Link parkin’: Musicbrainz Picard
Picard is a cross-platform music tagger powered by the MusicBrainz database.
Picard helps you organize your music collection by renaming your music files and sorting them into a folder structure exactly the way you want it. A variety of plugins are available and you can even write your own. Picard supports a wide range of audio formats and can also lookup an entire CD for you.
During my completist phase of gathering the Fabric and
FabricLive digital releases, I wound up with a bunch of .wav
files. These files had no metadata, which makes for a crappy playback
experience. I had been mucking around trying to pull something
together using Discogs data and ffmpeg. Things got complex
way too fast.
So I start digging around for MP3 taggers looking especially at some of the commercial ones for macOS. Google happened to turn up Picard. I was a bit skeptical since open source apps and commercial music data haven’t worked well for me in the past.
Man was I wrong! Picard so far is really good. I’m actually impressed how well it’s handled metadata for the mix CDs I’ve thrown at it. The Musicbrainz metadata repository hasn’t been stumped, Picard lines up data and tracks well, and updating tags is just a button push. Bonus, cover art gets added properly as well.
Now to be about cleaning up a big pile of mixes recently and not so recently acquired.