Hi, I am new at this. I have a library of mostly FLAC files (some MP3) on my computer that are mostly rips of my CD collection. I think there is approximately 1,350 albums that are mostly tagged ok.
I am looking for a program that will scan and update just the Genre and Year tags for each album or track.
Is MusicBrainz Picard the right or best program to use? If so can you also point to a guide to tag just certain tag fields? In not can you point me to the best program to do this task?
How did you tag them initially? Do they already have identifiers pointing at particular MusicBrainz or Discogs releases corresponding to your CDs?
When you say that you want to update the tags to contain the year for each album, do you mean the year when the CD in your collection was released, or the year when the album (i.e. the release group, in MusicBrainz terms) was first released, even if it was on vinyl?
I used FreAC to rip most of my CDs. I don’t know much about all this, but either it had a large database or it calls out a disk ID to the internet, but my different players all see most of the data like Artist,Album, #, Track from the files.
Most CDs show in MusicBee, but some had missing Album Art and MusicBee either found the cover or it was an easy search with a right click. Basically I just ripped my CDs and the tags were there like magic!
The Genre was inconsistent as were the year (release year).
As I didn’t want a lot of Artist to sort through, an album like Santana will have 10 tracks, but the artist on one track would be Santana with Rob Thomas. I changed most CDs to only have one Album Artist name. All is good there.
I simply would like to keep existing tags except Year and Genre, update (import) those two tags.
I read there is a setting called Keep Existing Tags, but the post was years ago and the wording may have changed. I don’t see exactly that setting.
I can open all my Artist files that start with “A” (about 1000) in MP3TAG and delete the data in those two tags and then run MusicBrainz. …and then do the rest of the alphabet.
I think I am getting close, just need a few more instructions.
and yes, after I listen to something, if it hit the spot, I might want to search for more music of that Genre or year.
It’s already noted in that thread, but worth repeating:
Backup your files first, tag changes or tag deletion cannot be undone, and Picard allows you to make a lot of changes very quickly
If you’re going to the work of matching your files in Picard, you really should keep the MBID tags, which will save you having to do the work again if you ever want to update genre etc
Getting the year from MusicBrainz should be okay, you just have to decide if you want to get the year of specific editions (e.g. the year of the exact CD you ripped), or the year of the first release of that album in general. You can tweak what data you want and where you want it via Picard scripts and these tags: date, originaldate, originalyear
Genre can be a bit all over the place still.
If you spot information and genres that is wrong or missing it would be much appreciated by others if you fixed it or add it
