How to identify the physical file/folder behind a title...?

[quote=“aerozol, post:19, topic:10831, full:true”]
Luckily once you’ve attached a MBID (Music Brainz Identifier) to an album it’s extremely easy to make changes and then apply them to your entire library, so you can look forward to that at least![/quote]
“Look forward to…” does that mean this is a not-yet-released feature, or is all I have to do is await your explanation?
It does sound enticing to be able to apply a change to the whole library - just like that. Please explain :slight_smile:

That’s somewhat an extension to my answer above :slight_smile: Picard (as well as other MB based taggers) will write MBIDs to the tags. When loading already tagged releases into Picard, it will automatically load it into the right pane with the latest metadata from MB. That makes it easy to update the metadata of already tagged files with the latest changes from MB. It also makes it easy to apply changes in your tagger settings, e.g. a different naming scheme.

This process could also be completely automated (Picard is still quite manual, requiring you to load the files, wait for the data to be loaded and hit save). I don’t know currently which software is suitable for a fully automatic update of your library, but maybe someone else knows more.

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@VikingOy: I answered only partially yesterday because I wanted to have a look at Picard before writing anything wrong. So here is some more info.

I can honestly not replicate that behaviour, unless I enable “Clear existing tags” in the options (which clears everything and writes only the new tags and is disabled by default). But if I have e.g. a “composer” tag in my file and MB does not provide one the existing composer tag stays untouched. That’s how it is supposed to work. If it doesn’t it is a bug. It would be great if you could verify that you haven’t enabled “Clear existing tags” and that the tags really get removed anyway. If so, please let me know (and which tag it was).

Picard won’t change “The Beatles” to “Beatles, The” unless you do some scripting. You have actually the choice between the artist name as it is written “The Beatles” (%artist% or %albumartist%) and the sort name “Beatles, The” (%artistsort% or %albumartistsort%). As for the “John & Yoko” example that could have been specific artist credits on one release. You can try whether “Use standardized artist names” solves this for you.

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@outsidecontext: Thank you for making several things much clearer to me, and for your supporting effort. I understand that you have long experience with Picard and deep understanding of its inner workings.
I’ll do some more testing here before I make further bombastic statements :no_mouth:

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