Your Jellyfin library can look just as good as any streaming platform’s library, complete with the right titles, metadata tags, and beautiful album art. It doesn’t matter how messy your offline music files are (they don’t even need track names), this tool automates everything with just one click.
Meet MusicBrainz Picard
The easy way to tag your music
Medusa does not rely on filenames to index the library. It actually extracts track names, album names, artist, track number, cover art, etc. from the tags embedded in your music files. brings out things like All of these embedded tags are part of the file’s metadata.
Normally, you would have to spend hours manually writing that metadata to the files. Then you’ll need to find and add the cover as well. MusicBrainz Picard is a free tool that automatically does both for you.
It can also batch process files that don’t have any tags or title information (like if you ripped from a CD). It sounds like magic, but it can actually listen to a music file for unique audio signatures. And then it cross-references those audio signatures against the MusicBrainz database.
Use MusicBrainz Picard to automatically tag music
Step by step process
Start by placing all your audio tracks in one folder. As you can see, mine is pretty messy. The files do not all have album covers and they do not have any metadata information. MusicBrainz supports Picard the most Audio formats including FLAC, OGG, WMAetc.
Go ahead and Download MusicBrainz Picard for your computer. Available for MacOS, Windows and Linux. After installing it on your computer, launch it.
In the onboarding steps, click next until you get to the screen asking if you want to directly overwrite and edit your music files. Check this box and then click next.
Now let’s load our music files into the program. Click the folder icon and open the folder you just created. Picard will load it as an unclustered directory.
Click the cluster button at the top of the screen. This step divides the music files into folders based on the metadata and title information already available. My files have almost no metadata, so Picard just puts them in a folder.
- Brand
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Zettlab
- CPU
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RK3588
- Memory
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16 GB LPDDR4x
- Driver Bays
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4x 3.5-inch, 1x M.2 NVMe
Then select all files with Ctrl or Cmd+A, then click search. The search function uses already existing metadata to match music files with the MusicBrainz database. If any matches are found, it will immediately start auto-tagging files. In my case, it couldn’t find any reasonable matches, but mistakenly labeled one of the files. So I will just clear these results and move on to the next step.
For files missing any usable metadata, select all your files with control or command+A and then click scan. It will listen to the actual audio signatures and find matches in the database. In my case it correctly identified 13 out of 15 tracks. It even found the cover art and automatically inserted it into the files.
For the remaining two tracks, I will select them separately. Right-click and then select search. Processing a track individually will usually automatically tag it correctly. Once again, managed to capture the cover image and labels for these two files. You can almost always process stragglers by targeting them individually.
After the batch is processed, you’ll see Picard show you the original values and the new values for the tags, as well as the cover, side-by-side. You can manually edit any tag here if you want.
If Picard can’t load the album art for any of the tracks, right-click the CD icon in the bottom corner. Select “local file” or “download from URL” to update the cover manually. In my case, it correctly placed the covers for 13 of my 15 tracks. I had to update the other two manually.
MusicBrainz overwrites file metadata
The files are ready, just go ahead and click save. MusicBrainz Picard will automatically tag them and rewrite the metadata inside the files.
If you are working with hundreds of files, it is better to process them in smaller batches. That way, you can catch any strays and add missing metadata before moving on.
Now let’s try uploading our processed files to Jellyfin. Titles, artist names, and album covers appear as expected. I can also filter the collection by albums and artists. Clicking on an artist’s name opens up more information about them from the MusicBrainz database, as well as all the tracks available within Jellyfin.
We have only scratched the surface
MusicBrainz Picard is all you need to clear your clutter Jellyfin music collection and make it look as good as any library you’ll find on major music streaming platforms. Picard also has plugin and scripting support, which means you can do things like create filenames from tags or create folders from albums with minimal effort.
