What does this mean in the tutorial?

MusicBrainz Picard
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Thank you. Yet, what means:

"simply drag & drop the track to its correct spot.".?
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I was in university studying IT in 1987 and beyond, and in being there was on the internet way before the billion of consumers where on it, thank you. I like to think I am not completely retarded.

Where, how do I ‘drag and drop’ ‘the track’ 'to its ‘correct spot’?

You can’t drag or drop anything in this ‘GUI’, and the tuto leaves a lot to be desired. Sorry for being irritated, it’s a human nature thing. Soon our robotics@google will have solved that problem too.

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I already explained how you should load the correct release into Picard. Once it’s there, you can drag the file from the wrong track on the wrong release to the right track on the right release. It’s not rocket science.

It is true that the tutorials leave a lot to be desired. But so do your manners.

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“I already explained”.

Sigh.

“But so do your manners.”.

Like wise. Dutch, I assume?

1 Like
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Haha. Here, have a hug.

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This person actually DID understand my question.

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Hi @DonBello,

I agree, those instructions only make sense if you already know the answer. :slight_smile:

So, here’s what’s going on in the image that corresponds to your question.

Files from the middle pane are matched to releases/recordings from MusicBrainz in the right pane.

In the image, a set of files has been matched to a release in the right pane. One of them is a poor match, as indicated by

  • the yellow icon (where the good matches are green), and
  • the metadata at the bottom, which shows that the existing tags for that file don’t perfectly match the proposed new tags.

To fix this, you can click on “Afire Love” in the right pane and drag your file off of the track, either back to the middle pane or to a better match.

What the image doesn’t show you is a better match. (Sigh. I’ll look into replacing the image and clarifying the instructions).

To find a better match, you might try a few things.

  • You can right-click on the album title in the right pane, and select other versions, which might let you select a different edition of the album, one which matches your tracks better.
  • If other versions doesn’t work, you can search MusicBrainz manually for the correct track, and use the green “tagger” button to load it into Picard (it will appear in the right pane).
  • If manually searching fails, the track may not be in MusicBrainz. In this case, if you’re adventurous, you could add it :slight_smile:

Once the correct track is loaded into the right pane, you can drag your file onto it (from the poor match, the track with the yellow icon).

Does that make sense?

3 Likes
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CallerNo6 has answered in detail, I will add a gif to make the dragging and dropping clear:

btw @DonBello I absolutely agree that this feature is not very well explained in Picard!!
Which is a shame, because once you start using it, Picard gets sooo much better.

Basically:
Left side, your files
Right side, database entries

Match them up correctly for great success!

Let us know if there’s anything else that’s not clear :slight_smile:

7 Likes
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Your AniGifs are extremely helpful, @aerozol
A simple “Like” isn’t good enough for your work! I hope that someone collect your AniGifs and re-use it on the documentation pages.

1 Like
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Thank you very much Caller06 and Aeorozol (challenging nick :grin:).

I’m still very confused. It starts, Caller06, because you are mentioning a middle pane, yet I only see a left and right (twice: top, and bottom). That specifically means my limited brains implode with this:

“To fix this, you can click on “Afire Love” in the right pane and drag your file off of the track, either back to the middle pane or to a better match.”.

Aside from the missing middle pane, what does this mean: “drag your file off of the track”? Off what track?(?)

Aero, sorry, I have no clue: you’re quickly dragging a green (ok) 03 away, then dragging something back, and then I have no clue, sorry :frowning:

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Yes, sorry, there’s no formal terminology. I interpret the image I posted as three panes across the top and one across the bottom. The “left-most” pane is the file browser, and is an optional view. The “right” pane is where MusicBrainz data is loaded (and matched to your files). The “middle” (in that image) is where you perform operations on your files (like scanning, lookups, and AcoustID submissions).

I agree, this kind of breaks the “drag/drop” mental model. If I try to explain again, I’ll probably only make it worse, so instead can I walk you through an exercise? Do this in Picard (but do not click Save at any point!)

