Afternoon! My mp3 collection's really taking shape now thanks to MP3Tag and particularly ohrenkino on here :). Next step is to see if I can fill a few gaps of info I hadn't bothered about until now - thinking particularly of:
date of release of song
genre
and whilst I'll obviously curate the genre fields to my own use, it'd be good to get a starting point of something vaguely "official".
I understand there are a number of online db's with this sort of info (MusicBrainz, Discogs, freedb), some supported by MP3Tag, some possibly not. I think I'd rather sift and check the data using Excel rather than apply it directly to the files, though am open to applying direct if I can be sure it's safe.
Simple question: how do I do it? I've obviously used such db's when ripping CDs, but a fair bit of my collection is not from CD eg old radio shows, so I won't have anything but (my version of) the artist, title and album to help the db identify the song, and give me the info I need. I suspect MP3Tag can help in this, but also suspect I may need to interrogate db's myself external to MP3Tag.
You can use Web Source Scripts (WSS) for this purpose. Start with the built-in Tag Sources for MusicBrainz and Discogs for example. You can find more in this section.
GENRE is not something that can be calculated. If you ask 3 people about a song, you will get at least 4 GENRE suggestions.
There is no "official" source for GENRE.
Some of the existing WSS may help you to find the release date of a song on external databases. I suggest that you first find such an external source for your collection style, and then see if there is a ready-made WSS for it in the section mentioned.
Thanks @Lyricslover - I'll investigate. Yes, Genre's in the eye of the beholder, but when I've got nothing in that field, even "Jazz" v "Punk" will be a starter
I know what you mean.
But the starter is exactly the problem. Even "Jazz" or "Punk" is not the correct GENRE for a EDM song.
Personally, I would never rely on an external source for GENRE.
Do a test yourself and ask different sources for the same song.
Well, I've looked into this a bit and it doesn't really seem doable en masse - think I'm right in saying that even MP3Tag can only do it album by album. I've read that freedb (for example) had 2m albums even back in 2006 - if I'm wanting to do this track by track, that would mean downloading and interrogating a db of at least 20m tracks, even if there was such a thing...
Yes, most WSS are written to work best with a complete album.
freedb was shut down on June 13, 2020.
If you're looking for an alternative, you might want to check out gnudb.org, which has taken over many of freedb's functions.
Mp3tag also supports freedb/gnudb:
I think that the program for Musicbrainz Picard has a function to search for metadata for a lot of files in 1 go.
The result is, admittedly, sometimes fairly surprising but it may help to get the gist.
Yet, I do not think that any data retrieval will update only a single field but add more or less all available data.
