Problems matching Christmas albums

Hi, newcommer here. I’m posting in this thread because nkshv’s situation seems similar to my own. Here’s my situation:

  • Recently I spent several days ripping 178 CDs (all Christmas music) into folders on my laptop.

  • I assigned a separate folder to each CD, containing all tracks for that CD.

  • Each folder is named with the CD title, and the publisher’s inventory number

  • Ripping was done using Exact Audio Copy, which produces fabulous audio results. Unfortunately for all but four CDs, no track titles came over with the music. Tracks were named generically “Track 01”, “Track 02”, “Track 03”, and so on.

  • Downloaded and installed Picard successfully.

  • I tried Picard with a couple of CDs that I know are in the Musicbrainz database, because I looked manually, and found them there.

  • I tried both the cluster/lookup method, and the scan method. Neither produced any results, whatsoever. The right hand column remains stubbornly empty.

  • OS is Windows 7 pro, 64 bit; I have a very high speed internet connection, and I even tried with the firewall turned off. Nada.

Since Picard works for other people, I must assume that I am either missing some necessary component, or that I am doing something wrong. But after several hours of futzing around and reading online documentation, I can;'t figure out what.

Any help/advise appreciated.

Picard is a tool for looking up entries in the musicbrainz database.
The release needs to exist in the database first for it to find the information.

As you have all the cd’s I would use that to find the cd.
Place the cd in your drive.
launch picard and press the lookup cd button.
If it is in the database it should show up on the right hand side.
Drag and drop your recordings, the will be on the left side initially as they have not been matched, drag these to the right hand side.

If the disk is not found you should add this to the database.
There is a lookup in browser button in picard and this can be used to attach a disk id to an existing release.
If the release does not exist add it to the musicbrainz.org database.

2 Likes

Since you already know that the release is in the database, you should do the following:

  • Load the folder with the music files into Picard
  • Cluster the tracks
  • Right click on the cluster and select “Lookup in Browser”
  • Find your release via search (since you told us you already found it before)
  • Press the green “Tagger” button on the right which loads the release into Picard
  • Manually drag & drop the cluster with your files from the left pane into the release that you just loaded in Picard that is in the right pane
  • Press save on your files :slight_smile:

And because you couldn’t match your files with Scan, it means that the tracks don’t have AcoustIDs attached to them in the database. You could submit them into the database as well. This is how to do it:

  • Drag & drop the release from the right pane back to the “Clusters” folder in the left pane (or load it again + cluster if you already removed it)
  • Press “Scan” and wait a couple of seconds for the Fingerprints to be generated
  • Drag & drop the cluster back into the release in the right pane (you can also use Lookup if you already tagged your files to test if they are matched properly now)
  • Press the “Submit AcoustIDs” button :slight_smile:
5 Likes