and series MBID’s.

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Regarding II and III, it should be possible to do these without extra lookups. I’m looking into it with a view to maybe adding in the next release of Classical Extras. No promises, mind!

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