Possibility for more generic matching

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Hi all,

Quite new to this but I love it and I started using it for my own music collection. I have a generic question. I like the way I can match 5% of my music with the exact cd/vinyl and get all those beautiful metadata details. However, in a lot of cases my music doesn’t contain much metadata and I can match it with 50+ cd’s, all having all numbers in green, correct title/length etc.

I still would like to add some metadata but not sure which match to choice. Preferably I would match it with a more generic match so I do not add too specific wrong metadata, just the generic correct metadata.
My question is: is this a considered use case or is Picard only for exact matches getting the perfect complete metadata-rich collection?

Regards,
Frank

2

How you tag your files is entirely up to you, just so long as you don’t submit information back to MusicBrainz that might not be correct. If you haven’t looked at these already, I suggest reviewing the Using Picard and Work Flow Recommendations sections of the Picard User Guide. They may help provide some perspective and ideas on how best to tag your collection.

1 Like
3

Well, I did already look at some tutorials. But let me make my question a bit more specific. I can of course manually delete the too much details, like barcode etc. But I was hoping that for each versions of the correct match, there would be perhaps 1 generic version without for example the release country or barcode etc. This way instead of having to delete all the details I can just select the “generic” match.

I guess from your answer there is no such thing? Probably in the options I can also configure which metadata to ignore. Is that the way to do it? But how to know with metadata is generic, and which is specific?

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4

I think this is perfectly doable - do one pass for exact matches/where you know what version you have, using default Picard settings.

Then go through the rest with some (release-specific) tags removed in your tagging script using unset, such as:

$unset(label)
$unset(catalognumber)
$unset(media)
$unset(musicbrainz_albumid)
$unset(musicbrainz_discid)
$unset(musicbrainz_releasetrackid)
$unset(releasecountry)

Please correct me if I stuffed that up @rdswift :thinking:

That should keep the generic album info - artist, track title and number, album name, etc. You may also want to use some extra code to use ‘originaldate’ instead of ‘date’ (so you always get the earliest album release year) etc - as far as you want to go!

3 Likes
5

Exactly what I would have suggested after seeing @FWessels clarification. Simply unset the details that you don’t want included. You can see the tag information that will be written from the list in the metadata pane, and can also delete individual items from there.

Also to clarify a bit… There is no “generic” release available with only the common metadata items. One of the things that MusicBrainz strives to provide is a comprehensive metadata set for each different release.

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6

Again, there really is no “generic”, but I suggest that you have a look at the Basic Tags section to see which tags will be written (if they exist). Then as @aerozol suggested, simply prepare a tagging script with an $unset() command for each of the tags that you don’t want.

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7

One change that I would suggest is to use $delete() rather than $unset().

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8

Well, this helps a lot. Thanks for your explanations. I tried to avoid the scripting part, but as a semi-programmer I should not have fear. I am going to dive right into it now :wink:

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9

There are also two plugins that can help:

  • Load as non-album track: Adds a context menu option to load single tracks as a standalone recording, without the album information

  • No release: Very similar, adds a context menu option that removes the album specific tags for a recording. It is actually pretty much the same as the above script solution

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