Can't save certain albums in my library

[dbuttric]

I"m trying to imrove my use of Picard. I made a copy of my original library, and decided to have picard delete all the old tags, (I mostly use FLAC in my library) and retag everything.

I generally happy with this result. But after finishing, I now have about 50 albums that still show with a red asterisk in the CD.
When I open the album the same set of tracks in the album show with green rectangles for status.

I took the suggestion about the path length, and I have adjusted my filename script so that it does not include the artists in the file name, just the track name.

Then I read that using a CIFS share for the library is not really recommneded, so I copy a subset of my library to my local disk for more aggressive testing.

I’m still not able to get the tracks to save, and sustain a restart of the application.
When I click the same button on a disk, I see all green check marks for all tracks.
When I restart the app, all the checkmarks revert to last state.
If I’m not using CIFS, and my paths are less than 255 chars, why oh why can’t I save the state of a release, and have it survive an application restart?

I’m running the app in debug mode - next time I’ll redirect the logs to a file that I can upload.

Has anyone seen a problem like this?

Thank you.
David Buttrick

[dbuttric]

OK, I have figured one thing out. If the track has multiple artists, it will not save.
Even though according to Picard, it does save - beacause there are green checkmarks for each track after I click the save button.
Very confusing and frustrating.

[outsidecontext]

There are a couple of cases where Picard will show as modified on load. This is usually related to cover art or using ID3v2.3 instead of v2.4. See also the thread below for some details

MusicBrainz Picard asks me to save a file every time

Hello, this is my first message. I’ve been using MusicBrainz Picard on Ubuntu 20.04 since 2021, and it always worked like a charm. Recently I’ve added some new mp3s. After the scan, the software ask me to save them. After saving, if I close the software and I open it again, some of the files that I’ve previously saved are marked to be saved again (purple star). This keeps going on every time on the same few files. I’ve also checked if there is problem of file permissions, but this is not the…

That does not mean that you “can’t save the files”. If Picard saved without error and your files get moved / renamed / tags saved (depending on your settings) everything is ok.

[IvanDobsky]

Instead of relying on the green check marks, look at the bottom panel for colours.

If you have got all your files selected in the top right, then there should be no differences shown in the bottom half of the page. Everything will be white. Showing nothing has changed.

Unless I scroll down more…

Now I see some green showing me some instrument changes that need updating.

I’ve always found it quicker to check this way as I can see if anything is worth updating or not.

One oddity of this method is after you hit SAVE you need to deselect and then reselect the tracks to see everything is now white. For some reason, pressing Save does not automatically refresh the colours in the lower half of the screen

Update: Also - I get the same red star too. After doing this little demo, I hit save. The disc icons lost their stars. Removed all the CDs from Picard, and then loaded everything back up… and the star is back. But this time the bottom half of the screen is now all white as there are no differences between server and my files.

[dbuttric]

I think I’m understanding what Picard is for better after going through this issue.
I’ve been treating it as a database where in resides the most recent, correct state of my library.

This is probably not the way you want to go.

It’s not designed for access to your entire collection and to maintain that. It’s designed to properly tag a new set of additions to your library, and then move the properly tagged files into place to be left untouched - until you feel like you need to update a set of music with a new tags, etc.

Is this kind of a more correct use of the software? It seems like this is going to work better for me - it’ll be alot faster. Picard takes about 40 minutes to process all the albums in my library.

From today, I’m going to have a ‘Processing’ folder on my nas, that will be the ingestion folder for Picard. I’ll have it configured to move new files to my library folder.

Thanks for the help.
David

[rdswift]

@dbuttric

Is this kind of a more correct use of the software?

If I understand you correctly, then the answer is “yes”. You may be able to get a bit better understanding of Picard from the Introduction section of the User Guide.

[IvanDobsky]

You have it correct now. Your “library” are your music files. Keeping the tags in the files means they are available to any player you choose on any device.

Picard’s big advantage is being linked to the MusicBrainz database. And you can tweak and change which tags appear in your files.

A “Processing” folder is how many of us work. It speeds-up the processing of new data.