I've googled as best I can, and I can't seem to find a way to easily add MusicBrainz ID tags without overwriting my other tags. Picard will apparently overwrite all of my tags with MB data if I add any ID tags - it's all or nothing. As I've spent years creating my other tags, that's not acceptable to me. I found a MusicBrainz thread from 2008 that expressed the same concern I have, and the concept of selectively writing tags to keep existing tags within Picard was rejected and does not seem to exist today (Picard version 0.15.1). A simple solution back then to accomplish what I desire was not available - can Mp3Tag create and write MBID tags? Any suggestions appreciated.


The thread I found googling that was most relevant: http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=1010

Note that the proposed solution in 2008 is not even close to what I regard as "simple". My definition, for better or worse, would just use one application to add MBID tags without altering other tags, and do so across hundreds of albums in one run. thanks!

isn't this a musicbrainz problem, then? Mp3tag is not involved in this workflow, right?

Anyway: what you could do: create yourself an export script for a textfile that includes all the fields that you do not want to have overwritten by musicbrainz. Please note, that it is easier if you also included the full path and filename as then the data would be read into the correct file.
Export the data.
Tag with musicbrainz.
Import that data from the previously written textfile.
Basic rule: last one wins.

You are free to copy any tag-field within a file to a tag-field with another name into the same file, for example ...
Action: Format value
Field: TMP_ARTIST
Formatstring: %ARTIST%

Do this for all fields, which you want to save or backup in this file, in order to possibly restore them later to their original tag-field.
Doing so, you have the ability for automated comparison resp. for showing related tag-field contents side by side in the Mp3tag list view for visual checking purposes.

DD.20111021.1333.CEST

Thanks for the responses. It's a tag challenge, and the Picard solution is not viable for me, so I wanted to see if there was a way within Mp3Tag to create the MBID tags without wiping out my other tags. As I understand it, the MBID tags are created based on the attributes of a song or album (so no lookups outside of Mp3Tag are required), so I thought I'd see if anyone had looked into this with Mp3Tag. I know nothing of the specific algorithms used to create the MBID tags, so I don't know if this is something that can be done via an action, but I thought I'd check with others with a similar desire.

Thanks again.

Use puddletag's masstagging with Musicbrainz configured as the only tag source and specify the fields you want to retrieve.

You forgot to mention that you have to start/install LINUX first to get the benefits of puddletag.

MacOS works equally well...
There's nothing stopping a windows user from firing up a livecd session of Linux eg Ubuntu, using puddletag to add the musicbrainz tags and then restarting windows.

An even better option would be for a anyone familiar with Python making the necessary changes to the source so that file paths are handled regardless of OS and submitting the changes for inclusion into the main source.