Is there any application that lets you manually add metadata such as album art and co into files?
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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You can make manual edits. You have to read the instructions or wiki
It's a great program, but my goodness their online interface for entering actual track and record information is ridiculously difficult to use and their rules for titles etc are bad.
I would love to get back into hosting songs locally again, but I've grown too reliant on algorithms for music discovery. Is anyone aware of an app to automatically download songs from certain sources based on algorithm? Picard could do the last mile to organize the downloaded files neatly
I'm not aware of such a thing but back in the day I found some great bands by looking at similar artists on last.fm
I use last.fm scrobbling so it can learn what I like and provide suggestions based on my locally hosted music.
Oh, right, that too! Wow I completely forgot about that, and I found my favorite band of all time that way 20 years ago!
I have barely done any music discovery in ages due to a combo of a showstopper bug making my music app unusable for a couple years, and being in moderate to severe burnout for nearly a decade. I'm starting to get back into it though, thanks for reminding me!
Took me about 2 years of fine tuning settings and plugins, but finally I've got it pretty much dialed in perfectly.
Maybe teach us? Used Picard, too. 95% is good but the rest is garbage detected. But idk why.
I might be able to share my config, I will check tomorrow.
EDIT: turns out raw Picard configs aren't all that friendly or in a decent format to share
For the longest time I'd use MP3tag in Windows, which is still a great tool, runs great in Wine, and it can do some of the same things like look up artwork and in particular rename files based on tags.
But less than a month ago I downloaded Picard and have been getting into using it, and the workflow is quite strange. But it works. And I can recommend it.
How well does it work with foreign names, obscure titles, DJ Sets and remixes?
Example: Wir sind Helden - Nur ein Wort (Otto Kuhn Remix) Hozho - DJ Mix 03 (Live @ Jardins Efémeros, Viseu)
Now that you asked that question, it changed all my Japanese OSTs into Japanese text, but it got all of them correct. Same with my French music and Russian music.
Picard uses audio fingerprinting and the musicbrainz DB to match the items. If the items are in the DB, then it will find them. If they aren't, then they can be added.
There are other similar tools (although they might not have graphical UIs) which also use additional metadata backends and allow complex manipulation of audio files. I personally use beets which can be configured to use Musicbrainz, Spotify, Deezer, Discogs and Bandcamp for metadata (it will also help with file manipulation, audio normalization, fetch cover art and many other things). It seems that there is a plugin called 'ytimport' which integrates with SoundCloud and YouTube. That might help with your specific question, though I did not test it.
Beware that the latest release of beets (2.5.x at the time of writing) is quite fresh and might break some plugins. I personally will stick with 2.4.x for a while.