Basic beginner questions

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Hi,

I just changed computers. On my old Mac I had an early version of Tuneup which I used to identify and tag all my songs in iTunes. When I copied my music files to the new computer, the track information did not come across and I was left with hundreds of songs with missing data.
Q1) Why didn’t all the old the data that I added over the years come across with the files?

I looked for something better than TuneUp and found Picard and I’m slowly working out how to use it.
Q2) I am dragging tracks directly from the iTunes window into Picard, It is identifying the tracks and finding the missing info etc., but when I save, the details in iTunes don’t get updated. For example, iTunes may originally show both Title and Artist in the Name column. After Picard does it’s magic and I save the data It’s not until I do a “get song info” that I see all the columns populate. This is time consuming for hundreds of tracks. Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks.
Brian

2

I have not used iTunes but my impression is that it keeps a database of songs in your library.

I am not familiar with Tuneup but perhaps it updates the itunes database and does not touch the music files so the tags may not have been updated.

Now you have updated the tags of the files you need to tell itunes that it should scan the files again and read the tags into it’s database.

See another thread

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3

The iTunes guide is also mentioned in the answer to “I tagged a file in Picard, but iTunes is not seeing the tags!” in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the Picard User Guide. There is also some discussion about a bug in the iTunes ID2v2.4 tag format implementation. As a work-around, you can configure Picard to write ID3v2.3 tags.

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4

Thanks, that’s great. Looks like I missed reading the FAQ’s!

5

Thanks rdswift. I’ve now devoured the FAQ’s and the iTunes guide.
I’m a lot further in to cleaning up my library and I’m getting used to Picard.

I don’t like that it sometimes splits an album I’ve originally ripped from one CD and then splits the tracks across multiple Albums (Greatest Hits, Various Artists, etc.). When this happens I remove the “found” albums and have settled on finding the correct Album with CD lookup and then manually dragging the tracks across as the best solution.

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6

Options \ Metadata \ Preferred Releases

Tweak the sliders to prefer ‘‘Album’’ by pushing the slider to the right and push ‘‘Compilation’’ to the left. AcoustID can be a bit dumb with < Scan > and will match the first release it finds. Tweaking those sliders helps bias the matches to the kinds of releases you actually own.

But you will always have to do the drag and drop game. Then add in the confusions of multiple release within one release group all having identical fingerprints.

A trick worth noting is when you get a scattered album, drag it ALL back to the left and re-cluster it. Then you can drop the cluster onto the correct matching album instead of having to do it one track at a time.

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7

In addition to what IvanDobsky wrote above, a few tips:

  • Always cluster before doing a lookup. A cluster will trigger an album search, looking up individual files will lookup file by file
  • Prefer lookup (metadata search) over scan (acoustic fingerprinting). Acoustic fingerprinting always works on a file by file basis, and while current Picard releases will consider your preferred releases preferences it still can give different release results.
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