MusicBrainz Picard : Audio Tagger with Auto-Rename Feature

Earlier this week we reviewed a software named Kid3 Audio Tagger that can be used to edit the metadata inside the audio files of many different types. MusicBrainz Picard is also a similar audio tagger that can automatically fetch the metadata for your audio files collection from the internet, change the file names according to this data and even move the audio files in sub-folders pertaining to the music albums to which these sound files belong. Unlike Kid3, MusicBrainz Picard is not a portable software but works in Windows, Mac and Linux. Separate versions are available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows.

The user interface of Picard is very well designed. For the simple use of tagging your audio files, you simply begin by adding the individual files to the Picard interface. It can recognize many popular audio file formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis, FLAC, WMA, Speex, MusePack, WavPack, True Audio, and MP4. You can use the toolbar buttons to add files or the entire folders containing many audio files. You can also drag-n-drop the files on its window which is very convenient.

MusicBrainz Picard

For automatic tagging using the online database, you can select any audio file and then click on the Scan button in the toolbar. This will make it generate an AcoustID for that audio file and then using this unique ID, it will scan the online database for the audio file. An album and the song information will be soon displayed on the right side. You can select this song in the album to view the information and click on the Save button to save the metadata in the file’s tag. Picard uses a really huge online database that stores information of more than 8 million songs.

If you want to rename the audio files based on the tag information too, then you have to choose the Options from the menubar for this. You can choose to rename files, save tags and move files for these options. If you choose “Save tags”, then tags are saved when you click on the Save button. Similarly, files are renamed base don the metadata tags and moved to a sub-folder based on the tags for other options.

MusicBrainz Picard

MusicBrainz Picard makes it very easy for you to manage your audio files, update the accurate tag information, rename the audio files and arrange them according to the albums to which they belong. However, it fails to fetch the tag information for some very new songs as well as non-English songs.

You can download MusicBrainz Picard from https://picard.musicbrainz.org/downloads/.