Hi all,
I’m looking for something to automatically tag some old music files I have sitting around. I’ve been working with Picard, but a lot of albums are not in MusicBrainz, and adding them has been a serious PITA. Is there any kind of software that either:
- Can apply metadata directly from a streaming service (like this script for adding albums to MusicBrainz does)?
- Can simply allow me to manually edit metadata with an interface that isn’t completely awful to use?
or even:
- Two separate tools, one to grab metadata and another to manually add it (maybe a CLI interface for batch operations?)
Appreciative of any advice—I just hope there’s a better way, with how tedious this can be.
EDIT: Just to specify, I’m on NixOS.
You might want to have a look at https://beets.io
Yet beet is the way to go. Music is so huge, there won’t be a complete database unless it becomes mainstream.
Don’t get me wrong, I use Beets for my entire library, but it doesn’t solve any of the issue OP has. It does not get metadata from streaming sites or anywhere else, but same as Picard from Musibrainz. It does not allow to manually change metadata of music you are importing. On the contrary, for that Picard is the better tool as it allows that.
There are not many advantages of using Beets over Picard, apart from CLI, and especially for the OP use case.
I just installed such a tag editor a few days ago, what a coincidence. I don’t know what operating system you are using, but the one I chose is a graphical tool Kid3 . There is also commandline tool just called id3v2 . Both tools should be in the repositories in your distribution. However, these are Linux only I guess.
Kid3 is okay to me. You can get basic information from the filename into the tags, by specifying format variables like %{track}-%{title} in example and then click “to Tag 2” in example. Opposite is also possible, to rename all files based on the information from the tags. Nothing is changed physically on the files, until you hit the Save button.
Manual Edit: If you want edit a field with same entry for multiple files, then on the left side of the view with the files, just mult select with mouse while holding CTRL or SHIFT key. Then on the right side where the tag editor is, enable one of the entries like “Album” by clicking to show the tick. That means this Album entry will be updated for all selected files. Now type something into the Album field to fill or change it, enter and I guess that’s it.
Import: I did not use this functionality yet, but it has multiple import resources from Amazon, MusicBrainz and other places. The Import options are in the top left menu under “File”.
kid3 can apply metadata based on the filename if that’s useful for you (just things like title and track depending on how you name your files). I also use it for manually editing metadata once in a while, selecting multiple songs and setting the same artist or album tag is pretty easy to do.
I have not tagged music files in a very long time but last I did it was with easytag.
