Improvements

Hi, these are not bugs so I guess here’s the place to suggest…

I have three panes open: file browser ¦ local info ¦ online or lookup info

  1. easy names for the panes, not left/right etc. Maybe with an interface picture in the help documentation ???

  2. for file browser a refresh button as changes to folders do not show up.
    Maybe a refresh button for the whole app - as when i’m trying the scripting I have to close and restart the whole program each time.

  3. oops. and d’oh!

Just my 2 cents, thanks.

  1. recommended standards?
    probably too contentious, but as I wanted to try renaming my files to
    artist - album - tracknumber title
    I noticed that having “someArtist feat. Someone” in %artist% was causing a mess
    Any other ways to do it (like having %title%=songtitle ft. someone)?

  2. again recommended standards
    I do like edits/mixes/ dj versions
    and these cause all sorts of naming/tagging problems - which I’ve ignored until now
    Is there a thread with suggestions?

  3. don’t allow illegal characters in tags OR a plugin/script to replace them
    things like \ or : cause no end of trouble when trying to rename files using tags with these.

  4. is this a bug
    I added an album, and did lookup. 5 of the 10 tracks appear on the right. good.
    but 5 of the tracks were not matched (because of added info in the title tag) - once I did “scan”, these remaining 5 appeared on the right. (amongst the other 5). All good.
    it just seems to me that I might as well use scan everytime if this happens.
    Am I missing something? please advise.

food for thought.

It seems like using albumartist instead of artist would solve the ft. artist and remix problems.

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Strongly agree. This is on my to-do list.

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If the file browser does not refresh, this is a bug. Which operating system do you use? For the loaded metadata you can right click and select refresh (or hit Ctrl+r). Easy way to refresh all loaded releases is hitting Ctrl+a (select all) and Ctrl+r to reload.

Not sure what you mean by mess, can you explain? One thing is what @psychoadept answered, maybe you want to use %albumartist% instead of %artist%? Also if you prefer the featuring info in the track title instead of the artist name there is the “Feat. Artists in Titles” plugin (see Available Plugins - MusicBrainz Picard)

We can’t help you without knowing what tagging problems you face here :wink:

Check Options > File naming > Windows compatibility. When enabled this will replace all characters illegal in Windows filenames with underscores by default. This replacement is only done in the file names, not in the tags. If this is for some reason not sufficient you can use $replace() in scripting to do additional replacement.

Lookup and scan do different things. Lookup uses the existing metadata to do a query on MuzsicBrainz.org. If you have bad or missing metadata this will fail. Scan on the other looks at the audio using acoustic fingerprinting with AcoustId. It can help on cases where the metadata is not sufficient. The general advise is to:

  1. First cluster your releases
  2. Do a lookup on the clusters
  3. Scan files not matched.

Clustering your unmatched files tries to group your files by album (again based on existing metadata). If you lookup an entire cluster, Picard does a lookup for a matching release, including the track count. This helps in keeping files together. Even if it cannot match one or more of the files in the cluster to individual tracks, it will still put the files to the release where you can then finalize it. Just doing a lookup on unclustered files does a lookup per file. This can easily result in Picard matching the files to correct songs, but on different releases.

Scan on the other hand always works on a per file basis. And since it does not use metadata you are more likely to end up with compilations and files scattered across multiple releases. Still it is very useful to have in difficult cases.

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Awesome, could you get in touch when you’re working this out CallerNo6?
I do UX and I think a little bit of input from that side could be really helpful.

I think we could do something like this but with icons that make it clear/no text (would be a challenge though):

Is that what you’re thinking of @BigJonMX?

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We have a real live UX person here? Nice!

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Thanks for all the replies. I will progress with all this new knowledge as soon as possible…
You’re all awesome!

PS. like the interface names :slight_smile:

Update) Again with the standards… Some tracks already updated and saved were highlighted as needing updating and saving again. because Release Type = album/compliation is now album; compilation.
And a couple of other tags also changed from / to ;

It might sound picky or padantic, but if I run Picard on a large folder i could end up with many many saves to consider…
(im not sure what i want to say about this, other than, keep up the good work)