Hi everyone.
I’m pretty frustrated by the lack of information about music genres in Picard.
From what I’ve been finding out in previous posts, there is the possibility of adding music genres manually (and that’s what I need I think) but I can’t find any info on how to do it anywhere: Musicbrainz forums, Reddit, Youtube… NOTHING.
Picard doesn’t do a good job with music genres from what I’m experiencing. So I want to add them manually.
I was told to right click and “add new tag”. There I choose one of the options and obviously choose “genre”. However, you have to enter values for the genre to appear and this is where there is no information (or I didn’t find it despite having searched intensively). What “value” to add? What is a “value” in this program? A number, a word, directly the name of the music genre? Worse yet, I tried to solve it with logic; I entered “Rock”, “Metal” as genres to see if that would work. And while the “genre” tag did appear in the list, when I restarted the program it was gone.
I’m very frustrated and now I understand why many people recommended mp3tag to me instead of Picard.
Do I have to abandon all the time I’ve invested in this program to uninstall it and go to mp3tag?
Too bad.
First of all, you couldn’t have answered me 13 days ago. The first time I posted here was only 2 days ago. On the other hand, in the 3 posts I made in these 2 days, this is the first time I have received a response from you. I think you are confused.
As for what I expect from the list of musical genres, I don’t know what to expect, but I do know that this topic is not addressed anywhere.
Finally, I would like to thank you, but I don’t see that you have helped me at all.
As genres can be opinionated, the option to pull genres was added later in the development history. Therefore genres need to be enabled from Picard’s Options.
Thanks a lot again.
I did that. And the value I entered doesn’t stay forever, it just stays for that one disk.
I would like the “Genre” tag to always stay active without me having to constantly add to it and edit it.
I would like Picard to have that label by default every time I load a disk and choose from the labels that exist. It just seems that there are no labels in the program to choose from.
Regarding your advice to use both programs, what would be the sequence?
Should I run everything through Picard first and then run everything through mp3tag just to generate tags?
There is no problem about when it was added, I need to know how to activate it and how to use it so that when loading discs, the Genre tag is always present and a musical genre appears in it (if I have to edit the genre by hand there is no problem, but the tag always appears).
Picard is only editing what it sees. Not giving you a choice list. There will never be a choice offered in that way.
You CAN add genres to MULTIPLE albums at the same time. The more albums you select, the more you can tag with the same genre.
Which ever seems to work best. It depends what kinda tags you are adding.
Generally I use Picard first for the the vast data that comes from MusicBrainz, and then fine tune with MP3TAG
Now if all you want to do is bulk add your own choices of Genres from a dropdown list, then there is a third tool to look at. I started playing with Quod Libet the other day - that seemed insanely flexible. Though yet another different style to learn. That one is also a library and playlist generator, but did have the ability to select a batch of tracks and apply genres to them in huge bulk. And did have the dropdown options too.
Thank you very much. I was hoping to do everything with just 1 program so I don’t waste time learning how to use and configure several. It’s a shame there isn’t just one. Thank you very much!
The trouble is all us awkward humans all want something different.
I think you can pretty well get most things done with Picard.
In many ways genre handling is new to Picard due to how fussy people can be with the genres they want. I’ve been going back over my music now Picard’s genre handling is improving. For my own tastes I then tweaked some of the values
I have no idea what “folksonomy” is so maybe should have used it.
I find this a good start point, but sometimes I have my own personal stuff I want to add. So either do that with scripting or now looking at Quod Libet to do it quicker in bigger bulk.
That could be done using a tagging script in Picard. Assuming that you always want a default genre of “rock” the script would look something like (warning: untested code):
If you wanted multiple defaults added (so you can then delete the ones that you don’t want on a track or album), that could be done with something like:
