Option to not modify some tags

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Greetings Brainz.

I have my library organized into {genre}/{albumartist}/{release}/{song}. Every song has embedded cover art as well as a cover.jpg. Every song has the year, disc number, and track set correctly. I stream using Navidrome on my homelab server. Every song has ID3v2.4 metadata. I’m a bit OCD about keeping all the data consistent.

I want to try out Navidrome smart playlists and want to get the MB extended metadata into my files. I installed the MB docker server onto my homelab and brought down the data sets. MB server communicates with Picard on my PC, where I am editing files before syncing to the Navidrome filesystem.

Here’s my dilemma. I don’t want Picard altering the existing artist, album artist, title, album name, year, disc number, and track number values. Is there a setting where I can protect these while getting the extra metadata that MB provides? I’m fine with Picard adding extra artists in the TXXX:ARTISTS field as necessary. In fact, that’s some of the data I would love to have.

The workaround is a bit messy, but I suppose I could save the current metadata to placeholder files and revert those fields afterward, en masse. I’m perfectly capable of creating some janky Python, but I’d rather just use a plugin or modify a setting to get to the same result.

Thanks!

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You can add the tags you don’t want to be overwritten in Options > Tags > “Preserve these tags from being cleared or overwritten”.

Picard will then not overwrite existing data, but it will write the tags if they are not present or empty in the files.

4 Likes
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Also notice the “Profiles” in Picard. That way once you have the settings set to not overwrite data, you can save this as a Profile. Making it easy to toggle on\off for when you want to tag a new release.

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I see that. I had created a profile earlier, but wasn’t sure what it was for exactly. This makes sense. It’s less about the person and more about the type of activity they are doing in Picard. Thanks for pointing that out.

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Sure enough. That works exactly as I expected.

Thank you!

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