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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[–] Prologue7642@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Beets is great but it also uses musicbrainz so won't really help OP.

[–] GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yet beet is the way to go. Music is so huge, there won't be a complete database unless it becomes mainstream.

[–] Prologue7642@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Don't get me wrong, I use Beets for my entire library, but it doesn't solve any of the issue OP has. It does not get metadata from streaming sites or anywhere else, but same as Picard from Musibrainz. It does not allow to manually change metadata of music you are importing. On the contrary, for that Picard is the better tool as it allows that.

There are not many advantages of using Beets over Picard, apart from CLI, and especially for the OP use case.