Total Noob Question - New Values - Please help!

MusicBrainz Picard
#1

Hey,

I’m having trouble figuring this out.

Screen Shot 2021-03-20 at 8.47.10 PM

How would I make “Album”, “Artist”, and “Track Number” come up under “New Value” column for manual editing regardless of what is pulled in under “Original Value”? I want to edit these things manually, I’m not interested in utilizing the automatic functionality.

More specifically, I want “Title”, “Album”, “Artist”, “Track Number” and “Length” to come up under “New Value” as a default for all of my tracks regardless of whether the data exists upon bringing the files into the software initially or not. I will then manually add what isn’t already there.

Thanks !

#2

You should be able to just double-click a field on the right that you want to edit.
If you want to pre-fill it with some value you could use a script containing something like $set(Album,whatever)
For as far as I know duration is usually calculated from the file properties, and is not a tag you can (nor should) edit manually.

But bottom line: why use Picard for this?
I think something like mp3Tag would serve such a purpose much better.

5 Likes
#3

@layupbk Whilst I agree with @hiccup about there being better programs to manually edit tags, if you are trying to tag music files from published artists i.e. music with details in MusicBrainz, then I would encourage you to think again about whether to use the automated functions. You may well get more information in tags than you think you want, but the amountg of time you will save will be massive.

#4

I’m referring to empty fields that aren’t showing up automatically. How do I make them come up for every file that is imported. Referring to the above example, it should also have fields for Album and Artist that are empty automatically so I can manually edit.

How would I create a script to do this?

I used Picard for this previously and it worked perfectly. MP3tag isn’t free, nor is it supported by my operating system.

Thanks!

#5

MP3tag is free, and he has just released a Mac version. What OS are you needing? https://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html (Ah, I see, it is $19.99 on Apple… but then isn’t everything expensive in the Apple world? )

#6

I’m running 10.13.6, and it requires 10.14 or above. I can’t upgrade at the moment.

#7

There is currently no such feature. Empty tags are not shown in the list and need to be added first.

As a workaround you might select multiple files and add the tags you need (e.g. “title”) with a dummy value, then go through the files and change it.

In general Picard’s primary focus is on using data from MusicBrainz and on automation using scripts or functions like “Tags from filenames”. Of course it is possible to edit tags manually, but this is rather a secondary feature and the development focus is clearly on using data from MB. So you might find other tools with a higher focus on manual editing tags more convenient to use for this.

But I like the idea of being able to specify certain tags that are always shown independent of whether they are empty or not. I added the following ticket to track that:

2 Likes
#8

Thank you. This would be helpful to me also.

In my case I would like to add a tag to my files for explicit content. And surprise surprise the tag name is Explicit Content.

I would like to have that tag show up each time I load a file but for it to be empty so that I can add the word Explicit or EXP or a description or something in there to use with file naming or other scenarios.