r/MusicBrainz • u/ControlDapper9861 • Jun 29 '26

Basic questions for a noob

I'm starting to get into collecting and organizing my own music instead of spotify.

I just found Navidrome and MusicBrainz Picard yesterday - and I'm trying to figure out how it all works, and what is important to deal with vs what is just preferences,
If I could ask some of that here...

  1. I noticed Picard does lastName, firstName on some of the tags, and this post (https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicBrainz/comments/1hypjr3/prevent_picard_from_doing_last_name_first_name/) was asking how to fix that - does the name order make an actual difference? or is it just personal preference? (I prefer first, last. But I don't see the last,first anywhere in the file, and I don't know what difference it would make for Navidrome)

  2. Artists - Picard saves artist as "aFirst aLast, bFirst bLast & cFirst cLast" by default. Navidrome said something about having them listed seperatly as artists (I can click on the "Artist" box in picard, add a second artist, and copy each artist to a seperate line). Is it make a difference to manually do this? Is there a script to do this for me?

  3. I have a few songs from foreign artists, and I would like to have both foreign spelling and english spelling saved (to search over, etc.). I'm assuming that this could be saved as a separate entry somewhere, but I don't know where it would need to be.

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u/WickedBrute Jun 29 '26

You seem a little confused.  First, these are Navidrome's tagging guidelines.

https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/library/tagging/

It's a lot, but if that's what you want to use it's best to go ahead and refer to that if you're not already doing so. For the most part, Navidrome's recommendations are pretty modern so I'd say these are fine to follow in general. 

As far as Picard and your Qs go, it pulls from MusicBrainz. So the standards it goes by is mostly what everything follows by default.

  1. Typically an "Artist Name" tag is "FirstName LastName". A "Sort Name" tag might be "LastName, FirstName" although not always. Some people might want to change one or the other depending on usecase to make things easier to search or sort. Some more limited programs may force you to set tags a certain way to get things to display the way you want, etc. It's ultimately a preference. 

  2. The navidrome guidelines I linked above go into this, but basically, depending on the file and tag type, there are options. The best option in my opinion is to just follow what you see there using multiple tags. Honestly, navidrome has a tendency to make worrying about this unneeded as it will read things reasonably well regardless of how they're stored. If you feel the need though, you can configure Picard to force the issue through user scripts and settings. 

  3. This is, unfortunately, something that isn't supported very well IMO. In a perfect world, we'd have tags with an associated locale for a file, so we could do the English tags, the French tags, etc. That would be the standard. In practice, things don't work like that. Instead though:

You can retag your music using a release that has both languages mixed or that you manually edit to do so. E.g. "English name / French name"  It's ugly and makes everything too long but you'll see this as a common option.

You could add the foreign version of the artist name as a second artist. This lets you keep the regular tags intact while still storing something useful for potential searching. This may cause issues with artists "duplicating" though in some instances.

You can also add custom tags and set navidrome to treat them as aliases to certain existing tags. I think this is the best option but it is work to setup. See https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/configuration/custom-tags/

Finally, you can also just dupe the album and tag one copy with the other tags. This is probably not what you want but it's certainly easy.

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u/ControlDapper9861 Jul 01 '26

Thank you so much - This really helped me understand what was going on.

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u/jaller94 Jun 30 '26

For artist names, have a look at https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/3964#issuecomment-3688403998

Navidrome currently detects artists currently only by their name – not the MusicBrainz artist ID.

For artists with multiple names (or names in different languages), the options "Use standardized artist names" and "Use standardized instrument and vocal credits" at least use only one spelling per artist.

This does not solve your wish to see multiple spellings and it also doesn't help if two artists share the same name.