Uniformly tag album-artist throughout the album

Hi, I have this weird problem, MusicBrainz Picard does not assign the same album-artist tag to all of the songs in an album, but gives some the correct artist and others none, leaving the field empty. This happens with ALL my albums. This makes my music player split EVERY album in two albums (sometimes more because it is case sensitive).

I want to know how to make Picard automatically and consistently write the same thing for all of the songs of an album. If it is relevant, every album has its own folder inside its artist’s folder.

Thank you for your time and have a nice day : )
– David Bevi

This is not normal behavior.

What does Picard say the tags are after you have saved them?
Can you provide screenshots?

Thanks. I noted the problem some days after the tags were changed. I used Picard just once, AFTER going into settings to make Picard prefer album tags over live tags over remix tags etc.

ITM I cannot provide a screenshot, but I’ll post one after it finishes a new cycle of tagging, which I’m currently doing after resetting preferences.

EDIT: I tried googling, uninstalling, reinstalling, using AppCleaner… I can’t find a way to completely reset Picard’s prefs (v 1.3.2, OSX Yosemite), so I sticked to resetting only the release prefs.

This is what I see in the right half of the screen just after I add a folder, you can see that Ghost Stories is shown twice. I’m confused by Picard UI (my fault for not reading documentation) but I don’t think it should be like this.

What is it and what are the possible causes?

You have Picard set to scan every track acoustically, and the acoustic fingerprints for your files can be found on both releases. You can drag individual files from one release to the other or even use drag and drop on the releases themselves. You can also disable “automatically scan all new files” in the options and use manual cluster and lookup to prevent this from happening in the future.

I don’t want (nor can) do this manually every single time, I thought Picard was able to do “uniform” tagging automatically, am I wrong? How can I set it to do it? If Picard is not suited for this job what should I look for?

No, Picard doesn’t tag automatically. It can make good guesses, but you have to check before you apply anyway. I don’t use any other tagging software so I can’t make any recommendations.

Thank you very much (seriously) : (

Instead of using scan, use ‘cluster’ and then ‘lookup’.
This works much better if you’re working with albums and will solve your problem (as I understand it).

Personally I would still double check things by hand, but if you don’t care about details and mainly have popular albums, it should be more or less automated.

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