Be aware that this is a multi-provider app, while a tag editor would only benefit locally stored files and thus is not likely to be supported. But you never know…
This and also it’s usually not good to try and force every possible functionality into one piece of software. It’s amazing that Symfonium works as well as it does, considering how many different providers it supports.
However I’d leave tagging to purpose-built tagging software like Mp3tag instead.
Many people (me included) also generally distrust player software and only give the players read only access to the music files.
Generally I find that the best approach is to properly tag and verify the integrity of files before adding them to your collection. That usually minimizes the need for adjustments down the road and fixing tags is done quicker at a PC anyhow.
That’s exactly how I do it. Rip → Tag → Add to collection (and sometimes: → Fix tags → Add again … ). As I have a local copy of my files on the PC I need to tag those at the source anyway. And I only use dedicated tagging software, because I am not sure what other software (e.g. the tag editor of MusicBee) does with tags it does not recognize. Kid3 is my go-to editor, but I use MB Picard for initial tagging now.
I’ve tried kid3 and while it shows a few more tags than mp3tag, I didn’t see anything like the advanced action functionality that mp3tag offers. I often edit 1000+ files in one go so speed and flexibility are paramount to me.
To get the musicbrainz tags I use this web source script which is way faster than musicbrainz picard in my experience and has the added upside that I don’t have to leave mp3tag.
I usually do:
Go through folders 1 by 1, check if the external art is high enough quality, look for better art if not.
Load all files into mp3tag, check if there are any unwanted tags and delete those (ripped by etc.).
Tag the albums with the musicbrainz webscript
Run my default actions that ensure stuff like removing unwanted characters (I hate some versions of ’ for example and replace all of them with the default one). They also ensure no trailing spaces, multiple spaces in a row etc…
Let mp3tag create new folder and filenames based on the new tags
Run my recompression script, flacr, on the results, which calculates replaygain tags for all audio files and recompresses all flac files with the latest encoder while ensuring a padding of 4KB and also checking for integrity errors in the process
Copy the final files to the NAS.
That’s the reason why I limit write access to my music as much as I can. All the players get is read only access.
I only process the rips from my own CDs, so.the workflow is slightly different and requires less large-scale batch tasks. As I have to read the disc IDs (and often enough edit the MusicBrainz database while ripping), transfer speed from MB is never an issue
Kid3 is a little cumbersome for some tasks, I mainly use it because it does nothing by itself, and I like FLOSS software. Regex processing could be more intuitive, but if you spend some time with it, it is quite effective. But my impression from a short look at mp3tag was that I would most likely use that if I did not have kid3.
Picard scripting is also quite advanced. But I find Picard useless as a standalone editor, as it always wants to revert back to what is stored in the MB database.
That’s commendable. At the scale of my collection, going into that much detail was never an option sadly.
That also annoys me. In mp3tag I’ve created a few actions to deal with some stuff that musicbrainz does differently than I’d like. For example having (live) (stereo) (acoustic) etc. lowercase in braces. Since I don’t want to fudge up the casing of the rest of the title I’ve created a collection of such words that are replaced automatically. It’s funny how I still find new words to add to that list from time to time.
I love regex, using it in mp3tag is also a bit painful depending on where you use it as you have to do some extra escaping of characters that are interpreted by mp3tag internally, making it even less readable.
It probably comes down to the scale at which you operate, what you’re used to and what you need. Until Tolriq mentioned kid3 some time ago I had never heard of it.