Musicbrainz picard remembering custom tags as options

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I don’t know if this has come up before, I went down the list for a while but got tired of looking not finding what I wanted and thought it quicker to post. I am in america, an english only speaker but I love japanese a anime and also love many songs from them and also a few other jpop and kpop songs but mostly anime themes. anyway I would prefer to sort and list my music with the english translation of the title and such but I don’t want to lose the original information so I add tag calling them things like (title kanji) I put the original kanji title in this new tag and then the english translation in the (title) tag so that on my computer and in the car mp3 system it is listed under the english translation so it is easier to manage and recognize. the annoying thing is that I have to manually name this tag every time I open a new song to tag. I don’t mind having to click add tag each time but having to manually type in the tag type every time is annoying. is there a way to have a database of frequently used custom tags so you can just select it from the drop down list that you can click on when adding a new tag? I do other custom tags in this regard too. let me show an example of what I do from a song I just finished editing the tags for.

title: taste of apple tea
title kanji: アップルティーの味
title rōmaji: Appurutī no aji

I do the same for artist names and album names as necessary. I would think it would be nice but a huge undertaking to add a feature and information like this to musicbrainz picard as a whole. language settings and or sorting based on user preferrence. it would be convenient to have multi-lingual tags for all songs so there would be english songs with tags for french or spanish or german or russian and the same the other direction. you have a tag for each language for each tag type that is relevant and the basic default tag is filled by selecting a default language so like for me being english there would be a title english tag for the language database but the value for title english would be duplicated in the title tag for me. but I don’t expect that to happen any time soon if ever. but simply being able to quick select from a list of my own custom tags would be nice.

2

I would definitely not massage individual files one-by-one using Picard. If the data exists in MusicBrainz, you could do this at scale with a custom workflow:

  1. Open the Japanese/Japanese release - https://musicbrainz.org/release/f0c7470d-f7ed-4dde-960e-d52249aa543e?tport=8000 - and save your files.
  2. In your favorite tagging software, move the %title% tags to %title kanji%
  3. Open the Japanese/Latin pseudo-release - https://musicbrainz.org/release/69477a83-b266-4ab2-a510-7027945f010a - and save your files.
  4. In your favorite tagging software, move the %title% tags to %title romaji%
  5. Open the English/Latin pseudo-release - https://musicbrainz.org/release/7fd01f7b-6628-4caf-9d2c-80dba737d8d4 - and save your files. Now the %title% tags are in English.

This only works well if,

  1. Per https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases/Pseudo-Releases, pseudo-releases should not contain things like release dates, labels, etc. If so, then each time you save the pseudo-release’s tags over your files, none of the release event fields should be changing - only the titles and artists should be changing.
  2. Per https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Release#Language_and_script, editors should be using Japanese language / Japanese script rather than junk like [Multiple languages]/[Multiple scripts]. (The transliteration should also be Japanese language rather than [Multiple languages] so you can tell it apart from the English translation.)
3 Likes
3

I think this would work:

Create two scripts.
In one put the command:

$set(title kanji,%title%)

In the other:

$set(title romaji,%title%)

Make sure the two scripts are not set to run automatically. Now pull up the Japanese release, match the files to it. Right click on the release (not the individual songs) and run the first script, then save. Next, pull up the Romaji release, match the files, run the second script and save. Last, pull up the English release, match the files and save.
I haven’t tested this, but it should work.