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[How-To] Organize Your Music Files and Tag Them Automatically
about Computing on 27/07/2008 - like it?

I’m a music buff.Music surrounds me all time time, whether its listening to it from my laptop or from my P1i. My music collection though isn’t as large as some other people’s, regardless I’d like to keep it organized. While re-organizing my music files, I realized that a huge chunk of my files were badly tagged, and erroneously named. So I set about searching for a software which can automatically tag and rename my files, and I found MusicBrainz Picard Tagger.

So what is MusicBrainz? The wiki states

MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the Artist name, the release title, and the list of tracks that appear on a release. MusicBrainz collects this information about recordings and makes it available to the public.

Picard tagger is a software which makes use of MusicBrainz database.

Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track/file oriented like the ClassicTagger was. Picard is written in Python, which is a cross-platform language, and makes use of cross-platform libraries – this allows the same code to run both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Picard Tagger is a powerful, but the interface is a bit confusing for first time usage, and hence I thought I’ll write this small how-to.

Picard tagger has a 3-pane interface, the left pane is the File browser/manager, the middle pane shows the files which haven’t been identified, and the right pane is for files which have been identified and tagged. In case you’re seeing only a 2-pane interface, click on View –> File Browser.

Now, from the file browser drag and drop the files you want to be identified and tagged. The files will be grouped under “Unmatched files”. Click on the cluster button to cluster them according to to albums.

Next, click on the folder and click on Lookup or Scan button. Picard Tagger will contact the MusicBrainz database and list all the albums and the tracks will have an icon next to them, indicating how much of a match it is.

Now if you’ve got your music from multiple sources(you know, *ahem*) then its possible that looking up will bring up multiple albums, so just drag and drop the tracks to the relevant albums.

This isn’t necessary, though, and you can skip this and just click on Save.

And that’s it’s it! The tags are saved.

Picard tagger is also extensible, you can use plugins to extend its capability. One of the must-have plugins is the cover art downloader. By this plugin you can not only embed the cover art within the tag, but also save the cover art as a separate file. Just click on Options –> Options –> Cover Art –> and ensure “Embed Cover Images into Tags” and “Save cover images as files” is checked. Windows Media Player 11 users would want to enter “folder” as the file name, else WMP won’t detect the CoverArt.

Besides tagging, Picard can also rename files based on the tags. For this Click on Options –> Rename. You can also change the filename structure, for this Click on Options –> Options –> File Naming and change the structure there.

Hope this post was helpful.

Here are the download Links:

MusicBrainz Picard Tagger: Windows / *Nix / Mac OS X

Cover Art Downloader Plugin

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Tags: CoverArt, ID3, music, MusicBrainz, MusicBrainz Picard, organizing, Picard, tags

Ah, thanx for the info!

I’ve been manually editing and managing tags for things. some have really messed up info and longlong back I used iCoverArt and it totally messed up the art for most of the collection, eventhough I manually removed the art for most files it comes back for some reason.

Hope this fixes the problem!

It would have been lot better if the last.fm thing had a tag editor like this. I usually see the info on last.fm and change coverart by downloading from there

Lovingly written by Reeteshinator on 27/07/2008

Wow thanks….. this is what i needed
downloading all those now
thanks a bunch again

Lovingly written by unitechy on 27/07/2008

The last.fm app is just a scrobbler. I’ve been using Picard for a while, meant to do this post lot earlier, time constraints means I couldn’t. Also I rewrote this article Windows Live Writer ate my original post

Lovingly written by Sathya on 27/07/2008

@Appy Welcome!

Lovingly written by Sathya on 27/07/2008

Hmmm. Will give this a try, I have been using Winamp 5’s auto-tagger feature, will give this a shot too. Thank you for sharing.

WLW never eats your posts, it has a default auto-saver after every 2 minutes and the saved post can be retrieved from the drafts menu.

Lovingly written by Manan on 27/07/2008

@Manan. WLW did eat my post. Did I mention it was a SAVED draft? I clicked on the draft and poof! It was overwritten by a blank one

Lovingly written by Sathya on 27/07/2008

Yeah i know last.fm is just a scrobbler :roll: , I was just suggesting that, if last.fm had a nice tag editing tool/add-on, then it would be great.

Last.fm has a very good database already with info on almost everything I have.

A new user-based community mDB will take quite sometime to come to a level of info as much as last.fm has.thats what I meant in the first reply.

But yeah I said that when I read it.. looking at the webpage it seems to have 6m tracks listed and many artists too, so I dont think not finding proper tags could be rare

Lovingly written by Reeteshinator on 27/07/2008

Thanks Sathya…Great article.
I like the way you have explained all this.

Lovingly written by Harshad on 27/07/2008

Gonna give this a try now, thanks to a music collection that I downloaded not having been tagged properly. I hate badly tagged songs.

Will keep you tweeps updated.

Lovingly written by Santosh on 03/08/2008

Psst.. Where the heck do you save the plugin?

Lovingly written by Santosh on 03/08/2008

@Santosh

After downloading a script, Open Amarok and then

Tool -> scripts manager -> Install Script

browse and locate it

Lovingly written by Reeteshinator on 03/08/2008

@reetesh you got confused with Amarok scripts!

@Santosh put the plugin under plugins folder where Picard is installed

Lovingly written by Sathya on 03/08/2008

now how did that happen!

I had to put the plugins to
“~/.config/MusicBrainz/Picard/plugins”

in-case someone here is a linux user

Lovingly written by Reeteshinator on 03/08/2008

@Reeteshinator I’m waiting for the Win32 version of Amarok. Linux can wait until I repartition my HDDs again.

@Sathya There wasn’t any ‘plugins’ directory in the software’s folder. So created one and then copied the file there. Activated the plugin from within MBP. Works like a charm. Thanks!

Lovingly written by Santosh on 03/08/2008

Sathya,
I’m back at last.fm since, i got JetAudio working with it.

Thanks a ton for this.
Definitely Useful

Lovingly written by Aravind on 07/08/2008

@Santosh Glad to know it helped

@Aravind welcome

Lovingly written by Sathya on 07/08/2008

Ah, finally used the thing on Windows too, and its working like a charm.. was having some “Cannot write into file” error in Linux.

Sadly.. most of the things I need the covert-art and details for. dont exist in that too..
so I will have to resort to just copy pasting from Last.fm for those too!

Lovingly written by Reeteshinator on 14/08/2008

@krist0ph3r @NerdIndian http://lin.cr/8yl

Lovingly written by Sathya on 02/05/2009

@akshayb94 http://lin.cr/8yl

Lovingly written by Sathya on 12/02/2010

@kv @vsr MusicBrainz Picard works well too http://lin.cr/8yl

Lovingly written by Sathya on 12/02/2010

Thanks for this , man… will do it today and let you know how it goes

Lovingly written by Akshay on 13/02/2010

Started doing it and its going great… hope to be finished till tomorrow.
P.S. : I like the ‘lovingly written by’ thing in the comments… would look damn funny if anyone was ranting in a comment and it was written ‘lovingly written by’

Lovingly written by Akshay on 13/02/2010