I would like to add some tango cds to MB and need help to get started. Adding them manually is no option for me, because it is too time consuming, so I thought that I could use Picard to send my metadata programmatically to MB.
I must confess that Picard scares the wits out of me because I always fear that it will overwrite my carefully inserted tags. But anyway.
Some djs and tango lovers are building their dj sets according to the original release year. The year of recording is needed, because we group tangos together into tandas and all pieces in a tanda should be of similar characteristics. All players I know of only evaluate the YEAR tag so that I inserted the original year into the YEAR tag in my files. This conflicts with the release year of the cd. So MB could overwrite the year tag, which would destroy the work of months. (Good to have backups)
My requirements are:
that I can protect the year tag in my files from being overwritten by Picard (I saw an option in the docs hinting at this)
that I can bulk copy the value of YEAR to ORIGINAL_YEAR so that the right metadata gets into MB
that there is a way to convert a string in the comments field to the originaldate field. (I insert the day of recording into the comments tag as this is displayed in dj software.
Picard is a tool to retrieve data from musicbrainz.org and write these to tags.
You cannot create a release from picard, you need to do that from the website.
When you add a release to musicbrainz you can specify the release date of that version.
There is the concept of release groups as a level above releases used to group different versions of releases.
The earliest release in the release group is used for the original release date tag so the best thing to do would be add the earlier release group to the database.
There is scripting support that could copy tags around but that is probably the wrong way of doing things.
But you might be able to pre-fill a lot of data by using the “Add Cluster as Release” plugin. I haven’t used it myself, but as far as I can tell it’s made specifically for cases like these (where your tags have mostly decent info already).
I am not sure whether I want to add a release. From the definition of https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Release/Date I guess that the earliest release date is not the date of recording. But I am unsure whether the originaldate is the date of recording generally. But in my case it is.
I have files where the day of recording is mentioned in the comments tag. This day of recording would be valid for all releases of this recording so it would help if I could copy it to the originaldate tag.
If they are CDs, then they should be releases. The recording date of the recordings in them is unrelated to the fact that it’s a release with a specific release date
We don’t really have a “recording date” field as such right now. Usually, recording dates are stored in relationships (like between the recording and the composition being recorded, or the performers).
Usually something will have been recorded prior to it being released… it’s hard to release a recording that will be recorded in the future.
Someone was working on a Picard plugin to look through all Releases a Recording appeared on and set the “original release date” based on that, rather than only looking at the Releases in the current Release Group. See:
Note that there’s also a “Tango.info” plugin which might also help you with what you want? I’m only slowly starting to get into tango music myself (my girlfriend is an avid tango dancer), so I haven’t tried that plugin out myself yet.
If your software needs a YEAR field specifically, you should be able to use a fairly simple tagger script to set it based on DATE (on phone so can’t easily suggest specific code niw).
