MusicBrainz Picard/FAQ

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Products > Picard > Picard FAQ

This pages answers frequently asked questions about Picard.

How do I use Picard?

See:

File Formats

What formats does Picard support?

MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP4, Musepack, WavPack, Speex, The True Audio and Windows Media Audio. WAVs cannot be tagged due to the lack of a standard for doing so; but can be fingerprinted and renamed.

What formats will Picard support?

Picard is intended to eventually support all formats (including fingerprinting), but this is a complex process, and will take some time.

Which tags can Picard write to my files?

See Picard Tags for information on which MusicBrainz fields get written to tags by Picard.

Configuration

I tagged a file in Picard, but iTunes is not seeing the tags!

Firstly, you need to force iTunes to re-read the information from your tags and update its library. This is discussed in the iTunes Guide.

Additionally, iTunes has a known bug in its ID3v2.4 implementation, which makes it unable to read such tags if they contain also embedded cover art. As a work-around, you can configure Picard to write ID3v2.3 tags.

My tags are truncated to 30 characters in Windows Media Player!

Picard, by default, writes ID3v2.4 and ID3v1 tags to files. WMP can't read ID3v2.4, so it falls back to ID3v1 which has a limitation of 30 characters per title. You can configure Picard to write ID3v2.3 tags and WMP will be able to read them correctly.

How do I tell Picard which browser to use?

On Windows, GNOME and KDE, Picard uses the standard browser for these systems. On other systems, you can use the BROWSER environment variable.

For example:

export BROWSER="firefox '%s' &"

Miscellaneous

The green "Tagger" icon has disappeared from MusicBrainz.org, how do I get it back?

This icon shows up when a manual lookup is performed via Picard (using the bottom "Lookup" button).

Alternatively the parameter ?tport=8000 can be added to the end of almost any MusicBrainz URL and the green tagger icons will continue to show up from then on.