I by now understand that the ‘add to preserve tag’ feauture only prevents overwriting an already existing and populated tag.
But if a tag frame doesn’t exist in the track, Picard will create and populate that tag frame.
I must say I really dislike that.
I believe you can avoid that by creating scripts? But that’s not very intuitive (to me yet).
Of course you can then start by adding some obvious tags in scripts that you never want Picard to create.
But it’s close to impossible to create a comprehensive list to start with, because only after using Picard (and possibly plugins) for a long time, you will find out afterwards that many tags have been written to your files that you never knew existed, and you don’t want or care for at all.
Is this an issue that is known to bother other users too?
Is there some easy workaround for it?
It doesn’t bother me much. The library/player software I use only shows the tags I want, so I only see the rest when I use tagging software. If you use Classical Extras, you can just put any unwanted tag names in the “blank tags” section (but you do have to list them explicitly). Or you could unset in scripts as you suggest.
To me it is an issue, since I have some tags that I have been using for some underlying organizing scheme.
I use and populate these tags only on specific tracks, with a restricted list of words/descriptions.
My player/manager uses some formulas to check these tags for presence and these specific contents.
Such a scheme will be severely messed up when Picard decides to create and write these tag frames when they are not present in a track.
(and that is how I found out about this unwanted behavior)
Previously I assumed that the ‘add to preserve tag’ feature saved me from such troubles, but it’s now obvious to me that it doesn’t.
I’ll now try to find the tracks that have ‘unwanted’ information written to them, and remove it again.
Of course there are ways in which I can now try to circumvent these problems in the first place, but an option in Picard to prevent it creating specific tag frames through it’s UI would be very welcome.
You can try it the other way around. If you use the additional command $keep() you can tell Picard which tags you finally want to keep in your files. Everything else will be deleted.
Please have a look at this similar thread: