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[AlexS]

Hi

I'm after tips for after a CD rip (no CD available, I'm don't want to go around hunting for them they are among the 1000's stored in my loft, nor do I want to rerip 20 CD's).

Can anybody recommend a third party tagger that just works.

Comments please thanks.

[JimH]

MC's tagging is second to none.

Audio CD's don't have any information stored on them other than the audio.  It's all looked up from an online database.

[AlexS]

I think only (a) is related to this forum, so OK then I'll edit this post and yet again create another thread.

[RoderickGI]

I use MusicBrainz Picard to correctly identify and tag any files I have that I'm unsure about. I have a lot of those because I inherited a large digital collection from my brother, and it wasn't well curated! It is slower but more accurate, using acoustic fingerprints, and lets you properly assign tracks to the correct Album. It saves tags to the files, which MC then picks up during Auto Import, if "Update for external changes" in turned on.

You really should have asked your questions on these last three threads in one thread. There is a lot of crossover. My comment regarding Metadata on CDs on your other thread would make much more sense if all these questions were in one thread.

Oh, PS: MC's tagging is second to none. But the online database, YADB, isn't.

[Absinthe]

I use MusicBrainz Picard to correctly identify and tag any files I have that I'm unsure about. I have a lot of those because I inherited a large digital collection from my brother, and it wasn't well curated! It is slower but more accurate, using acoustic fingerprints, and lets you properly assign tracks to the correct Album. It saves tags to the files, which MC then picks up during Auto Import, if "Update for external changes" in turned on.

You really should have asked your questions on these last three threads in one thread. There is a lot of crossover. My comment regarding Metadata on CDs on your other thread would make much more sense if all these questions were in one thread.

Oh, PS: MC's tagging is second to none. But the online database, YADB, isn't.

Roderick,
I've been playing with MBP the past few days as well.  I have a few obscure classical recordings and CD/DVD disc sets (Time Life) that don't show up on Discogs/AMG or are extremely difficult to find.  Picard has found each one but the process of getting them recognized by Discogs or AMG relies heavily on the Catalog Number.  Unfortunately, the tag containing the catalog number in Picard is "CATALOGNUMBER" and and MC uses "Catalog #"  Is there any quick, elegant way to map the two tags together?  Perhaps edit Picard to save the catalog in an MC field?

[RoderickGI]

Interesting question Absinthe. Thanks for asking, as it has made me confirm the functionality I describe below. I always knew it was there, and should work, but haven't had lots of success until now.

But first, I would have expected MC to already have a mapping from CATALOGNUMBER to [Catalog #], but it seems it does not. I don't know what populates [Catalog #], if anything. That is hidden in code. Maybe JRiver could look at it, and if there isn't any conflict, add the mapping. It may be that there is a mapping already there for movies or something, so audio doesn't have the mapping.

While I don't know of any way for a user to map from an external tag to an existing MC field, you can get the data into MC easily. Just create a new field in MC called CATALOGNUMBER making sure that the name including case matches exactly. You can change the Display Name for the field, but must use the exact same name as the existing tag for the new field. Then just run the "Update Library (from tags)" function for the files you want to update. MC will import the data.
EDIT: Just to be clear, we are talking about the "TXXX (CATALOGNUMBER)" tag in the files.

I created such a field, gave it a Display Name of "Catalogue #" and ran the update for a file I have used MusicBrainz on. The data appeared in my Library no problem. Then in a View where I had both [Catalog #] and [Catalogue #] displayed, I edited [Catalog #] and put "=[CATALOGNUMBER]" into the field, which copied the value from [Catalogue #] to [Catalog #]. I also tested the right-click "Library Tools > Move / Copy Fields" function to do the same thing, which worked fine. This is a multistep process, but it does get the tag values into the existing MC field correctly. It would be best if the values did get into the existing field name, for consistency with other media, but you could also just use the new field directly.

I really think JRiver should look at the mapping though, and add it, unless there are good reasons not to.


PS: I also looked at files I had ripped from CD and hence looked up on YADB, at the Album level. They didn't have any values in [Catalog #] either, which is a bit strange. I would have expected that to be a key piece of data in matching CDs to the YADB records.

[Absinthe]

Thanks for the reply Roderick, your experience seems to mirror my own.  I was successful in picking up the tag from Picard into MC under CATALOGNUMBER as you describe below but never carried it to moving/copying/mirroring it into Catalog #  I use the MCUTils scripts to pull down metadata from AMG and Discogs, so it would be nice if there was a 1:1 mapping of tags from Picard to MC.  In my process, Catalog # is populated from Discogs::Field catalog and then mapped to Catalog # which is a stock MC field.

Similarly, Picard will return the Discogs Release ID and the AMG Album ID which are key fields to scraping accurate data from both services so it would be a great help if these tags would cross over into MC without copy/paste or additional steps.  I really like Picard, but don't feel its necessary for 85-90% of my library where the catalog number is straight forward, or I have easy access to the CD spine label but on some Albums the scan function is a lifesaver.

Perhaps a series of plug-ins for MusicBrainz, AMG, Discogs and whatever other metadata storage source would be a possible solution?  Each plugin could have its own mapping to the stock MC fields.  This would help minimize pulling scads of duplicate data and mapping it to unused library fields.  I find YADB is a good step 1, but to get richer metadata (Artist Bio's, Band Members, Credits, Awards, Original Track Years and so on) really requires multiple sources

I just don't know if there are enough other users out there with similar issues that would warrant such a set of features to accommodate this??