I did a video to better explain.
Basically, all I want to do is tag songs with artist albums and have BPM added to the tags, if I could normalise the volume to 92db that would be great too.
Thanks for the detailed look over the settings. You say you want to tag by artist albums. Some info on your current collection would be useful. Do you generally have full albums, or only single tracks from albums? How many files do you have to tag, and what file format(s) are they?
A few notes about your questions and some random things I noticed:
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For tagging full albums, depending on your current files and their organization the best approach can differ. If you mostly own full albums with some reasonable tags, using “Cluster” and then “Lookup” usually gives the best results. But generally you can tag your files against any release on MusicBrainz. See also Retrieving Album Information for different ways of loading releases into Picard.
Your “Preferred Release Types” settings would help selecting albums over other types when using “Lookup”, and to a lesser extend also when using “Scan”.
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In the file naming sections the file naming preview shows that your files would all be saved to your “New Media” folder as single files, with “Artist - Track Title” as file name. Given that you also mention that you want to tag your files by album you probably would also like some folder structure. Maybe try the default file naming script, which would create folders for artists and albums. Or have a look at Writing a File Naming Script and ask here in the forums for help to get the folder and filename structure you want.
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If you want to add genres, you should only enable one source of genres. Otherwise the results are unpredictable. You currently have MusicBrainz genres and two genre plugins (Wikidata and last.fm) enabled. There are plans to change this, but currently all genre sources operate independent of each other and eventually overwrite each other’s genres. I recommend you enable only MusicBrainz genres for now, in my experience they have become rather good and you can easily add your own if wanted.
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I fear you are currently out of luck for using Picard to add BPM information. There is a BPM plugin that attempts to calculate BPM from audio, but it requires a component (the “aubio” Python module) that is not included in the Windows build of Picard and generally hasn’t seen any updates for years.
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You cannot change the actual volume of the audio with Picard, but the usual solution to volume normalization is to add ReplayGain tags to the files. Players supporting ReplayGain (which are a lot) can use this information to play the audio with normalized volume. There is a ReplayGain plugin available.
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Thank you for the quick reply.
I only single tracks from albums.
I have 95k files to tag
Files are mp3
The idea is to create artist folders with the tracks inside but all mp3’s should have album tags not singles or complations. I will put artists in artist folders with the script.
I uninstalled plugins and will just use MusicBrainz genres to tag genres.
Shame about BPM.
I will carry on using mp3 Gain for 92db gains.
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If you want to tag against the album it depends a bit on the files right now. If they already have the “album” tag set, but it is the name of a single or compilation, this can interfere with “Lookup”, which is metadata based. And even “Scan” will decide based on metadata between different potential matches.
My recommendation: First make sure in the “Preferred release types” settings that you have dialed down the sliders for the types you do not want completely to zero (fully on the left). The matching algorithm gives those matches a heavy penalty that normally should cause them to not be selected.
Then I’d try lookup on a couple of files first. See how the results are. Do the same with “Scan” and see what works better for you.
You can also try to unset the “album” tag beforehand.
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