Possible to disable most tag cathegories? keep only artist, song, release date

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Hi!

Picard is great. But for my needs it fills in waaay to many not so interesting tags in the mp3s.

i have fixed to only write the file-names with only artist and song name. this works great now.

but, when it comes to the tags, i would like it to NEVER add the almost 20 tags with codes, signatures, track-numbers ids and god knows what.

i would like it to only add, artist, song, release date and NOTHING more.

(extra: it would be great if it could delete any other entries that that if there where any present originally)

Is this possible? i want my files very clean and thin :slight_smile:

2

At the moment you canā€™t select a few tags to keep, you can only tell Picard what tags not to use, with $unset(). So you can imagine that is a lot of work. But why donā€™t you just set up your music player to only show the tags you care about?

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3

Hi, thanks for your answer. yes, maybe im to picky, its just im a bit worried the huge amount of info in these tags will conflict with Seratos tags in any way. I would love to have my files totally cleaned and with ONLY artist, song, bpm, release date, and nothing more. then after that add possible add key but that is a later choice.

4

I would advise to keep the MusicBrainz IDs, especially the album and recording ID. They allow you to easily update your tags again with e.g. Picard without the need to re-match all the files.

You can unset everything else you donā€™t need and you can also tell Picard to not overwrite certain existing tags in Options > Tags

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5

Just wanting to second @outsidecontext on this - at first glance the musicbrainz tags look like the most useless bit of advertising ever, but they are actually very useful.
You could have the ā€˜thinnestā€™ files ever by removing all tags except for just one or two MBIDā€™s, and still have access to every bit of information (or any tag you decide you want to add or change) about that track at a click of a button. People tend to underestimate that flexibility.

Yours truly, guy on MB forums telling you to keep MB tags :wink:

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6

There is a plugin that adds a $keep() scripting function which I believe does exactly this

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7

Hi there guys! thanks for the feedback i will consider your input.

psychoadept, pls could you explain how i use the plugin after i installed it, sorry for the noob question.
i just started looking in the program last nightā€¦

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8

Youā€™ll need to add a script under options > advanced > scripting (Iā€™m pulling that from memory, will double check later).

I think the script would look like this:
$keep(Tag1)
$keep(Tag2)

You can find more about scripting here:
http://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/scripting/

For tag names, you should use the ā€œinternal nameā€ given here: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/mappings/

(I agree about keeping MB ID tags)

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9

great, ill try to learn a bit about this scripts. thanks

10

I tried this, but Picard refuses it and says: "Unknown function ā€˜keepā€™ "
Is it an obsolete function? Should I use another syntax for this?

11

You need to enable the ā€œKeep tagsā€ plugin from the ā€œOptions -> Pluginsā€ settings first. Then you can use that function in your custom script.

1 Like
12

Ah, thanks SothoTalKer, I missed that.

It now indeed ā€˜does somethingā€™, but for flac it now just adds another tag to the existing tag, and for mp3 it doesnā€™t seem to work at all.
Never mind, Iā€™m a bit worn out from experimenting for a couple of hours already on this ā€˜save specific tags from Picardā€™ project of mine, without getting results.
Iā€™ll be back later if I pick it up again.

13

Hi,
i am also new to this, i have managed to Tag most of my music however once saved it has the album or track number in front of most songs, how can i disable this feature so i dont see any numbers in my music.

im a complete noob so if you can basically spell it out for me that would be appreciated as im had a look in options and seen what would probably work just dont understand it. TIA