Basically I have some music from future funk channels. Picard doesn't recognize about 1000+ tracks. What's your routine for filling missing fields for music tracks?

Make a cup of tea, open mp3tag and get to work!

If you're going to do it by hand anyway, you could add the missing tracks to Musicbrainz. This way Picard would be able to recognize them, for you and for everyone else.

My routine for that is about what you would expect, Coffee, listen to the track, Research it, Manually fill out as much of the tag as I can, upload to MusicBrainz, Repeat.

Each album takes an hour or two. Faster if I can find a page somewhere with the whole album listing, preferably including the names of everyone involved with the album.

There isn't an easier way that I've found.

Every few days I'll have Picard rescan the collection in the unlikely event someone else has also worked on some of the tracks I'm working on. It does happen, not very often, but it does happen.

This but with soulseek-downloaded flacs

Sometimes it just don't find the audio fingerprint. Try the lookup button instead.
Or fill in the missing info by hand. Btw I usually use the --embed-metadata flag on yt-dlp. Most tags should fit like that.

Yup. I use Picard and Nicotine regularly. Then drop in grease monkey in your browser with a couple of user scripts for discogs and bandcamp. You're a tagging machine.

Honestly...sounds like something an AI agent could do pretty well. Then when you're browsing the library and you find a mistake you can fix things as needed.

Weigh the environmental cost against how much you value your time. Using local LLMs is probably enough for this kind of job, with much smaller environmental cost.

Each album takes an hour or two. Faster if I can find a page somewhere with the whole album listing, preferably including the names of everyone involved with the album.

For OP this process would take 100+ hours for their collection. That's an insane amount of work for just organizing your music.

How much free time do you people have? At that point I'd just use AI

How much free time do you people have? At that point I’d just use AI

Free time? What's that? /s, kinda

Most of that time is spent uploading the tag info up to MusicBrainz. If the band/artist or album isn't already there, It can indeed take that long. Their web interface is a confusing mess, at least for me. I don't usually have more than 1 album at a time to deal with manually though, and that not very often.

As for using an LLM (I refuse to call them AI. They ain't there yet.), if it works, cool! More than likely though, they would try pulling from MusicBrainz, fail to find a match and give up, same as Picard has for OP. An LLM agent harness might be able to more quickly upload album tags where the artist or album doesn't yet exist in the database though. Hadn't thought of that before and may give it a try next time the issue crops up. Thanks!