MusicBrainz Picard: Smart Music Tagging Application [Windows, Linux, Mac OS X]

If you read the comments of our EasyTag post, you knew a post on Picard was imminent (thanks, guys!).

Picard is the official tagging application for Music Brainz, an online database that contains information about artists, releases, and songs.

Why is Picard so great? It uses MusicBrainz and that's it's real power, because MusicBrainz handles an acoustic fingerprints database. An acoustic fingerprint is an identifier which is unique for a track, no matter how it's encoded. So, you can get all the tags for a musical track by calculating its ID and submitting it to the MusicBrainz server using Picard.

Other Picard (which is cross-platform - working on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X just like EasyTag) features include support for most audio file formats (full support for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and Musepack files, and it can also manipulate MP4, WavPack, Speex, The True Audio, and Windows Media Audio files, though it cannot calculate audio fingerprints for them), CD lookups and disc ID submissions and excellent Unicode support. Another great feature is it's extensibility, with plugins which include: cover art downloader, generate cuesheet, use Last.fm tags as "genre" and other last.fm tags, and others.

For a quick getting started guide, see THIS page.


To install MuzicBrainz Picard in Ubuntu, simply paste this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install picard

For other Linux distributions, Windows and Mac OS X: Download Picard