MusicBrainz Tagger

MusicBrainz Picard
1

It’s something I have been wondering about since the beginning. As I am more an MB site user than a tagger, I did not ask before:

I don’t know what, besides probably a major rewrite, led to rename MusicBrainz Tagger into MusicBrainz Picard.

Maybe it was an appropriate project name, but maybe the product name should have remained unchanged.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to now rename it back to MusicBrainz Tagger?

It is a descriptive name. It is easy to understand that it will allow you to tag your files, using MusicBrainz data.

Many people just say MusicBrainz when they start using the tagger called Picard.

Maybe this confusion, this lack of visibility is even limiting the amount of users because they don’t realise there is an MB tagger out here.

Picard is either a food store, a Star Trek thing or something else, none of which having any relation to music or to tags, as far as I know.

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Picard was the next generation MusicBrainz tagger, Picard the star of the Start Trek: The Next Generation series.

Descriptive names are useful, but I do like things to have a bit of history behind them. Besides, even if it’s going to be called MusicBrainz Tagger again, the same people who don’t say Picard now probably won’t say Tagger either, it will still be MusicBrainz to them.

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3

The story behind it is really some very private joke and while it may suit project names (in a project team with people sharing reference), indeed (or it can be version names like Android does), but not product name, IMO.

If you google it, you will see frozen food or that Star Trak man whom I didn’t know before searching why the MB tagger was renamed (I wondered why it was renamed to frozen food store). It’s also the name of people from Picardie in France.
Nothing fancy nor musical.

For taking US equivalent to how a product name can sound in some other languages, other cultures or when the name is too much private joke, think of MusicBrainz Mississippian, MusicBrainz Trader Joe’s, MusicBrainz Inspectuer Gadget, or MusicBrainz La Soupe aux Choux.

4

I see it called Picard and MusicBrainz Picard on many other sites. Removing a name used commonly elsewhere does not make sense to me.

Those sites know the difference between “MusicBrainz” the database and “Picard” the app. Especially as many of those sites will tell someone to use Picard, and follow that by recommendations to join the MusicBrainz website if the database is missing their releases.

Picard is a great way of hooking in new users to MusicBrainz. (It is the main reason I joined)

Please do not assume that because a few noobies get confused that all the other happy loyal users of Picard need something dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

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5

I can somewhat understand and sympathize with the thought behind this.
But, I do prefer a specific name over a generic one.
When googling on matters pertaining Picard, I can use something like “picard scripting” and get close results on the first page.
Using “tagger scripting” would not give such satisfying results.
So then I would need to enter “musicbrainz tagger scripting”.
First, I am lazy, and second, that would probably still result in worse search results than using “Picard scripting”.

So if this is simply about not liking ‘Picard’ as a name, the only viable improvement to me would seem changing it to a more unique name.

(Maybe something like “qerypasudifo”? It looks like that’s not used for anything yet, resulting in zero google hits at the moment.)

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