Is there a plugin or setting to remember to keep original values

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I have some soundtrack albums for this show and each season they have a new soundtrack. Unfortunately there is some inconsistenty in the titles of the soundtracks so I usually manually edit the soundtrack to keep its original title to keep consistency. However whenever I need to edit or update them after restarting picard they don’t remember to keep the original values and prompt me to change back to the database titles. Is there a way to remember to keep original values?

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2

The trick I use is to set the files as Read Only in the OS to act as a stop on accidental changes. That then means Picard throws up lots of red STOP signs reminding me that there was a change I had made.

It would be nice to have a “permanent exceptions” addon that could remember fixes like this where we override our own copies with our own title variations, etc.

3

That’s a neat trick! Thanks for the input. I’m gonna try that

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4

I like simple solutions - especially if it has taken me an hour to tweak values in Picard to something I want to see which is against a MB guideline. Other people have complex scripts they rely on. I prefer a simple block switch.

5

I have a tagger script that always runs on loaded files. It saves the original values when loaded for the first time only (and saved, of course). I specified the original tags I want, to a value of OriginalTagName and set the values accordingly.

If there is a value already set, it will not change it unless you -remove- the tags named OriginalTagValue. That means, no matter what you do with the file, the way it was when you first brought it into Picard is saved.

$noop(Retains original filename & pathname for backup)
$set(originalfile,$if2(%originalfile%,%_filename%))
$set(originalpath,$if2(%originalpath%,%_dirname%))

$set(originalalbum,$if2(%originalalbum%,%album%))
$set(originaltitle,$if2(%originaltitle%,%title%))
$set(originalartist,$if2(%originalartist%,%artist%))
$set(originaltrack,$if2(%originaltrack%,%tracknumber%))

$set(MakeItSo,Aye Sir!)

Each line is doing a particular tag.
Example using the first line:
It sets the original filename to a tag named %originalfile%. If there is already a value for $originalfile%, it does nothing.
The second line does the same except with the pathname,
Third is the album name… and so on.

The last line is just so I can have something to search for if I want to know if this track has it’s original values saved within it.

That way if you ever want to restore the stuff to what it was you just need to generate a script that would look for those values of %originaltagname% and set them back.

…and for me, even including the pathname as I can then also put the files back into directories the same way they were when I imported them, effectively backing up the whole thing.

Plus, if I want to revise that backed up information later, I have a slightly different version of the same steps that forcibly replaces the backed up value.

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