Question as in the thread title.
Probably ābad tagsā if they are misleading, but either way you should work with a small number of files if they have no good tags.
I donāt know what you are actually asking. If you are concerned with āwhat is worse for Picardā, I would say, donāt be concerned about Picardās 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.
Yes. Thatās 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 ABBAās āDancing Queenā, but you have tagged it with artist=Slayer, title=Raining Blood. Why is this bad?
- Lookup will likely find you https://musicbrainz.org/recording/4ba5c3a8-8a49-492a-98cf-e2f3ec4d1db0
- Scan should be able to find the ABBA song by the audio fingerprint. But the totally mismatching tags might cause the found recording to fall under the matching threshold.
What is a āBadā 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¦
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 translatorās 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 donāt it depends.
You see. The file name or tag may be inaccurate or incorrect due to human factors.
Thatās why I insist on scanning the fileās fingerprint.
I know, but not always accurate either.
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.
Oh, I wish Picard could operate at 99% efficiency or more.
Then you can also use Mp3Tag to rename files based on tags.
And so I am very satisfied with his and your work.