Music Tagger MusicBrainz Picard 1.0 Review

Martin Brinkmann
Aug 3, 2012
Updated • Dec 4, 2012
Music, Music and Video
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7

MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform music tagger that is using an album-oriented approach when it comes to tagging files. What many users will like is the fact that it can do so almost automatically. All you basically need to do is point it to a directory with music, and the program will scan and attempt to match up the files automatically. While this may work well for some of the music, you may notice that there are still unmatched entries left in the program's left column after the initial scan.

Once you realize that, you can make use of the program's lookup or scan modes to identify the remaining songs. If you select lookup, Picard will connect to the Internet to match each song to an artist and album. If that succeeds, it is moved to the matched listing on the right where you find a list of properly identified albums along with the song count for each.

The lookup takes quite some time but appears to be very thorough in this regard. Only 300 of the 3700 music files that I had added to the program were identified during the initial scan. The lookup took an hour to complete, and I ended up with 469 files that the program could not look up online.

The functionality that Picard provides does not stop here though, as you can then use audio fingerprinting to identify the remaining tracks. Before you can use that function, you need to configure it in the options. Picard supports two different audio fingerprinting solutions and I'd recommend you run both if the first does not identify all of the remaining songs.

Once that scan has finished, chance is that you are still left with a few songs that were not identified correctly. You can then start to manually edit those songs using information from the Musicbrainz website or other sources.

MusicBrainz Picard is an excellent music tagger that supports a wide variety of formats. It is easy to use, supports advanced options like audio fingerprinting, and plugins that you can install to add to the program's feature set. All in all a great program if your music collection needs to be sorted into albums.

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Comments

  1. Justin said on November 30, 2011 at 10:18 am
    Reply

    The warning message about AAC streams when you load streams is because you don’t have the free Orban AAC/aacPlus Player Plugin installed.

    http://codecpack.co/download/Orban-aacPlus-Player-Plugin.html

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on November 30, 2011 at 10:56 am
      Reply

      Justin, thanks for the information.

  2. santosh said on December 1, 2011 at 12:43 am
    Reply

    does this support AAC ? or only mp3 streaming

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on December 1, 2011 at 1:43 am
      Reply

      I’d say it supports all pls streams but I have not tried that so cannot verify it 100%.

  3. Barnabas said on August 3, 2012 at 5:15 pm
    Reply

    Thank you Martin for a most informative and viable solution (it allowed me to play streams from a Netherland internet radio station in my WMP)! Continued success to you!

    Barnabas (USA)

  4. AppleRome said on October 7, 2012 at 7:31 am
    Reply

    Your steps’ recommendation is still valid until 7th October 2012.. Thank you very much !!

  5. Laura said on December 1, 2012 at 4:41 pm
    Reply

    Thank you!

  6. sak2005 said on December 9, 2014 at 8:03 pm
    Reply

    You must convert file.pls to file.m3u
    because file.pls open with winamp and file.m3u open with wmp.

  7. Lithium said on February 10, 2017 at 11:10 am
    Reply

    Hi
    2017 still kicking on Windows 7
    Thx a ton

  8. Dennis said on April 18, 2017 at 4:05 am
    Reply

    Hey, even i can do it, i stumbled through it and it works great! The only instruction advice i will add as i had to figure this out, when the wmp box opens that says save or open the bar on right says wmp click that drop down and select “open pls in wmp” once you do that it will work . Took me quite some time to discover that as i am no computer expert by any means. Having said that, previously i had downloaded codec packages and something about aac. None did any good. This rocks, i listen to a lot of internet radio and a number of them have dropped flash player and getting wmp to work had been a nightmare. So many thanks for this great solution to another problem that Micro-Hell will not even address. Peace- Out

  9. stephen marshall said on March 19, 2019 at 2:07 am
    Reply

    openplsinwmp came in a zip file. I unpacked it, and didn’t find anything that looks like an executable, and even the files in the “doc” folder were in a format windows didn’t recognize. I’m not stupid. you said it would open effortlessly. It didn’t. This a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down.

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