Tagging mp3 files with picard

Picard is a program for tagging mp3 files, looking them up in an online database. It is written in python and should run on Windows and Linux, I have only tried Linux. A Mac version should be on it's way. Web page: http://musicbrainz.org/.

Installing picard on Fedora Core 5

Installing dependencies:

sudo yum install libofa libmusicbrainz-devel libtunepimp libtunepimp-devel
python-ctypes cd-discid python-tunepimp  wxPython wxPython-devel
libtunepimp-extras-nonfree python-musicbrainz2

I don't think all the devel packages are neccesary if you install all dependencies via RPM, only if you need to compile some of them yourself.
Most of the RPMs are from Fedora Extra but at least the libtunepimp-extras-nonfree os from Livna.
libtunepimp-extras-nonfree is needed for mp3 support.
Installing picard:
Click on the Download Picard link on the front page of http://musicbrainz.org/ (or
```
wget http://ftp.uk.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/picard/picard-0.7.2.tar.gz
```
).
```
tar xvzf picard-0.7.2.tar.gz
```
Read the INSTALL and the README file. When you think all dependencies are resolved, try starting the program with
```
./tagger.py
```
If it works, install it with the command
```
sudo python setup.py install
```
and start it with the command
```
picard
```

Using Picard

The first time you open Picard you need to create a user account to use the music database. Picard asks you if you want to create a user account. If you click "Yes", a "Create User Account" page is opened in your browser. Create the user account, and enter the data into Picard in the Options dialog.
Next, Picard will ask you to donate some money to them. You can Click "Later" if you don't want to donate anything right now.
Settings: File -> Options:
1. Login: Type your login and password from the User Account you just created.
2. Tags: Clear the "Write ID3v1 tags to MP3 files" options or xmms will show bogus song titles. Select the encoding you want. I have selected Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) but I think it uses UTF-8 all the same.
3. Encodings: Select the file name encoding you want. I selected iso8859-1 but I think UTF-8 is used anyway.
For the actual procedure of tagging mp3 files, I refer to their own guide http://musicbrainz.org/doc/HowToTagFilesWithPicard (more thorough explanations can be found in http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDocumentation).
If you cannot drag mp3 files to the "Drag new files here" area, make sure you have installed libtunepimp-extras-nonfree. This is probably a Fedora specific name. I found a google hit referring to installing libmad0 on some other distribution. The point is that you are probably missing the mp3 extension to libtunepimp.
If your file names are in a different charset from what you need you can convert them with the program convmv:
```
convmv -f utf8 -t iso-8859-15 * --notest
```

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Last updated: February 10, 2010