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

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:

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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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.

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

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

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?

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.

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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.

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