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:

  1. Can apply metadata directly from a streaming service (like this script for adding albums to MusicBrainz does)?
  2. Can simply allow me to manually edit metadata with an interface that isn’t completely awful to use?

or even:

  1. 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.

  • Blastboom Strice@mander.xyz
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I haven't tried, but if you're on linux you could try puddletag. OneTagger is very powerfull too (and cross platform). I also have some extra tools that may help you in this guide I made here (it's a guide on how to semi-automatically download and tag music, for a windows pc).

  • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
    ·
    2 months ago

    Sorry to hijack the thread, but does anyone known a terminal tool I can use to auto-tag the odd album when I find one with bad tags?

    Music is stored on the server and served read only, so gui tools are not convinient.

    Picard is great, but gui.

    • nelsnelson [comrade/them, love/loves]
      ·
      2 months ago

      I use beets for that.

      https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/main.html

      It's a bit of a learning curve, though.

      But I have developed a nice little README to remind myself how to do the basics.

      It's better than using a crappy GUI, or paying for something I will only ever use rarely.

      • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Well I looked at beats over a decade ago and it wasn't handling extra files that came with albums correctly (pdfs, jpgs etc).

        That bug is still present all this time later: https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/111

        • nelsnelson [comrade/them, love/loves]
          ·
          2 months ago

          Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if the maintainer would be willing to accept a PR to fix.

          That sounds like something I would enjoy doing for software that I personally enjoy using free of charge, and I love writing Python code.