Hello. Basic question: Can Picard be used to simply identify the songs on a home-brew CD, a compilation disc that isn’t necessarily from a single album?
Maybe. Picard can get an acoustID from each track, and if that acoustID is in the MB database, it can (assuming the acoustID is correctly linked) tell you what it is. That’s what the Scan button in Picard does, it matches by acoustID.
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OK, but scan is greyed out until I drag files into the window. Loading a CD does not light up the scan button. Do I have to rip the tracks and drag them into the app’s window before doing a scan? Would rather not…
Not 100% sure, but I think that’s right. Picard can only get a disc ID from a CD, so if it’s not a CD that’s in the database (which it sounds like it wouldn’t be) you have to do it from individual files.
Not sure if Picard is the best for what you are wanting to do. Picard is a tagger app, not an identifying app.
Yeah - you’d have to rip the tracks first. Then drag that folder into Picard (on the left hand side). Then hit the Scan button.
It will be a bit of a mad set of results as it will attempt to find the Album each of those tracks were on. So if you have a dozen tracks don’t be surprised if it then links to a dozen albums. It should get you results though.
Are you just trying to identify what is on your CD?
Yes, Picard can currently not extract the audio from CDs. There is a ticket at https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-650 to allow fingerprinting directly from CD, but nobody is working on that.
Yes, I am just trying to identify what’s on the CD. Apparently Picard is not good for that. Is there any other software out there that just does that?
Play the cd and listen to it using the Shazam app?
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Not that I’m aware of. But any software that does that will have to read the audio data from the CD (Aka ripping) and analyze it. If using this for Acoustic it could be implemented in a way that is faster than a full rip, since it does not need the full audio for analyzing, but still it will have to get it partially.
So in lack of a software that does the ripping and analyzing fully automated I would in your case just rip the audio with a CD ripping tool and analyze it using Picard.
Or you do what arozol suggested.