Picard authentication request when using self-hosted Musicbrainz for tagging?

MusicBrainz Picard
,
1

I’ve set up self-hosted Musicbrainz on a home server and I’d like to use it as a source of tags for Picard.

I used the Docker set-up for Musicbrainz and it appears to be working correctly - I can access the website it serves via the IP address of the server on my local network and I can search manually on it (including indexed searches).

However when I set the Server Address in Picard’s preferences to be the IP of my server, and then attempt to tag some tracks, Picard asks me to authenticate. When I click Yes to log into Musicbrainz, my local version of the site opens in my browser (as you would expect) but it displays a message saying that the action - presumably, generating the authentication code - cannot be performed on a mirror server. So Picard can’t pull the release information from my local Musicbrainz and Picard just says “[could not load album <releaseID>]” for each release I’m trying to tag.

Am I missing something obvious here?

This seems like an ideal use-case for self-hosted Musicbrainz - ie. enabling me to tag my files (all 78,000 of them…) from a local database instead of hitting musicbrainz.org for all the data!

2

Picard only requires authentication if it needs to handle your user specific data on MB. This is the case if

  • you have enabled MB ratings in Options > Metadata > Ratings
  • you have enabled to use only your tags in Options > Metadata > Genres

Both won’t work with a local mirror as user login and personal user data is not available there. But if you disable both options Picard will run without authentication.

If you had previously authenticated in Picard and just changed the server URL and Picard options still show you logged in, log out there to avoid causing authentication errors.

Authentication is also needed for the collection feature (which allows you to add loaded releases to one of your collections on MB), but this automatically is only being used if you have logged in.

3 Likes
3

Amazing - thank you - logging out before changing the server address to my local server’s IP did the trick for me!

2 Likes