Hi i’ve been using Beatunes which is very good, but for some reason started not working after years - so i’m fairly experienced.
I’ve downloaded Media Money, Tag Scanner, Mp3Tag, Kid3 - and all were too confusing - Music Brainz is first to look like it is solid, so i’m giving it a try.
What i’d like to connect the drive where my files are Z Drive - and i see Music Brainz is starting to bring in the data - i only see Title, Length and Artist - how can i add more columns with Genre composer etc.
What i’d like to do is search and sort columns to identify issues - and then select multiple albums/files and make those bulk changes - hopefully this can help me do it?
I’m waiting for the system to finish 'importing (?)" my files into Musicbrainz - i have 17,000 files - hopefully that won’t bog down this system - it perhaps is what caused Beatunes to have issues but i’m not sure.
I notice that system is displaying all the ‘files/music tracks’ is there a way to see a list of all the albums (less volume easier to see).
Lastly - any primary tips you want to suggest as i get started. - thank you!
You cannot throw all your music collection in at once
Do small batches (an album or a few albums) at a time
Be careful and try and match the correct release before saving.
Limit the plugins you use as these will slow you down.
Once you have all your songs saved with the correct tags go back and enable plugins to get more information. If picard detects a song with the musicbrainz identifiers it knows what release to look up.
Picard is designed to retrieve data from musicbrainz.org so there needs to exist in the database for something to match.
There are ways of importing data from some stores and seeding an entry from existing tags.
For completeness: Picard does not upload any files, but analyses them on your computer and tries to find online matches. So an old computer will take some time…
As @dns_server says: start with the known albums (called ‘releases’ here) and tag/store those first, removing them from the list ‘todo’.
To add to the above answers: It’s important 5o understand that Picard is not a music library management tool. That means unlike other tools you mentioned, like e.g. Media Monkey, the way to work with Picard is not to load your entire library at once. Picard will not remember this the next time you start it, it does not manage a database of your files.
Instead Picard is intended to be used to edit your files metadata. For that purpose you should only load those files into Picard you want to get organized right now.