Man, I could be wrong, but I would venture to guess that the number of people using this has decreased massively. In my teens and 20s I remember religiously scanning my entire MP3 collection through Picard and also gleefully scanning disc IDs into the database. Haven't used MusicBrainz in over ten years at this point.
Anecdotally - I, and several people I know, have independently started using CDs, Soulseek and Bandcamp to rebuild personal audio collections after becoming annoyed with streaming apps. LLMs have really helped organizing and tagging music efficiently.
Yeah I'm switching from Spotify to building my library manually now. I like having the full control, personal choice of music app/client for each platform I listen on, the ability to individually adjust tracks to my personal liking (some songs need manual ReplayGain adjustments to sound correct), being able to have my favorite albums be in FLAC and the rest be good quality Vorbis... it's all just better, except for discoverability. I've found so much good music through Spotify's algorithms that I probably never would have found otherwise. I wish a good FOSS alternative for that existed.
I got back into it around a year ago, highly recommend. Very refreshing to experience parts of the old world that have survived like soulseek and torrents again.
hell yeah im doing similar! it's been a lot of fun so far. My review agent has a very large backlog, but MusicBrainz + AcoustID have been super helpful for figuring metadata tags etc.
I am doing the same. I started to connect my agent to beets db. Actually would be quite I interested in some clean-up skills. I actually started to go to the local library again to add to my music collection (at least in my jurisdiction you can do private copies of non DRM content)
Could you provide more details about your LLM + Beets setup? I've been thinking of doing something similar and figured Beets could help me organize the random piles of MP3s I have scattered around my drives, but I don't want to manually correct the ambiguities from incorrect tagging.
I just started around messing with opencode and beets cli. No MCP, no real skills etc.. Worked reasonably well on some retagging, better dir layout. Nothing special. Probably could also done it without an agent. I still fail to clean up some ripped apart compilations, etc. (Partially due to premature re-sorting). Trying to figure out the human oversight part. My goal was also doing a sensible genre and other semantic description over the whole collection to enable RAG style playlists, but I guess one also has to have a decent plan for such things. I was actually hoping there was already more out there.
Multiple artists, genres, moods all behave different for each player. I hate thinking about tagging music.
Can't say I've had a good experience with picard either. Too many versions for many songs means tags can be anything if you leave it alone and do its thing
I did a full circle and finally self-host navidrome (since this year)
It's a funny feeling - after paying for streaming services for years you realize you barely supported any artists and do not own anything at the same time
Congrats to Philipp and the guys on the release, and thanks for keeping it alive. I was just looking at the MusicBrainz blog today, went down the history lane. I find it unbelievable that it's 20 years since I took over the project from Rob and did my first release with him.
I was in the Uni in grad school. That one year, the university decided to wire up all dorm rooms with ethernet. And guess what? Everyone's SMB server was wide open.... and in the lab I had access to desktops with massive hard drives, hooked to the university's ethernet. A few scripts using SAMBA was all that was needed to suck up the entire dorm's collection of songs, videos, porn, etc. , running into many GB of data. Then I used Picard to tag the audio files and rearrange them into directories by genre, artist, etc.
Good stuff! I'm excited to check it out. I see a lot of other comments here wondering if others still use this... I like MusicBrainz Picard because it makes it really easy to see everything that's going on at once. View the tags, see changes that will be applied, easily switch between configuration profiles, and easily browse to the recording or release page in MusicBrainz.
The manual workflow might not be for everyone, but it's a fantastic GUI application.
It's unfortunate that not all of their official plugins were ported before the update was released. I do use a few that aren't available (AcousticBrainz Tags, Wikidata Genre, etc.) and that makes it difficult to choose the update and then missing out on the tags.
EDIT: I installed it on a separate machine, and there is a setting in the wizard called "Fetch detailed track relationships". I'm unsure if that means it will contain AB tags or the Wikidata genres though.
