Merge existing tags with new ones

[Isabelxxx]

I have tried multiple ways to merge existing file tags with new ones retrieved by Picard and there seems no way to do it:

Related discussions:

Can Picard read existing file tags and use those for scripting?

I now this has been discussed before, but I can’t find the earlier posts regarding this. (if a mod can, feel free to merge this one into an older thread on the same subject) I would like to make a script check for the existence and/or value of an existing tag in the imported file(s), so that it can perform certain further scripting actions based on that. This was never possible, but I was wondering if perhaps something has changed, and this now can be done?

PICARD-2767

i.e I just wanna set the tag to ‘Female Vocal; Rave; Psytrance’ (sorting not relevant)

If I use copy/paste, the new tag is overwritten. If I copy and click edit, pasting it will not properly paste the individual values but all of them flattened and joined with '; '.

I know I can click ‘Add value’ multiple times and copy/paste each individual value, but that’s a hell if you have to process multiple files.

Directly editing the column and adding new values separated by '; ’ also flattens the values.

How can I merge values? (obviously writing a script to preprocess manually every track, copy the old values to another tag, then merge both via scripts and delete the dummy tag is also a NO, since it involves also editing files which don’t need an update/merge)

Definitely a simple contextual menu entry to do this would be much appreciated.

[outsidecontext]

Merging is currently not possible with scripting. You can not separetely access the old tags from the file. See also https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-2767

@Isabelxxx

Definitely a simple contextual menu entry to do this would be much appreciated.

I think this would be a great enhancement. I added a ticket:

PICARD-3021

[Isabelxxx]

Thanks; I also agree that addition to the metadata panel would be great.

[outsidecontext]

Just for information, the merge feature is available now in the new Picard 2.13.2 released a few days ago.