If you’re offended by the Gracenote music machine being bought by Sony, then a quick Google for “gracenote alternative” brings up a clever bunch of people called MusicBrainz. They make a piece of music tagging freeware called Picard, the so-called Next Generation music tagger. Picard is different in that it looks at your songs holistically instead of individually and chases down and applies album information based on your music.

Simply point Picard at your the music library and in less time than it takes iTunes to load (well almost), Picard has registered the library and figured out how much tag data is actually present. Picard writes tag information to the metadata part of the music file instead of just the updating the file name. Almost everything is mouse-driven so you rarely need to touch your keyboard even if Picard can’t find an exact match for your song or album. They even found matches for some of my more random Sky albums that I’m sure only sold 5 copies worldwide. Give it a whirl.

Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track/file oriented like the ClassicTagger was. Picard is written in Python, which is a cross-platform language, and makes use of cross-platform libraries – this allows the same code to run both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Tags: picard+music+tagging, picard+music, music+tagging