MusicBrainz Picard/FAQ

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Revision as of 00:35, 25 May 2011 by S01ipsist (talk | contribs) (ID3v2.3 with UTF-16 is now the default ID3 version since 0.14)
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Products > Picard > Picard FAQ

This pages answers frequently asked questions about MusicBrainz Picard.

Using Picard

How do I tag files with Picard?

There is a separate page that explains the tagging process.

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.

I am using Fedora, why doesn't acoustic fingerprinting work?

If you get a crash upon attempting acoustic fingerprinting, this may be because you have not installed the picard-freeworld package from the RPM Fusion repository. This functionality is not contained in the main Fedora picard package because it requires the ffmpeg package which cannot be distributed by Fedora. After enabling the "rpmfusion-free" RPM Fusion repository, install the package using (as root):

yum install picard-freeworld

I'm using Windows Vista or Windows 7, why doesn't drag and drop work?

It's a known problem when running Picard from the installer. Restarting Picard should fix it.

I'm using OS X, where are my network folders or external drives?

These should show up OK in the add file and add folder dialogs, but they aren't visible by default in the file browser pane. If you want to see them in the file browser pane, right click in the pane and select "show hidden files". They should then be visible in the /Volumes folder.

File Formats

What formats does Picard support?

Picard supports 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, however, they 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 before version 0.14, 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. ID3v2.3 with UTF-16 is the default ID3 version since Picard 0.14.

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' &"

Another approach that works in some GNU/Linux systems is the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

This should present you with a list of existing browsers in your system, allowing you to select the one to be the default.