Still learning about this. Used this to rehabilitate my library so my new Astell Kern player would properly read it. Namely, files that did not have album artist filled out would not appear in the artist drop down on the player. Ran this program and most of my library is now situated, but some 300 plus albums still need work, either because "album artist"is blank or has various artists. Rather then go down and replace the tags manually, is there a way to fill in this field automatically with the value in “contributing artist?”
Just a note not too familiar with how scripts work so if that is what is needed will need a walk-through on that. Thanks.
Whilst you can do this as a personal choice, this is not generally recommended.
In this specific instance:
So the whole point of this post is that he specifically needs to fill the album artist field.
There are various ways to match an album with a MusicBrainz release, but it would help to know for certain what state these 3200 albums are in when you load them into Picard. Can you load one of these albums and post a screen shot?
Thank you for your reply. I am happy to screenshot. but nothing much more than what I describe. Most are regular albums that for whatever reason when I run lookup or scan do not populate the album artist. There are some that are compilations. Problem is with various artists that single will not show up under artist.
Here is a screenshot with files sorted for blank first. One thing I noticed is that in the lower half field for manual editing or to compare original value with new edited value, there is no album artist tag. When I click on that to add value and select album artist, the new tag does not appear, so I do not even know how to manually edit at this point.
That may help. Right now I have fixed a lot of the blank stragglers by using mp3tag. Just tag on the folder by artist, and you can mass code album artist that way. Still have to do it front by front but I think most of my work is done. Stragglers will be “various artists.” I will try and use that in my 80s folder which features downloades from some 80s compilations featuring one hit wonders…
Just double-checking: are you using Picard to only manually edit the tags when in (what the docs call) the left-hand pane, or are you using the lookup/scan functions to work with them in the right-hand pane?
You need to enter a value for the tag in the “Edit Tag” popup where you can chose to add the albumartist tag. If you do not provide a value for the tag in that dialog, no tag will be added to the metadata box in the bottom, due to there being no old and no new value for the tag.
I uploaded my library, ran scan (even though should have done lookup). Changed the whole batch by the program. That widdled the unknown files from 1200 to 390ish. What I did is just go through the list jot down artists that were straggling then used mp3tag to batch code by scanning the artist folder. Itt is down from 390ish to about 171. Will make another pass. At some point though will need a way to automatically change those "various artist"fields. Will try the script someone recommended.