  1. pull a single music file from your library into Picard. It doesn’t matter which one, but it needs to be one that has not yet been tagged by Picard
    • to do this, drag a file into the middle/left pane (depending on your perspective :slight_smile: )
    • if Picard loads the album automatically and moves your file to the right pane, then your file has already been tagged by Picard. Go find a different one.
  2. load an album into the right pane. It doesn’t matter which one. Any album at all.
    • to do this, open a web browser and navigate to any release in MusicBrainz (← I picked one for you :slight_smile: )
    • the title of the release is a link. drag/drop that title from your b)rowser into Picard’s right pane. You should now see the album load in Picard.
  3. Expand the tracklist of this newly-loaded release (by clicking the “+”)
  4. Drag your file from the middle/left pane onto any track on the right. Notice that the icon for that track has changed from a musical note to an indicator that tells you if the track is a good match for your file. (red is bad, green is good)
  5. Select (click on) the track in the right pane, the one that you dragged your file to. The bottom pane should now show you the old tags (your file) and the proposed tags (the track from MusicBrainz). If you’ve done this randomly, it’s probably a pretty bad match.
  6. Now, try “dragging” your file off of the track and onto another one. Think of it as your file sitting on top of a track I guess.
    • It’s probably still a terrible match. Again, do not click save!
  7. Now, try dragging your file out of the right pane entirely, back to the left/middle pane.
    • there are times when you’ll want to do this so that you can continue “working” with that file, to perform operations like submitting AcoustIDs.

Sorry if that was long. I hope it was helpful.

3 Likes
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You are VERY kind, Caller, thank you VERY much.

I wanted to send you a PM to thank you, but I’m yet to find where that is hidden.

You’re in the US? I’m in The Old World (:laughing:), Europe, otherwise, I’d suggest a Teamviewer session, but we’re probably gonna hate each other because of the time zone differences :smiley:

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Hi, you can find many of us on IRC in MusicBrainz , where we’re used to time zone mismatches :slight_smile:

If you’re a MusicBrainz editor, you can also send PMs to other editors through the MB website.

1 Like
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A bit late to the party but

Our database has 3 different release for this album


all of them have this track at 5:54 and not 8:01
I looked at a few other sources and they don’t have that track at that length.
It is possible that you have a different version of this album but this is not in our database.
Or maybe you have the wrong track there.Was it ripped from an original CD? downloaded from a different source?
If it is a different release then please add it to the Musicbrainz database.

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I was just showing you what is meant by “drag & drop”, by dragging & dropping a few things :slight_smile:

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Hi DonBello.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences around using Picard and MB as a new user with us.

For whatever historical reasons the fact is that Picard and MB forums are as they are.

If you have the time, energy and inclination then the following may be a way that your experiences could be taken into future changes.

Picard: Survey and First Impressions

edit: (All the following is incorrect and outdated)
Without messaging facilities being available currently on MB forums I can point you to release Clàrsach na Bànrighe which I recently edited. With this information you could now, after a series of clicks, email me*. And I could commiserate around the obstacles to quickly learning how to use Picard, acknowledge your restraint in face of these obstacles, and ask you to consider the volunteer nature of the overwhelming majority of Picard/MB contributors, etc. And I’d say how important I think it is that Picard and MB have a far more easily accessible and understandable UI rather soon if the majority of global recorded music from pre-1950 is ever to be included in the MB database.
*Whoops. Not correct. First you’d have to register on musicbrainz.org. Using the same name as you do for the forums is suggested.

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These forums use the MB login; noone can be here without having an associated MB account. (There is also no way to choose a different user name.) This is exactly why internal messaging isn’t active here: because it wouldn’t make sense to have two messaging systems side by side.

The single sign-on seems to work so seamlessly that you have forgotten about it, filling the missing memory with other experiences. I take that as a good sign.

3 Likes
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And here was me thinking that my browser was finally doing log-ins nicely.

So how do I email DonBello?
I had a look at the searches on musicbrainz.org but no “editor/user” search was apparent.

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It is where the other searches are, the entity type is called “Editor”. (In some cases, it may be even easier to construct the URL, https://musicbrainz.org/user/DonBello, by hand.)

1 Like