What's worse for Picard: missing or bad tags?

Question as in the thread title.

Probably ā€œbad tagsā€ if they are misleading, but either way you should work with a small number of files if they have no good tags.

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I donā€™t know what you are actually asking. If you are concerned with ā€œwhat is worse for Picardā€, I would say, donā€™t be concerned about Picardā€™s feelings. It is just a piece of software.

Maybe you are asking, when using Picard to analyse a collection of badly tagged music files, to determine the correct MusicBrainz entries for those files, and perform tagging, is it more effective to present Picard with the files as-is, or to strip out the tags and present Picard with only the audio information and file name? I could understand a question like that.

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Yes. Thatā€™s what I mean.

No tags are worse then having at least some partial, halfway correct tags for the most important tags (artist, title, maybe album). Why? Because

  • without tags you cannot use lookup
  • without tags you can use scan, but also scan tries to validate the results against tags

But what can be really bad is actually wrong and misleading tags. E.g. if you have a file with ABBAā€™s ā€œDancing Queenā€, but you have tagged it with artist=Slayer, title=Raining Blood. Why is this bad?

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What is a ā€˜Badā€™ Tag? Is it

  • an incorrect one such as tagging an ABBA song as by Led Zeppelin
  • a spelling error
  • the same group, but a different title
  • the wrong year?

it dependsā€¦

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First case.

The absolute minimum is to match the correct Artist and song title. Album, year, etc. is less important.

What if there are errors in the file name?

Is Picard supported by the name of the file on the disk and when?

EDIT translatorā€™s inaccuracy

Is Picard uses the name of the file on the disk and when?

Tags are filenames are completely different. Tags are the important things. Filenames can be consistent with tags based on a defined format or they may not. Some music players care about folders. Some donā€™t it depends.

@dpr

You see. The file name or tag may be inaccurate or incorrect due to human factors.

Thatā€™s why I insist on scanning the fileā€™s fingerprint.

I know, but not always accurate either.

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The only time Picard uses the filename is when there are no artist and title tags and Picard tries to guess them from filename.

Apart from that you can use the Tags From File Names tool to fill tags from filename patterns.

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@outsidecontext

Oh, I wish Picard could operate at 99% efficiency or more. :wink:

Then you can also use Mp3Tag to rename files based on tags.

And so I am very satisfied with his and your work. :slight_smile: