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MUSICBRAINZ PICARD IMPORT ALBUM FULL
I set “Move additional files” to be “*.jpg *.png *.pdf” (so it will move album covers and liner notes when I move a track - notice this means you should not try to move a file out of Downloads directly with Picard - it will end up moving whatever random jpgs and pdfs you have in your downloads folder.) I’m going to make a full copy of my music library into a folder called “to-sort” and open this in Picard, and every time I save a file in Picard, I want it to move it to the destination directory “music” (ultimately we want this “music” directory to be the one that Navidrome reads from, so ideally this is a network share on the device we’re going to run navidrome on). Under “File Naming” I selected “Move files when saving” and “Move additional files”. Most of my music was purchased on iTunes, but I have some very old MP3s from the pre-iTunes days which don’t have any metadata, so I can use Picard to look them up based on their music fingerprint, similar to how apps like SoundHound or Shazam work. Under “Fingerprinting” I clicked on the “Get API Key…”. Under “Cover Art”, I enabled “Embed cover images into tags” and “Save cover images as separate files” (lots of apps like to see a “cover.jpg” file in the save folder as the album) and then I checked all the “Cover Art Providers”. Under “Metadata”, check “Translate artist names to this locale where possible” (I have some Japanese artists in my collection, such as Yoko Kanno, and while I can recognize their Japanese names in context, I wouldn’t want to try to type one into a searchbox.) This would be a really good time to make a backup of your whole music library.
MUSICBRAINZ PICARD IMPORT ALBUM SOFTWARE
Backupīefore we start, we’re using some software which is going to automatically overwrite data in files and move files around on disk. MusicBrainz Picard has a nice UI and is pretty easy to use. Beets is very popular program for this, but it’s not being actively maintained. What we want is some automated way of fixing all this metadata, and sorting files into the correct folder based on their metadata. There’s probably some spelling mistakes in there, and maybe you have some files where the artist is “Blink 182” and some are “blink-182” - things like this. If you have a large music collection, you probably have some old songs in there you ripped from CDs, and they might have some metadata that’s not quite up-to-snuff. I’ve spent some time playing with a couple of different tools for organizing my MP3 collection.
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