More music library tuning
One of the unfortunate things about moving a music library between macbooks is that for some reason, album artwork gets lost. I think there is a file somewhere that contains this information, but obviously I neglected to transfer it (or else, the new macbook is looking for the file in a different place).
This results in the unpleasant experience of seeing the ugly generic music note in place of pleasing album cover art. Apple Music does a decent enough job of finding album artwork, but it is not very good overall. Additionally its automated function (File>Library>Get Album Artwork) does not work very well, either.
This started me down the rabbit hole of finding options to do this in bulk. Enter MusicBrainz Picard. This is not a new program to meβin the sense that I've heard of it, but never used it. I had to find a few videos that demonstrated how to use it to fully wrap my head around it (and stop trying to load my entire music library folder at once).
The initial goal was to fix album artwork, but it's now turned into a secondary project to fix metadata. There are some weird genre entries that turn up when you click the drop-down (some numbers, for example; why are there numbers in my genre field?). Song or album release dates are either wrong or incomplete. That kind of thing.
So now I am going to go through my library one folder at a time to correct everything in hopes of fixing the bad data. It's going to take a while.