Up until now, I’ve been adding this sort of disambiguation to the Album title e.g. “You Are Here [Special Edition]”. But I don’t like doing that since that’s not actually the album title.
I realise there is a disambiguation tag in Musicbrainz. But I’ve found that sometimes it contains text that isn’t so helpful. e.g.“hi-res audio” isn’t really helpful for telling apart albums of the same name when all the files are hi-res.
I’ve since learnt that I cannot change the disambiguation tag in Picard on a case by case basis as it can only be changed through Musicbrainz (and would therefore affect all users).
I thought I could use the comment tag instead. But if I alter the comment tag in a file browser or in PuddleTag (like Mp3tag but for Linux) it doesn’t show up in Picard. In fact, I cannot see the comment tag at all in Picard. Manually adding the comment tag does nothing and I can’t find a setting to show it. I tried adding the comment tag to Options > User Interface > Top Tags (under date) but I still cannot it.
TL;DR: Do I just have to live with adding this extra info to the album title or is there some other better way of adding this that I can then add to my naming script so that the file name gets the extra info but the metadata is kept correct?
I can’t confirm this behaviour. I tested it. Comment tags written by puddletag show up in Picard. Have you really saved it. Sometimes it happened that the preview mode fooled me.
Usually (if not printed and necessary for distinguishing from others) “Special edition” should not be part of the title. Also the disambiguation field should only be used for reason specified in the guidelines. (“hi-res audio” is indeed not a good disambiguation as MB releases are not dependent on file format)
You should not add information you personally like to add to the metadata of your files. This can surely be done by scripting.
It was definitely saved. But at any rate I’ve since realised there was something funky going on with that particular file that I was experimenting with. When setting the comment with a different file, the comment tag is correctly added, shown, and saved.
Yes, exactly what I’m saying and trying to avoid. Which is why I’m asking how I would best go about adding extra disambiguation
My options as best as I can work out now are:
Add correct disambiguation information to the MusicBrainz database and then somehow filter the disambiguation to only show certain information (e.g. “Special Edition”) - no idea if this is possible
Use the comment tag to add this information
Add a custom tag
I can probably work out how to add the comment tag to the file name, but the other two options I’m not yet sure how to implement those.
How would I do that if it’s not one of the three options above?
I do something like 2. - I write it to the comment tag and add it to the album title as an “unofficial ETI”.
I use a specific code which I write to the comment tag (I keep “comment” - specified in options Preserve these tags…).
For example, the following code adds “special edition” in brackets after the album title:
R{special edition}
Then, save and refresh (the script is executed automatically):
The script looks for “R{“ in the comment tag. This will not be there by chance.
If it is found, it reads what is between the curly brackets and writes it after the album title ← this part is between escaped (!) round brackets, without \ the bracket would close the $rsearch function!
I also use this trick to change other things which I like to have different from MB, e.g. OD{…} changes the “original date”, in case the real original date is in another RG or if there’s no exact date known for the first release.