Welp, looks like it's time to re-rip / re-tag my CD collection at higher quality. Gives me a good reason to dust off some stuff (physically and virtually) that I haven't listened to in a while.
I've got a large, local library in Apple Music—the application, not the service, they need a naming czar—amassed over decades of purchases. The auto-lookup from iTunes/Music is fine, but I find a real joy in having correct metadata. All those mix CDs from high school!
I care less about high-quality album art than Apple execs do, I think, and I likewise don't bother too much with all the meta tags, but it's surprising how often the CDDB or Gracenotes or whatever Music.app uses are wrong, have typos, miss information, etc. I scrobble listens, so it's a natural progression for anything new or clearly wrong.
I think of it like tending a garden, and find it quite peaceful. It's clearly not for Regular People™ like so much else here. Every other person in my life is happy with "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Track 2" or just using a streaming service.
Picard was extremely useful to me when I decided to put all my audio on a streaming server in a local container (Navidrome). I used it extensively about five months ago. I find MP3 tags (and all the various formats and syntax) a nightmare usually but this was bearable. Picard was great.
I just recently went through my whole library with Picard and it worked well while the UI was definitely geared for power users. Really happy with the end result.
There was one UX papercut that ended up messing some data on tracks that I had to correct later: fields with multiple values, like "Artists", show the multiple values like "Beats and Styles; Toni W.". But the field in the UI is also editable as a text field, and if you manually write that with the semicolon, it stores one artist with the semicolon included! It took me a while to realise that I can right click to open an editor where multiple values can be entered and edited separately.
I've used it to successfully organize my messy library of (then) 50 thousands songs back in 2014. It's great if you can wrap your head around the weird ass workflow.
The plugins/extensions have also been proving quite useful, there are now quite a lot more available and useful ones. I've managed to incorporate some into my workflow.
I am. As the other commenter mentioned the workflow is very odd, and the UX of the app could do with massive improvements (haven't checked V3 yet), but it does a good job and I'm grateful to the devs for it.
2. Even when you do import a full album, it often struggles to match tracks. Here's part of a transcript I saved:
Match (29.3%):
StarSystems - Lift
≠ artist, album, tracks, unmatched tracks
MusicBrainz, CD-R, 2019, GB, None, None, None
https://musicbrainz.org/release/7c68b7ff-27c0-4da7-8430-d4228c6f6ff8
≠ Artist: -> StarSystems
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Arrival [2238026155].mp3 (1:08) -> (#1) Arrival (1:08)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Slipstream [1268364723].mp3 (6:23) -> (#2) Flower (6:25)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Trigger Fish [1805252711].mp3 (5:06) -> (#3) Party Time (5:03)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Moth [857985311].mp3 (4:51) -> (#4) Moth (4:51)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Vortex [1717930774].mp3 (5:38) -> (#5) Vortex (5:38)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Flower [3129604796].mp3 (6:25) -> (#6) Slipstream (6:23)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Party Time [545976708].mp3 (5:03) -> (#7) Trigger Fish (5:06)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Lift (feat. Jordan Rudess) [3330158657].mp3 (8:09) -> (#8) Lift (feat. Jordan Rudess) (8:09)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Disengage [526901544].mp3 (2:01) -> (#9) Disengage (2:01)
Unmatched tracks (1):
! (#0) (5:06)
Apply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,
Rescan directory, Enter search, enter Id, aBort?
Look at tracks #2, #3, #6, #7. Why is it trying to switch the names around, even though the original name + length is right, and the new name + length is wrong?
Picard has worked flawlessly for me so far, it's just a shame it can't be automated.
This is awesome. I've been using Picard for years and it's great. I just went through my entire library to add synced lyrics (via plugin) and fix my naming script. The new features for synced lyrics will help a lot in the future.
Recently me and a bunch of DJs reinvented how we manage metadata for our collections.
The TL;DR is use SQLite for everything. Both a local central database describing the entire catalog, and one “sidecar” database for every song representing its individual metadata.
