MusicBrainz Picard/Documentation

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MusicBrainz Tagger NG (picard) Documentation

This page discusses the PicardTagger.

Quick start for the impatient

The quick start guide has been moved to its permanent home. If you've never used Picard, before please read the guide or the remainder of the page for it to make sense to you!

Quick Start Guide

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 finished 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 be 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 the the "Unclustered files" folder. In the future the tagger will automatically cluster the files when it is done 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: 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!

Currently the cluster identification process is completely manual -- in the future Picard will automatically download albums for all the artists it found 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 tags file faster than the old tagger -- you just need to get used to the new way of doing things.