How do I have Picard display all of the information from the database and to tag it e.g Composer

I’m trying to have Picard display and then add all the tags from the database. As an example, I have the Beatles Abbey Road CD. I drag the tracks into Picard. They are already tagged with the Album and the Artist etc, so Picard scans the files and correctly identifies the album, grouping the tracks.

Abbey Road

If I click on track 2 as an example, the composer is not displayed in the list of tags for track 2. (There is a composer in the database

How can I get Picard to display all the tags?

Thanks

Under Options > Metadata there should be a “Use track relationships” tick box. Selecting that adds at least some recording relationships such as arranger and work relationships such as composer and lyricist.

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Thanks for the advice. Composer and lyricist and a good number of other items are now visible.

To me, this UI is really hard. I don’t understand how this is anything to do with track relationships. These are facts about the song… I am not trying to ‘shoot the messenger’ here. I appreciate your help. Is there a guide for picard with this in it that I should read?

Also, in my opinion, this should be on by default.

Thanks again,

No problem. I agree that the options are a bit messy. There’s many similar headers and Picard itself doesn’t explain things too well. I guess track relationships mean the recording and work relationships which are visible on a release page. Not too sure.

I didn’t know this before but it seems that the options are actually very neatly documented online: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/options/

File name scripting is also nicely documented there.

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Thanks . I will have a focused read of the link…

I had seen this https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/tags/

which lists Composer in the Advanced table with caption. “If you enable tagging with Advanced Relationships, you get these extra tags:…”

Good find! Track relationships and advanced relationships must mean the same thing here.

How can I suggest fixes in the docs?

The reason why this is an extra option that is disabled by default is that loading those extra data for the tracks slows down the requests. So it makes sense to enable the track relationships only if needed.

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In this context “song” and “track” mean the same thing. Remeber, Picard is an album-oriented tagger. It works best if you’re tagging entire albums, and when you try to tag individual songs, it can be sub-optimal.

Maybe the concern about performance is valid, but I’ve never found it slow and I’m using an old PC… so having it disabled perhaps. However, my point about the UI is still valid. It is hard to understand. As a computer scientist, I understand why this is implemented as a relationship, but as a user I should not have to think about this as hard as I do. Compared to other taggers, it’s hard. why should I care how Composer is stored? (and all the other relationships…) I just want to have the tags show up like any other tagger and then let me choose which ones I use on a case by case basis. What attracts me to Musicbrainz is the rich set of data, but it seems hard to get at it.

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I think you mean releases ? :slight_smile: It’s interesting that you say it is an “album-orientated” tagger. My impression is different given the ability to track different versions of songs/performances etc is included in Musicbrainz the db… is there a “Concepts” doc for Picard? its not clear to me… and is there a Musicbrainz compatible track orientated tagger?

You can suggest either by making a ticket at https://tickets.metabrainz.org/ for the Picard project, or if you have something specific in mind and know about git (or just GitHub), you can make a pull request directly against the website code at GitHub - metabrainz/picard-website: Website for MusicBrainz Picard (the documentation is under website/frontend/templates/docs/).

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Thank you for the links

You may want to try SongKong, which is a paid-for app. I used it for a while and found it quite good, but came back to Picard for flexibility and extensibility. Agreed that there is a bit of a learning curve and some fairly unintuitive aspects, but once you have the options set to your liking, it really works rather well. If most of your library is just odd tracks rather than full releases, then another tagger may be better for you.

Thank you! I read “If you enable tagging with Advanced Relationships, you get these extra tags” over on Picard’s tags page, but it didn’t say how to actually do that. Picard > Preferences > Metadata > Use track relationships. Thank you!

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