Hi all,
I’m a new user of Picard (Mac version) and have a question: I’m editing an album of classical music, choosing the values between the column “original value” and “new value”. But under the “Tag” column I cannot see a “Composer” tag… anyone can tell me how can I add this tag?
Thanks!
Marco.
Which release are you trying to tag? It may not have composer information in MusicBrainz.
This is the release: https://musicbrainz.org/release/8e67494b-b01e-444f-983d-f37659b0496a
I see that the composer (Franz Schubert) is under “Artist”… I’m new also with MusicBrainz, sorry, is normal to put the Composer as Artist if exist also the “Composer” tag?
Thanks for the help!
Classical music has historically been categorized by composer.
And this approach continues through to today.
For classical music in MusicBrainz, the track artist field is filled with the composer’s name. Search for “Classical Style Guidelines” in MusicBrainz documentation.
I know that this does not answer your specific question. Another, better informed volunteer will be along soon to tell you if this can be done with Picard.
If Picard won’t do this, mp3tag will do it.
In the options under metadata, there are two checkboxes for using track and release relationships. Could you check if both boxes are checked?
“Use release relationships” is checked, “Use track relationship” is not…
Please tick “Use track relationships” and try again. 
MusicBrainz database continues to put the composer in the trackartist field, however these days most serious Classical collectors prefer the track artist to contain the performers (soloists and orchestras) and just put the composer in the composer field. This does make tagging Classical music from the MusicBrainz database more difficult then other genres.
Can’t comment on the rest of what you’ve said, but this is why I avoid classical tagging. Maybe the style guides will be clear enough when I do more than glance at them, but I’m used to the simplicity of “as printed”.
I agree, if there was a switch that then showed fields for the commonly Classical used metadata fields such as composer, conductor and orchestra it would improve the quality of the data going in without having users having to directly fiddle around with advanced relationships so much. And I haven’t changed my view that using recording artist for performers and track artist for composer when adding Classical is a poor idea, hopefully one day it will change.
Huh? I don’t know anyone who does that. But it is easy enough to create a tagger script to do just that, if you so please. Of course Picard-9 would help a lot by giving people the option to switch between options geared for classical or modern music.
I agree. And it is a shame because it degrades its usefulness… at least as far as classical music is concerned.
Really, so you have three albums of the same classical work performed by different conductors and orchestras, and you are happy to have all the track artists set to the composer, just the same as the composer field ?
Why would you want that ?
If MusicBrainz set track artist to something more sensible then you wouldn’t have to create tagger script, which in any case would be difficult to do reliably since you wouldn’t want to do this for non-classical and difficult to distingusih between the two.
Yes.
There is a tag for performers, just like there’s a composer tag. If you want to organize your music by them, then use a player that supports the performer tag.
My preference is that this area is made as simple as practicable for new users so they can have a better chance of succeeding in understanding, tagging and editing.
As I’m sure you know just about every player given greater precedence to artist and composer tags then another tags, so whilst i would add to performer only doing that doesn’t really cut it.
This discussion illustrates why I wrote the “Classical Extras” plugin - https://picard.musicbrainz.org/plugins/. Please feel free to try it out and feed back any comments.
I am working on an enhancement to the plugin that remembers the options settings for every track - sort of Picard-9 functionality.
BTW there is one advantage of using Track Artist for composer - it allows the use of “credited as”, particularly useful for all those Russian composers. The plugin enhancement will also hopefully use that as well as improved classical/non-classical identification and SongKong/Jaikoz compatibility.
Again?
and
and
… seriously, can we please not do this again? I mean, if we were actually covering new ground, not something that has already been covered (in something like a hundred posts), maybe it’d be worthwhile. And not to mention this discussion has more or less hijacked an unrelated topic.
Really I wasnt intending to hijack the thread or talk about the MusicBrainz database at all. I was only responding to the incorrect assertions about Picard and tagging that there is no issue because everyone use the composer as the artist tag, and if you don’t want to do that its fine because you can simply write tagger script or use a player that supports performer.