Showing posts with label Music Brainz Picard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music Brainz Picard. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Tagging audio files using Music Brainz Picard- Some more examples

Here are some more screen shots to illustrate identifying music files by use of an acoustic fingerprint, and adding tag information, using Music Brainz Picard.
I've added a folder containing 19 music files which are not tagged with meta-information- album, artist, track etc.- and used the scan button to have Music Brainz Picard check the acoustic fingerprints of the tracks against its database. The application has suggested four possible album matches:


The first suggestion is actually the album I'd ripped to MP3.


The complete green bars indicate a match with high confidence; the incomplete green bars a slightly less confident match, and the incomplete orange bar (track 16) a tentative match. (As we saw in the previous post, matches with low confidence are shown by a red bar.)
There are three tracks (5, 15 & 19) for which the application has not found a matching file. If we select this album and save, the corresponding files will not have their tag information added. We need to tell the application that three of our files in the added folder correspond with these tracks- we'll either find them in the unmatched files, or in the three other album suggestions.
In this case, my unidentified album was a soundtrack, which included tracks originally found on other albums, so it won't be surprising if Music Brainz Picard thinks they belong on another CD.
Here is our missing track 19, track 18 on another CD: we need to drag and drop it to track 19 on the first CD suggestion.


Here is our missing track 5: again we need to drag and drop it onto track 5 in the first CD suggestion.


And here is our missing track 15: drag and drop to the first CD suggestion as before.


In this example, Music Brainz Picard had correctly identified all the tracks, but understandably not been able to tell which CD the tracks were from.
It's also possible to see the acoustic identification completely misidentify a track, it which case it's again necessary to manually drag the misidentified file to the correct CD suggestion, and drop it on the correct track number.
(If there is a way to tell Music Brainz Picard "this suggestion is the correct album, and all my files belong to that album, in the order that they appear as files in the folder", then I haven't found it. If anybody knows better, or can simply or clarify the instructions given, please leave a comment.
Update: Forgot to RTFM.
You can drag whole directories, multiple files or album clusters onto albums and Picard will attempt to match the dragged files to the album. Any track that doesn't match up well enough, will be added to an "Unmatched Files" sub-folder specific to that album. You can drag files out of this folder and into the right slots in the album to fix up the files that Picard couldn't get right.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Tagging audio files using Music Brainz Picard

As described in the previous post, I recently converted some audio files from the FLAC format to MP3 using Sound Converter. Now sound converter is very clever, and when it converts files with no tags, it goes online to look for the appropriate information: album, artist, title etc. As far as I can work out, (see a previous post), it does this using a discid calculated from track lengths and an online database of CD discid's.
For several of my CD folders, Sound Converter correctly added MP3 tag information (although it left the files without meaningful filenames). Other folder it could not identify, and I had to use a different system of file identification, an acoustic fingerprint, and a different application Music Brainz Picard (which can also take care of the file name issue, renaming files according to the track name*).
It took me a while previously to work out how to use Music Brainz Picard, and when I cam to use it again, I realised I forgotten what I'd learnt, so I thought I'd write a short tutorial.
The first step is to add a folder containing tracks you want to identify from the menu.


The unidentified tracks should appear as unmatched files.


[Update: Anonymous has commented that it would be more efficient to use the Cluster and Lookup features here first- see comment for details.]
I can then select the unmatched files and use the Scan option from the menu, which will create an acoustic fingerprint and check it against the Music Brainz database. Suggested matches will appear in the right-hand window. In this case, there are only two hits- the red bars show that the confidence in a match is low, but the result is correct.

In the case of a more certain match, the bars will be green. If the track appears on more than one album, or the acoustic fingerprint created matches more than one track, alternative album or track suggestions will be displayed.
This is where some manual work comes in- I have to drag the unmatched file to the appropriate track (on the appropriate album, if applicable). (In the case of mismatched files, I have to drag those from the wrongly suggested album to the correct album.)
[Update: From reading the Music Brainz Picard documentation, it seems I can drag all of my unmatched files and drop them on the identified album, and Music Brainz Picard will attempt to sort them out.]
Note: If I click Save above, Music Brainz Picard will only add tag information for two tracks in the folder. I have to do some dragging and dropping:

Now I have matched all the tracks, I can click Save.

The correct tags have been appended to my files. (To change the file names to something more meaningful, select Options>Rename Files.)
In the event that acoustic fingerprinting can't suggest an album match, enter album, artist or track details and click the search icon. This will open a web page in your default browser. Check the suggested hits and click the green Tagger button to return details to Music Brainz Picard.

* To change file names to match tag information, select a folder and use the Lookup button to match tag information against Music Brainz Picard's database, select Options>Rename Files and save.)
Update: More example screen shots in this post.