The huge advantage is it stores metadata that ID3 tags never imagined like beat grids and phrases and cue points.
The other advantage is agents crush manipulating data that is in SQLite. Chatting with my music collection feels better than any music library app did.
Of course tools also import and export to native audio file tags and use the musicbrainz API.
Looking for feedback and other music nerds that want to collaborate on this approach.
This is interesting, thanks for sharing. It looks like all the hamburger menu links are leading to a 404 for me on mobile though (didn’t try desktop).
Does the “analysis” tab in this app imply that this software does its own cdj compliant beatgrid and phrase/key analysis? If so, do you find it works better than Rekordbox?
I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated.
It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if it scrapes CDs and streaming services. Maybe I'll build it one day.
I'm personally a fan of the tagging being a separate explicit action, it suits my flows at least: Download to staging folder -> Picard (tags, grabs artwork, normalises file names, I intervene where needed) -> automatic transfer to streaming server when it's finished.
Tons of people have scripted Beets to autotag music as they're downloaded or appear in a directory though. So in that sense it's an automatic, non-manual workflow
Ehhhh, people are specific about their albums. I recently used this auto tagger and it would tag a song in a strange album. Like song Ocean Avenue from Yellowcard was not from their album Yellowcard but some compilation album that I had never heard of.
Man, I could be wrong, but I would venture to guess that the number of people using this has decreased massively. In my teens and 20s I remember religiously scanning my entire MP3 collection through Picard and also gleefully scanning disc IDs into the database. Haven't used MusicBrainz in over ten years at this point.
Anecdotally - I, and several people I know, have independently started using CDs, Soulseek and Bandcamp to rebuild personal audio collections after becoming annoyed with streaming apps. LLMs have really helped organizing and tagging music efficiently.
Yeah I'm switching from Spotify to building my library manually now. I like having the full control, personal choice of music app/client for each platform I listen on, the ability to individually adjust tracks to my personal liking (some songs need manual ReplayGain adjustments to sound correct), being able to have my favorite albums be in FLAC and the rest be good quality Vorbis... it's all just better, except for discoverability. I've found so much good music through Spotify's algorithms that I probably never would have found otherwise. I wish a good FOSS alternative for that existed.
I got back into it around a year ago, highly recommend. Very refreshing to experience parts of the old world that have survived like soulseek and torrents again.
hell yeah im doing similar! it's been a lot of fun so far. My review agent has a very large backlog, but MusicBrainz + AcoustID have been super helpful for figuring metadata tags etc.
https://github.com/accraze/musiclib-agent
I am doing the same. I started to connect my agent to beets db. Actually would be quite I interested in some clean-up skills. I actually started to go to the local library again to add to my music collection (at least in my jurisdiction you can do private copies of non DRM content)
Could you provide more details about your LLM + Beets setup? I've been thinking of doing something similar and figured Beets could help me organize the random piles of MP3s I have scattered around my drives, but I don't want to manually correct the ambiguities from incorrect tagging.
I just started around messing with opencode and beets cli. No MCP, no real skills etc.. Worked reasonably well on some retagging, better dir layout. Nothing special. Probably could also done it without an agent. I still fail to clean up some ripped apart compilations, etc. (Partially due to premature re-sorting). Trying to figure out the human oversight part. My goal was also doing a sensible genre and other semantic description over the whole collection to enable RAG style playlists, but I guess one also has to have a decent plan for such things. I was actually hoping there was already more out there.
If tagging music wasn't so ass I would do it.
Multiple artists, genres, moods all behave different for each player. I hate thinking about tagging music.
Can't say I've had a good experience with picard either. Too many versions for many songs means tags can be anything if you leave it alone and do its thing
A lot of people never stopped and never used streaming services. I very rarely come across releases that don't already exist on MusicBrainz.
