Musicbrainz Picard
Version: 2.2.3 Web:https://github. com/metabrainz/picard
The times of mass-scale CD ripping are gone, and it seems most people prefer to keep their music libraries on their hard drives. Maintaining such a library can be tricky, especially if parts of your collection were obtained from different sources, encoded with various software, and some tracks still look like Track X by Unknown Artist (my favourite!–ed).
We have a cure, and it’s called Musicbrainz Picard. This is a graphical application made using Pyqt5. Essentially, it is a front end to the Musicbrainz database, an open music encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. The good thing about Picard is that you don’t have to rip anything again but can fix your existing music files and fetch missing metadata – not just album and track names, but also cover art and lyrics.
Picard tries to recover missing metadata items using the remaining ones. This often looks like a track having all its details in the filename, but with blank metadata fields inside. That is easy and just saves you from filling the information manually. However, even if all the metadata is missing, Picard is here to help. This software can take acoustic fingerprints of your tracks and find matches on Musicbrainz. As long as your unknown tracks represent some officially released content, there’s a good chance Picard will find the correct names from the online database.
Using Picard makes it is easy to find out if your local album copy is missing some tracks (B-sides, second sides, etc.), or if some tracks were modified (someone could have removed silence around a song) – the application will indicate such things automatically. The left side of the Picard window shows the ‘unclustered tracks’. Drag them onto the right side to start recovering. And don’t forget to click Save before exiting the application.