New user question - will MB-P work on streams split into files?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I saved a number of streams, and used Audacity to split them into files. But I didn’t name the tracks on a lot of songs, and didn’t even name the artists on a lot of others. Some of the clips I had to boost gain, and most clips had their start and end points set manually in the Audacity stream. So i suppose those would not match the fingerprints of officially released cuts.

Is there any hope for automatic tag generation on these files? Or am I doomed to manually edit every one of the 2 or 3 thousand files that did not get recognized by Auto Lookup and Scanning ?

a thousand thanks,
doc

2 Likes
2

It’s unlikely that it will be every file that needs manual attention.
How are the individual files named of those that are named?
Are they in a folder with a name that corresponds with an album?

3

Yes, there is hope.

If your track lengths are close enough to those in an official release, matching might be easy.

  1. Open your target album in the right pane, and the corresponding tracks in the left pane
  2. Drag-and-drop the “Unmatched Files” pseudo-folder onto the album name. Picard will try to match untagged files based on track length. If your edits are close enough in length, this may be all you need to do.
  3. If two or more tracks have a similar length (which is likely), you may have to listen to them in order to drag and drop them onto the correct targets.

If many tracks have nearly the same length, you may need to add track numbers to the tags. If your file names contain a track number, you can use a programme to extract that number and insert it into a tag. In Linux (et al.), the Media Tags Plugin for Thunar can do this. (I expect that tag generation from file names is what @mmirG is implying, too.)

Even if your files aren’t numbered, there may be hope. If you can list them in the correct order when sorting by name or modification date, then you can paste that list into a text editor to convert it into a script for tagging or renaming.

2 Likes
4

Thanks very much mmirG and sibilant. Out of about 5400 split files, I tagged the artists name in about 1000, and the name of the cut in about 500, kind of using “Elements of Style” rules for capitalization, but adding “(live)” to them where appropriate. All of those, 100%, were completely filled out correctly by MB-P. Hooray. But with so many files to split, and doing this at work, between meetings and deadlines, I got lazy.

So I would create a folder, like “smooth jazz” or “big band”, or for artists use the name, e.g. “Peter Gabriel”, “Sting”, “Paul Simon”, etc. Then using the silence finder in Audacity, adjusting the settings as needed each time, and adjusting the individual separators, I ended up with tracks named S, S1, S2 … S99.

As you can see, I don’t have an album-centric view of the collection, although (and perhaps rightly so) MB-P seems to me to be album-centric itself. With the same song by the same artist on multiple release media, I am clueless where some of the songs I streamed came from.

MB-P was able to put correct tags, esp. track name, on quite a few of the files inside the named artist folders. I think that is the case, but I will check tonight. Since I selected “rename files” option, it is pretty easy to see which ones were updated.

I only have a couple of hours of face time with MB-P and haven’t really figured out the interface for manually exploring and tagging. About all i have figured out is to drag a single file over, correct the tags, and then delete it from the list on the right pane of the GUI.

Anyway, I’m pretty amazed at what it was able to do, and will try to find out how many files are left that are unidentified or misidentified. Then I will try to learn the most efficient way to use MB-P to update the tags with some manual input assistance from me.

Thanks again.

3 Likes