Yeah it has been 10 years for me too. But yesterday I downloaded the RC to have my ChatGPT Agent run through my catalog and normalize everything.
Time to pull up Bandcamp and Soulseek and keep adding to my collection.
I did a full circle and finally self-host navidrome (since this year)
It's a funny feeling - after paying for streaming services for years you realize you barely supported any artists and do not own anything at the same time
Same. Also reminds me of similar apps I used heavily and all of it vanished with the rise of streaming platforms
I'm still using MediaMonkey for my collection.
Congrats to Philipp and the guys on the release, and thanks for keeping it alive. I was just looking at the MusicBrainz blog today, went down the history lane. I find it unbelievable that it's 20 years since I took over the project from Rob and did my first release with him.
just looked Rob up and learned he passed away earlier this year, sad
it was good to work with you guys back in 2011-2012
Rob was such a cool guy. He showed me how to run a still made from a pressure cooker, some copper tubing, and a garden hose.
I'll splurge for the boxed set - with hardcopy manual, and community support included !
That 90’s CD-ROM vibe you like is coming back in style!
Oh, this brings back memories...
I was in the Uni in grad school. That one year, the university decided to wire up all dorm rooms with ethernet. And guess what? Everyone's SMB server was wide open.... and in the lab I had access to desktops with massive hard drives, hooked to the university's ethernet. A few scripts using SAMBA was all that was needed to suck up the entire dorm's collection of songs, videos, porn, etc. , running into many GB of data. Then I used Picard to tag the audio files and rearrange them into directories by genre, artist, etc.
Good stuff! I'm excited to check it out. I see a lot of other comments here wondering if others still use this... I like MusicBrainz Picard because it makes it really easy to see everything that's going on at once. View the tags, see changes that will be applied, easily switch between configuration profiles, and easily browse to the recording or release page in MusicBrainz.
The manual workflow might not be for everyone, but it's a fantastic GUI application.
It's unfortunate that not all of their official plugins were ported before the update was released. I do use a few that aren't available (AcousticBrainz Tags, Wikidata Genre, etc.) and that makes it difficult to choose the update and then missing out on the tags.
EDIT: I installed it on a separate machine, and there is a setting in the wizard called "Fetch detailed track relationships". I'm unsure if that means it will contain AB tags or the Wikidata genres though.
Kudos to the team being able to get a new major release out. Robert would be proud.
Welp, looks like it's time to re-rip / re-tag my CD collection at higher quality. Gives me a good reason to dust off some stuff (physically and virtually) that I haven't listened to in a while.
Anyone here still using this?
Absolutely!
I've got a large, local library in Apple Music—the application, not the service, they need a naming czar—amassed over decades of purchases. The auto-lookup from iTunes/Music is fine, but I find a real joy in having correct metadata. All those mix CDs from high school!
I care less about high-quality album art than Apple execs do, I think, and I likewise don't bother too much with all the meta tags, but it's surprising how often the CDDB or Gracenotes or whatever Music.app uses are wrong, have typos, miss information, etc. I scrobble listens, so it's a natural progression for anything new or clearly wrong.
I think of it like tending a garden, and find it quite peaceful. It's clearly not for Regular People™ like so much else here. Every other person in my life is happy with "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Track 2" or just using a streaming service.
Picard was extremely useful to me when I decided to put all my audio on a streaming server in a local container (Navidrome). I used it extensively about five months ago. I find MP3 tags (and all the various formats and syntax) a nightmare usually but this was bearable. Picard was great.
I just recently went through my whole library with Picard and it worked well while the UI was definitely geared for power users. Really happy with the end result.
There was one UX papercut that ended up messing some data on tracks that I had to correct later: fields with multiple values, like "Artists", show the multiple values like "Beats and Styles; Toni W.". But the field in the UI is also editable as a text field, and if you manually write that with the semicolon, it stores one artist with the semicolon included! It took me a while to realise that I can right click to open an editor where multiple values can be entered and edited separately.
