alt Hacker NewsPicard 3.0
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Congrats to Philipp and the guys on the release, and thanks for keeping it alive. I was just looking at the MusicBrainz blog today, went down the history lane. I find it unbelievable that it's 20 years since I took over the project from Rob and did my first release with him.
Oh, this brings back memories...
I was in the Uni in grad school. That one year, the university decided to wire up all dorm rooms with ethernet. And guess what? Everyone's SMB server was wide open.... and in the lab I had access to desktops with massive hard drives, hooked to the university's ethernet. A few scripts using SAMBA was all that was needed to suck up the entire dorm's collection of songs, videos, porn, etc. , running into many GB of data. Then I used Picard to tag the audio files and rearrange them into directories by genre, artist, etc.
Good stuff! I'm excited to check it out. I see a lot of other comments here wondering if others still use this... I like MusicBrainz Picard because it makes it really easy to see everything that's going on at once. View the tags, see changes that will be applied, easily switch between configuration profiles, and easily browse to the recording or release page in MusicBrainz.
The manual workflow might not be for everyone, but it's a fantastic GUI application.
I'll splurge for the boxed set - with hardcopy manual, and community support included !
It's unfortunate that not all of their official plugins were ported before the update was released. I do use a few that aren't available (AcousticBrainz Tags, Wikidata Genre, etc.) and that makes it difficult to choose the update and then missing out on the tags.
EDIT: I installed it on a separate machine, and there is a setting in the wizard called "Fetch detailed track relationships". I'm unsure if that means it will contain AB tags or the Wikidata genres though.
This is awesome. I've been using Picard for years and it's great. I just went through my entire library to add synced lyrics (via plugin) and fix my naming script. The new features for synced lyrics will help a lot in the future.
Welp, looks like it's time to re-rip / re-tag my CD collection at higher quality. Gives me a good reason to dust off some stuff (physically and virtually) that I haven't listened to in a while.
Kudos to the team being able to get a new major release out. Robert would be proud.
I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated.
It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if it scrapes CDs and streaming services. Maybe I'll build it one day.
Love musicbrainz.
Recently me and a bunch of DJs reinvented how we manage metadata for our collections.
The TL;DR is use SQLite for everything. Both a local central database describing the entire catalog, and one “sidecar” database for every song representing its individual metadata.
The huge advantage is it stores metadata that ID3 tags never imagined like beat grids and phrases and cue points.
The other advantage is agents crush manipulating data that is in SQLite. Chatting with my music collection feels better than any music library app did.
Of course tools also import and export to native audio file tags and use the musicbrainz API.
Looking for feedback and other music nerds that want to collaborate on this approach.
https://deadca7.com/blog/deadca7-open-music-database-specifi...
https://data.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/picard/MusicBra... -> 404 Not Found
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Man, I could be wrong, but I would venture to guess that the number of people using this has decreased massively. In my teens and 20s I remember religiously scanning my entire MP3 collection through Picard and also gleefully scanning disc IDs into the database. Haven't used MusicBrainz in over ten years at this point.