Picard (the MusicBrainz program in question) absolutely needs hand holding. When I decided to do the initial run through of my library, I went artist by artist and album by album. There's a temptation to just throw everything at it. But there are enough releases and re-releases, and instances of a single song/recording being on multiple albums that it was much less headache to never try to more than one album at a time. That hand holding is a good thing in my opinion despite the tedium. There's just too much content for any automated system to reliably handle all the match collisions. Lidarr works because it more or less goes album by album too. Lidarr can do a pretty good job of screwing everything up though, so that's the one to keep separate or be very careful and test settings thoroughly. I'm still finding weird ways that lidarr has mangled stuff I'd already tagged and renamed with Picard because of a badly formed renaming format string in lidarr's settings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The was playing with Picard this afternoon. It did a good job finding what I had, though it seemed like it was updating the mp3 data before I was hitting save. I need to play with it more to understand it better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Once it finds a match, it will show you a comparison of the tags for each file before and after. Maybe that's what you saw. As far as I know, it only writes the tags and renames the files once you hit save. If there is an option to write the tags before you choose to save, I've never seen or used it. You can of course choose to not rename the files and just fix the tags.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah I think the interface confused me at first, I figured it out last night. Basically you are matching files in the top left to the top right (either automatically or manually). Once it matches it shows the before and after at the bottom, then click save to update the file. Useful!

I was having issues getting Jellyfin to update some data, in particular release date/year, even after using Identify on them and pointing to the correct album. I had to manually update that info for several of albums. Maybe the incorrect info in the mp3 tags overrides what it gets from the internet. That would explain it.