Best way to repair metadata format using Picard?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I’m brand new to Picard, and am curious if it can solve my problem before I dive in too deep.

I use WD My Cloud Home to serve my music to Sonos, and for whatever reason My Cloud Home struggles to read metadata from tracks encoded with iTunes v4.2 QuickTime 6.4 ripped from CD. Specifically, all tracks encoded with iTunes v4.2 have “unknown artist” and “unknown album.” The problem is, those tracks have that metadata!

Some details:

  • iTunes and Picard can read album and artist fine. Only My Cloud Home seems to struggle with it.

  • My Cloud Home can read metadata from files encoded with later versions of iTunes just fine. Something is different about files encoded with older versions that makes My Cloud Home choke, suggesting they are using a buggy metadata reader that makes assumptions broken by older metadata formats.

  • I do not recall how I associated these tracks with metadata back in 2004. It’s possible iTunes did it for me back then.

Picard seems powerful enough to solve my problem, but I’m not sure which features I should be using. Ideally, I would simply rebuild the metadata of all of my older tracks into a more modern format that My Cloud Home does not struggle with. I don’t need to perform any matching or alteration of the metadata values.

What’s the best way for me to proceed? What features will I need to use?

2

Since Picard is a tagger application, and you don’t want to update the metadata tags: open picard, load files, do not scan or look up, just save the files. This might do the trick.

But to be honest, I think you might be better off searching for an audio converter or a batch tag editor.

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In addition to what @GTF1982 said, if just saving does not work then you could try saving with “Clear existing tags” enabled in options. This would rewrite the tags in the files. But be aware that this would remove tags which Picard does not support.

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