Click on “Cluster”, and Picard will rearrange the “Unmatched files” files likely to belong to the same album into album clusters.

If there are files that Picard doesn’t recognize, you should probably remove them.

Picard will put untagged files in its “Unmatched Files” folders and already tagged albums in its right pane

Find in the Browser your music folder and drop it in the left Picard pane.

Launch Picard, select View | File Browser in the top menu.

The process, described in detail here, consists of these main steps: I have used Picard, the official MusicBrainz tagger, to tag semi-automatically the majority of my music files.

The most famous ones that are managed in an Open Source way and fully compatible with Linux are FreeDB and MusicBrainz. Many music files are catalogued in several online databases. Podcasts from “professional” radio stations, that were very unprofessionally published online without any tagging whatsoever.

Digitized analog recordings (you know what I mean: things like me singing “Merry Christmas” in kindergarten…), normally made by relatives and friends who have no clue of what tagging is, or….

Most of those “non-song” files of mine are either: My own MP3 collection contains both songs directly ripped and fully tagged, in one round, from my own CDs, and other files from everywhere, all encoded without any tags. Actual songs often are not a big deal, but MP3 audio can be anything. This said, let me make clear from the beginning that “the fastest possible way to tag MP3 files” can still involve a lot of manual work.

The corresponding data are written inside the files themselves, to follow them when the files move to another computer or operating system, and inside backups.

They are indexable through an open standard that many software tools can process automatically.

If I really want my MP3 files to be and remain properly sorted and quickly usable even if I change software, I must guarantee that: For me, adding such tags is an absolute necessity. Last week, I promised that this time I’d introduce efficient ways to add ID3 tags to MP3 files. Marco Fioretti shows you his method for tagging MP3 files with as much automation as possible so that you can impose a little order on music or other audio collections.

How to tag all your audio files in the fastest possible way

Linux automatic music tagger