Help with removing some MB Picard tags and renaming files

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Can someone explain me how to delete some of default MB Picard tags?

I really don’t need plenty of tags like this ones:

albumartistsort
artistsort
compilation
musicbrainz_artistid
musicbrainz_recordingid
musicbrainz_albumartistid
replaygain_track_gain
replaygain_track_peak
originaldate

For me personally that’s plenty of unuseful informations that I don’t need and it will be nice if I can keep only this tags:

title
artist
album
tracknumber
Lenght
date (instead of using complete date, can I get somehow only original release year (like master release year) and release year without month and day?)
albumartist
artists
catalognumber
discnumber
genre
media
musicbrainz_releasegroupid
musicbrainz_albumid
musicbrainz_trackid
originalyear
label
releasecountry
releasestatus
releasetype
totaldiscs
totaltracks

For classical works I need just few more things:

composer
conductor
performer:

I know that I can write all MB Picard tags and later delete that I don’t need but it’s not best solution and I’m collecting my music collection whole my life (I’m not so young any more :slight_smile: ) and for me it’s very imporatant to have consistency with all my tags, naming scheme etc. (really very important :slight_smile: ).
I have plenty of albums with same name but with different publisher and release year and because of that I need tags like original date,release date, publisher, catalog number and if I can somehow get comment tag like comment in Mp3tag, foobar2000, MusicBee…

My second question is about renaming music files.

I’m using scheme like this one in TagScanner:

For compilations (Various Artists) and with more than one disc:

%disc%-%track% - %artist% - %title%

For compilations (Various Artists) with one disc:

%track% - %artist% - %title%

For albums:

%track% - %title%

For albums with more than one disc:

%disc%-%track% - %title%

In Mp3tag I’m uisng this name sheme for albums:

$num(%track%,2) - %title%

Compilations (Various Artists):

$num(%track%,2) - %artist% - %title%

This post is not about what is compilation and what is album. :slight_smile:

Can I make Picard to make this rename because it will be nice to have one app for all my work becase with all help, maybe I will be over with all that work for idk few years (every album is renamed manually with my scheme and I can’t done that by some app because of some extra info in naming like “West German Pressing”, “Bonus Track”, “Japanese Pressing”, “Reissue”, “Remaster”, “Red Swirl”, “Blue Swirl”, “Black Triangle”, bitrate, etc.) .

But, it will be great if someone can help me with that scrypt for renaming files in albums, compilations, multi disc releases etc. and with removing tags that I don’t need.

Right now I’m using combination of Mp3tag and TagScanner (for renaming files with more than one disc) and it will be great if I can use Picard for all my needs.

Around 90% of my tags in Mp3tag is from Discogs but I’m little sceptical about Discogs and their future like database with consistency (plenty of identical releases, capitalizing all words like (of, and, for…) deleting some releases and than Discogs ID’s in tags are unuseful etc.)
After few years of using Discogs for organizing my collection I’m ready to start using MusicBrainz like my primary source of all music info and have Discogs only for backup and for some releases that I can’t find in MusicBrainz.

Thanks for all help!

2

Using scripting (Options > Scripting) you can unset the tags you do not want to be saved. You have two options, the first is using e.g. $unset(albumartistsort). This will remove the value Picard would set for this tag, but it won’t touch the tag if it is already in the file. This is useful if you don’t want Picard to not overwrite a tag, but you want to preserve what you already have in the files.

The second option is using $delete(albumartistsort). This will mark the tag as deleted, making sure it also gets deleted from the file. This also allows you to delete tags like replaygain_track_gain, which are otherwise not handled by Picard.

A few corrections to your list:

  1. You want to save musicbrainz_recordingid to files, because this is used by Picard, together with musicbrainz_albumid, to properly load the correct album and recording again if you load already tagged files again. If you really want to get rid of some more musicbrainz_* tags you can remove musicbrainz_releasegroupid and musicbrainz_trackid.
  2. You also want the originaldate tag, because you say it’s important for you. See below.

Use scripting to keep only the year for date and originaldate:

$set(date,$left(%date%,4))
$set(originaldate,$left(%originaldate%,4))

Yes, Picard can rename the files for you. You can configure the file naming in Options > File Naming. The default is already pretty close to what you want:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/$if($ne(%albumartist%,),%album%/,)$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%-,)$if($ne(%albumartist%,),$num(%tracknumber%,2) ,)$if(%_multiartist%,%artist% - ,)%title%

For the file names this will do exactly what you want: If there are more than 1 disc it will set the disc number first. It will add the track number formatted to 2 digits (e.g. 02, 03, … 10). It will also add the artist name for multi-artist compilations.

You didn’t say anything about the folder structure you want, but the default will create a folder %albumartist%\%album%\ to hold all the files for one album. But if your files are already in a proper structure you don’t have to let Picard create the folders. Just disable the move files option and only enable rename files.

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musicbrainz_trackid identifies not only the Recording but also the position of the Recording on the Release which is very useful for cases where the same Recording exists/is used multiple times on a single Release. Even if Picard doesn’t currently use this, this is the one identifier that most precisely identifies the track that is being used and could theoretically all on its own be used to resolve all the other identifiers. I’d say it’s a very bad idea to not save this to your files as it may be or become used by Picard or other MusicBrainz‐aware software.

I do agree that musicbrainz_releasegroupid could be dropped (this can be resolved by looking up musicbrainz_albumid), but even then I’d actually recommend that you keep all musicbrainz_*ids, since—while it is extremely rare—it does happen that MBIDs get lost (e.g., a deletion that doesn’t get caught), and the more other MBIDs are associated, the easier it may be to find the proper “new” Release (for example). E.g., if a Release is deleted, it may be possible to use the combination of a musicbrainz_releasegroupid and musicbrainz_recordingid to find a “new” Release in the same Release Group that also contains that Recording.

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But ask yourself why is it nice ?
You can just ignore these tags, with most applications you’ll never display them, and they are only short text strings that will make neglible difference to your audio file size.

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