Your music library and MusicBrainz Picard

With all the steaming services available why have your own digital music library? The reason for this is two-fold. First streaming services like Spotify or Deezer have a constant changing library of music as a consequence of the agreements that they make with rights holders. This means that music in your playlist can suddenly disappear (or being greyed out) or, what happened to me, explicit songs are being replaced by clean ones. The latter can cripple them to a point that they aren’t listenable any more. What the examples demonstrate is that eventually you have limited control over the music of these services. Secondly the service itself can change e.g the app that you’re relying on disappears as happens with the Spotify app on my Squeezebox network music player.

Alternatively you can build your own digital music library e.g from your CD collection. This is called ripping and is done with software such as the free and open source Asunder. Asunder creates nice digital music files in the audio coding format that you desire. It can even add metadata to the file by checking an external music database. The process of adding or changing metadata is called tagging. The result of this process is often incomplete and results to gaps in the music collection. This is where MusicBrainz Picard comes in. It’s a tag editor that can fill all these gaps and it’s pretty good at it.

To work with MusicBrainz Picard open a music file, a folder with music files or even multiple folders with music files. MusicBrainz either gets the missing metadata by comparing it with it’s own. If that fails MusicBrainz Picard can get the correct metadata with acoustic fingerprinting. This compares part of a song with their huge online database of MusicBrainz to find the right song and add the correct metadata. After everything is done just save the info to the music files and your done.

Another powerful option of Picard is to organize your all your digital music file. To do this just select all the music and drag it into Picard. This video https://yewtu.be/watch?v=02fWYIur42g demonstrates just how powerful this option is (alternatively you can also watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02fWYIur42g).

MusicBrainz Picard and the MusicBrainz database are projects of the MetaBrainz Foundation. MetaBrainz Foundation has a philosophy of free, open access of data. It has been set up to build community maintained databases and make them available in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Most contributions come from volunteers so users are encouraged either to donate or contribute to the data gathering process.

Thanks for reading!