I have a lot of files without genre tags, so I’m trying to fix that. I’m not an expert, and know nothing about scripting; I’m basically using mostly defaults, working on Linux Mint.
I thought Picard would automatically add genre tags, and I wasn’t really picky about exactly what was used, but I found out this is not the case. I tried loading the files without genres, and found that if there was a blank genre tag, Picard would fill it in, but if there was no genre tag, it would not add one. So my first question would be how to add genre tags to files that don’t have one.
I experimented with manually trying to add the missing tag, and got 3 different results. Either it would add a blank tag, then fill it in on lookup, or it would not add a tag no matter what I did, or it would actually show the tag values in the same dialog as adding the tag, then fill it in on lookup or refresh. I don’t know why some albums would not allow me to even create an empty tag, but I don’t really want to do this manually if I can help it.
Is there a setting that affects any of this that might help? I I absolutely have to, I could probably figure out how to write the scripting, although a pointer to the right documentation or syntax would be appreciated.
EDIT: I learned something today about manually adding the tag. It seems that if I manually add one, I also need to populate it with at least one item for it to stick around. Also, I think the anomaly I referred to above about having values was me spacing out and not seeing the genre tag, so the program knew it was there and added to it automatically.
It sounds like the essence of what you are asking is, “How can I operate Picard so that it will add whatever genres the MusicBrainz database knows about to my music files?” Do I understand you correctly?
If so, then I won’t be much help. I don’t bother with genres in my own music files. However, I do find myself turning back to the Picard documentation over and over again. After years of using the program, there are still capabilities that I have not yet learned. The documentation on Genres is at Genres — MusicBrainz Picard v2.8.5 documentation . Have you had a look at that yet? Do you have questions about what that says and what you see Picard actually doing?
Also, you say you aren’t really picky about exactly what genres appear in your music files, but in case some of your music files get no genre entries, or bizarrely wrong genre entries, know that those genre entries come from the MusicBrainz database, and you are welcome — welcome! — to improve the database. In the database, Genres are added as part of the folksonomy tags.
So, by adding tags to the database entries that correspond to your music files, you can get those improved genre tags back into your own files, plus improve the database for everyone else. And that would be lovely.
If you have other Picard questions, please feel free to ask. If the question is on a different topic, then please create a new topic thread on this forum, rather than having this thread meander over time.
It doesn’t by default, this needs to be enabled in the options under Metadata > Genres. If you enable “Use genres from MusicBrainz” the rest of the defaults should be fine in most cases.
Please note that Picard currently is not really good at changing only a single tag, as it is meant to update your files with the data provided by MusicBrainz. If you don’t want Picard to touch other tags you need to add those tags you don’t want to get overwritten to the “Preserved tags” list in Options > Metadata.
Yes, you can not add an empty tag. Empty tags will not be written by default and you will just keep the existing data in the file.