Beginner here, need help with tagging

So, I just started sorting my music files today (over 4,000…) and I used MusicBee at first, which worked fine. There’s just one catch–I don’t play music on my PC, I use a Plex server to upload all my music and stream to my phone. So, in order to constantly sort new albums or artists, I would have to move all my files over into MusicBee (90gb) and let it sort them, then move back to the initial folder.

I looked up some tutorials online on how to use Picard, but none of them show how to sort the albums like MusicBee does.

image

I was wondering if anyone here could help me sort this with a syntax or scrip; any help is much appreciated.

(If the image isn’t clear enough, the order is Artist folder → album within that folder, and remove any of the year or kbps from the title of the album)

You’re looking for file organization, right? I believe there’s a setting you have to toggle under options before it will move files for you. You can also customize the naming script just like you can in MusicBee, but the exact syntax is a little different. The default values are probably pretty similar, though.

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That’s the thing; I don’t know what setting to toggle and I don’t know how to customize the naming script. I’m brand new to this.

I think you’re looking for Options → Options… → File Naming. There you can check Move files when saving and Rename files when saving. For the file naming script, you’ll have to look at the scripting documentation.

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Thanks for filling that in, I couldn’t get to my computer earlier.

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A few tips:

1\ Before you start make a full backup of your collection. In case something goes wrong, get confused, or Picard miss-identifies some albums.

2\ Experiment with a just a couple of albums first. Make sure you are getting the correct results before getting too far. Check it is naming things are you expect.

3\ Don’t try and retag all 4000 files in one go. Some manual checking of results is a good idea. :slight_smile:

Picard is very powerful and you can twist it to your exact needs, but by that same nature it can also get things very confused if you are not careful.

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