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:

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

or even:

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.

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[–] vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month 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.