MusicBrainz Picard/Documentation: Difference between revisions

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=Documentation for Picard=
#REDIRECT [[MusicBrainz Picard]]

This page discusses the next generation [[Picard Tagger|PicardTagger]].


==Quick start for the impatient==

We have a quick start guide that shows you [[How To Tag Files With Picard|HowToTagFilesWithPicard]]. If you've never used Picard before, please read the guide or the remainder of the page for it to make sense to you!

==Basic Picard Documentation==

This tagger takes an album approach to tagging, whereas the old tagger required the user to work with one track at a time and check to see if the tagger correctly identified the track. The amount of time spent reviewing the old tagger's suggestions will probably equal the amount of work the user has to do to find the right albums in the new tagger. More details on this thought later -- first let's explain the basic new operations.

Start with opening individual music files or directories by dragging them into the "New files (drag files to tag here)" folder. The tagger will read the metadata from each of the files and unless they have been tagged before, the files will be deposited into the "Unclustered files" folder. Files that have been tagged before and contain the [[MusicBrainz]] track identifier will be opened up as albums in the album view.

Once the tagger finishes processing the files, press the cluster button (white square with 'clusters' on them). This will cause the tagger to attempt to group the files into album clusters by examining the metadata read from the files and clustering files that appear to belong to the same album. Files that are not matched into album clusters will remain in the "Unclustered files" folder. In the future the tagger will automatically cluster the files when it has finished reading the metadata from the files.

This is where the magic currently ends -- from now on you will need to look up album clusters or individual files by selecting the cluster or file and clicking on the lookup button. This will open a web browser window where you can browse/search for the appropriate album using the [[MusicBrainz]] web-site. Once you've found the right album, click on the 'tagger' icon in the album title: [[Image:mblookup-tagger.png]] . Once you click on this link , the tagger pops up and loads that album into the tagger.

Now you can drag tracks from the "Unclustered files" folder or from the album clusters onto tracks in albums. Dragging a file to an album 'tags' it to that album and you should see an icon in front of the track:
* a green check mark indicates the track is up to date and saved.
* a small rectangle ranging from red to green indicates the quality of the match. red -> bad match, green -> good match
* a blue ? indicates an unmatched file.
* a red error triangle means the file has an error. See the status bar in the bottom of the picard window to see the error.
* no icon means that no file is associated with that track

You can also drag whole directories, multiple files or album clusters onto albums and the tagger will attempt to match the dragged files to the album. Any track that doesn't match up well enough, will be added to an "unmatched files" sub-folder specific to that album. You can drag files out of this folder and into the right slots in the album to fix up the files the tagger couldn't get right.

Once you've matched up your tracks to albums you can select a track or an album and click on the save button to save that track/album. Depending on your settings this may move the track to a new directory and/or rename the track according to its metadata. Take a look at the options dialog to fine tune your settings.

Once you've saved a file, or otherwise want to get rid of a track or album, select the track and click on the delete button in the toolbar.

==Isn't there more to Picard?==

Not yet -- but soon! Picard is actively developed:
* There is a ''beta'' version of [[Picard With Acoustic Fingerprinting|PicardWithAcousticFingerprinting]], which uses [[MusicIP]]s [[PUID]]s.
* We are enhancing the UI to create an [[Intuitive Picard Interface|IntuitivePicardInterface]] (yes, we know the current one sucks).
* Finally Picard will soon get an automatic tagging algorithm called "Data" that should do large parts of the tagging proces for you. See below.

===PUID?===

See [[How PUIDs Work|HowPUIDsWork]]

===Soon: Automated Tagging===

Currently the cluster identification process is completely manual -- in the future Picard will automatically download albums for all the artists it finds during the cluster phase. Picard will then go through the unmatched files and attempt to match them against album information that was downloaded.

But for right now, Picard is a little more 'do it yourself' -- however, I think that Picard will let you tag files ''faster'' than the old tagger -- you just need to get used to the new way of doing things.

Unfortunately, the current version of Picard is also not very user-interface friendly. The tagging/matching/association works well if you have just a few albums, but as soon as you have several hundred clustered albums, dragging them to associate with the TRM identified real album data gets too unwieldly. Future versions of Picard will have a much more [[Intuitive Picard Interface|IntuitivePicardInterface]]. Besides that, though, Picard works great!

===What works Now?===

* Open files into [new files] by double clicking files
* Drag files, and directories into [ Drag tacks to identify here ]
* Drag files into specific album slot to associate file with the track.
* Drag files/dirs onto an album line and picard will auto match tracks to the album. Tracks that don't match the minimal matching threshold, will go into a special[ Unclustered files ] folder that gets created under the album.
* Saving files with move and rename support, with support for UNICODE filenames and tags.
* Remove files/albums
* Cluster unmatched files into album clusters and automatically matching clusters to albums when albums get opened.
* Preference dialog features
* Cover art is shown for albums that match CDs on Amazon.com. The user can click on info and buy links right from the tagger.
* Looking up Audio CDs
* Searching for artists/albums/tracks from the toolbar
* Localized to various languages. See [https://launchpad.net/products/picard/+translations list of translations at Rosetta] for more details.
* Some multi-select support in the album panel.

===What is planned to work in the future?===

The following is a non-exhaustive list of all the things that don't work yet:

General things to fix:
* The edit menu isn't hooked up yet.
* No keyboard shortcuts for drag and drop operations
* All files that have no MB ids in their tags will always end up in the unclustered tracks folder when dropped onto[[new files]] -- use the Cluster button to cluster these unmatched files into album clusters.
* Add Helix Community support by using [[Py Player|PyPlayer]] for music preview and for mp3 decode support.

Album Panel
* Multiple select in the album view works only in a limited fashion

File Browser
* The file details should show up in Local mdata when file clicked
* Files should have appropriate icons

Metadata Information Panel
* The artist and album combo box drop downs do not populate with correct data
* Even though the metadata for a track can be edited, it still can't be saved.

Menus
* The menu is still sparse and needs more items
* The edit menu cut, copy and paste options are not functional yet.
* The application needs (more) context menus.

Browser launching
* For each lookup a new browser window is opened -- the user should have more control over this process.

Platform Specific Issues
* The application has not been tuned for Mac OS X -- wxPython still has some serious bugs that prevent Picard form running well. We'll have to wait for further releases before we can attempt to release a version for Mac OS X.

[[Category:To Be Reviewed]] [[Category:Documentation]] [[Category:WikiDocs Page]] [[Category:Picard]]

Latest revision as of 21:16, 25 November 2014

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