I've used it to successfully organize my messy library of (then) 50 thousands songs back in 2014. It's great if you can wrap your head around the weird ass workflow.
The plugins/extensions have also been proving quite useful, there are now quite a lot more available and useful ones. I've managed to incorporate some into my workflow.
When I get back to organizing my Bandcamp downloads, I do: what I set years ago still works
I am. As the other commenter mentioned the workflow is very odd, and the UX of the app could do with massive improvements (haven't checked V3 yet), but it does a good job and I'm grateful to the devs for it.
What other options are there? Genuinely curious about what else exists
I use beets and it works well for me: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
I'll second this. beets is excellent.
I wanted to love beets as I prefer the CLI, but it just seemed very finicky for me.
1. Tagging doesn't work if you don't import every song in an album at once (see https://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder/comments/1j0wnbz/need_... and dev comments on https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/5014)
2. Even when you do import a full album, it often struggles to match tracks. Here's part of a transcript I saved:
Look at tracks #2, #3, #6, #7. Why is it trying to switch the names around, even though the original name + length is right, and the new name + length is wrong?Picard has worked flawlessly for me so far, it's just a shame it can't be automated.
Ah, yeah — it was a rough process when I moved my library to it, but I have a rather involved workflow around it https://www.coryd.dev/posts/2026/expanding-my-music-pipeline
This is awesome. I've been using Picard for years and it's great. I just went through my entire library to add synced lyrics (via plugin) and fix my naming script. The new features for synced lyrics will help a lot in the future.
Love musicbrainz.
Recently me and a bunch of DJs reinvented how we manage metadata for our collections.
The TL;DR is use SQLite for everything. Both a local central database describing the entire catalog, and one “sidecar” database for every song representing its individual metadata.
The huge advantage is it stores metadata that ID3 tags never imagined like beat grids and phrases and cue points.
The other advantage is agents crush manipulating data that is in SQLite. Chatting with my music collection feels better than any music library app did.
Of course tools also import and export to native audio file tags and use the musicbrainz API.
Looking for feedback and other music nerds that want to collaborate on this approach.
https://deadca7.com/blog/deadca7-open-music-database-specifi...
This is interesting, thanks for sharing. It looks like all the hamburger menu links are leading to a 404 for me on mobile though (didn’t try desktop).
Does the “analysis” tab in this app imply that this software does its own cdj compliant beatgrid and phrase/key analysis? If so, do you find it works better than Rekordbox?
This is great, but what dj software do you use that supports this format? Mixxx would be the obvious first candidate I guess.
And what are the chances that one of the big names (primarily Pioneer) take up something like that?
I love MusicBrainz for everything they did but I don't think using a tagger as a separate program you have to open and point to a file is good UX, even if the tag lookup is fully automated.
It should be a daemon that auto tags all new files in the background and only prompts you when there's a problem. And if it finds a new song with metadata that's not in the database you get the option to upload it. Even better if it scrapes CDs and streaming services. Maybe I'll build it one day.
I'm personally a fan of the tagging being a separate explicit action, it suits my flows at least: Download to staging folder -> Picard (tags, grabs artwork, normalises file names, I intervene where needed) -> automatic transfer to streaming server when it's finished.
> Maybe I'll build it one day.
Someone beet you to it [1]
1. https://beets.io/
Beets isn't a daemon like GP asked for. You have to import files manually.
Tons of people have scripted Beets to autotag music as they're downloaded or appear in a directory though. So in that sense it's an automatic, non-manual workflow
I have it tag, convert FLAC to mp3 before importing to Navidrome and moving the FLAC to an archive.
Ehhhh, people are specific about their albums. I recently used this auto tagger and it would tag a song in a strange album. Like song Ocean Avenue from Yellowcard was not from their album Yellowcard but some compilation album that I had never heard of.
https://data.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/picard/MusicBra... -> 404 Not Found
[dead]