Is it possible to merge tags for foreign language songs? (Japanese/English)

Hello! Hopefully I’m posting this into the right place. I’m new.

So I’m in the process of switching my music-listening from iTunes (Apple Music, whatever) to Plex and PlexAmp. I’m being a good boy and going through my entire music library, using Picard and MP3Tag to make sure all my tags are correct, everything has album art, etc. I’m changing some of the tags Picard suggests to make things work better for me locally (mostly I like to use my own genres for some types of music in my collection, like cover songs and James Bond music.) As I tag all my music, I’m wondering if something might be possible. I have a decent amount of Japanese music: pop, soundtracks, etc. When I drop a Japanese album into Picard, it frequently pulls up tags in the native Japanese (kanji, katakana, etc) whereas I frequently already have my music tagged in English. I can’t read Japanese, but I thought it might be nice to keep that information in case I need to google the stuff later or discuss a track with a Japanese friend or something. What I’ve been doing by hand is copying the English names from the “Original Value” column in Picard, clicking the name in the “New Value” column so that the cursor is sitting at the very beginning of the Japanese name, and pasting in the English name. Then I have a track that has both the English and the Japanese in the title of the track. As I say, I’ve been doing this by hand. I know there’s some level of scripting available in both Picard and MP3Tag. I’m wondering if it’s possible to write a script that I could apply on a track-by-track basis, that would copy the song title from my original tags, and combine them with the suggested tag that MusicBrainz is giving me. If it is possible, how might I go about trying to learn how to do this (or could somebody help me with it?)

Thank you very much!

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What about using English titles for filenames and Japanese titles for tags?

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Hmm…perhaps? Although I wouldn’t ever see the filenames when they’re playing in Plex/PlexAmp. Maybe I could stick the English name in the Title tag and the Japanese name in…some other tag? I wonder if there would be a script to do that. I’d need to preserve the Original Value in the Title tag, and then pull the suggested Japanese tag from MusicBrainz and stick that somewhere else (although I’m not sure where.)
Thanks for the suggestion!

This is not possible with a single-pass tagger script. MusicBrainz data is typically normalized so that each language is a different release, and tagger scripts can’t read existing tags directly out of your file as those values get overridden by the currently loaded release.

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Ah, good to know. Thank you for the information!

If you didn’t already know: Translations of tracklists may be in the database (or you can add them) as pseudo-releases.

What you can do is tag the release using the ‘original’ release, and then re-tag using the English pseudo-release (which shouldn’t have metadata other than the translated names of the tracklist/artist/release attached anyway, so you can just untick ‘clear existing tags’ in Picard Options > Tags, and it will only rename those things/leave the label and country and all that as your specific release)

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That’s not what they’re asking for. They want their tags to have both the transliteration and the original script, which is difficult if not impossible to do in Picard.

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