I don’t want these tags as I’m using Jellyfin as a media player, and I’m trying to stop it fetching artist/album writeups/bios.
Under Options/Tags in Picard, I’ve added all the musicbrainz tags (albumid etc.) under “Preserve these tags from being cleared or overwritten”. It doesn’t work, though: when I scan an album, Picard still searches for and applies those tags.
Is there another way to prevent the MusicBrainz tags being applied?
You have read that backwards. That option always keeps\preserves those tags.
Have a read here: Help with removing some MB Picard tags and renaming files
You need to use $unset or $delete on those tags to be destructive as you require.
But is it not easier to just dig into Jellyfin’s settings and tell it to stop doing those lookups?
Just for completeness I want to add that by removing musicbrainz_albumid and musicbrainz_recordingid you remove the ability to easily update the tagged files with Picard.
Thanks! I checked out those options, looked into scripts, and now I have a nice script going. Unfortunately Jellyfin has some bugs atm re: metadata lookup settings, so I’m looking for workarounds to avoid Jellyfin’s unpredictable behaviour.
@outsidecontext, what ability exactly would I lose? My script now deletes/prevents all musicbrainz tags. I just re-opened some files I tagged with the script and the whole lookup/scan process still seemed very smooth!
Yes, that’ll still work, and since the tags are identical or at least very close to what is on MB it should usually also work well.
But if the release and recording IDs are in the files Picard can directly load the corresponding release and attach the files to it as soon as you load the files into Picard. That way you get exact matches to the release you originally chose for tagging without the need to rely on lookup again. It makes it rather trivial to update the tags or filenames of already tagged files.
Just something one should consider when choosing to not safe these tags 
Ah ok, yeah I get you. I’ll leave them out still as Jellyfin seems to use these tags to add short texts about the release, and I don’t think I’ll be re-tagging often enough that the lookup/scan time will bother me. Thanks for your help!