Help / Your library
Where tags and artwork come from
Every title, artist, album, genre and cover image in Vesari Stylus comes from one of a handful of places. This page lists them, and which cost anything.
Your own files come first
Nothing is looked up online until the local answer runs out. Scanning a track reads the tags already inside the file, then looks in its folder, and one level of subfolder, for a cover image named cover, folder, front, artwork or albumart (.jpg, .jpeg or .png). Failing those exact names it scores loosely named images such as "U2 - War - Front.jpg". A folder image wins; art embedded in the file is used when there is no folder image. See Cover art.
Everything below happens only when you ask: running Super-Tag, or pressing a button in the tag editor.
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is the free community music encyclopedia behind most of what Super-Tag writes, and it needs no key. A track reaches it two ways.
- An ISRC lookup. If the file carries an ISRC, the recording code often present on ripped or purchased tracks, the app asks MusicBrainz for that code directly. The identifier is definitive, so a hit scores 95 out of 100 whatever relevance MusicBrainz returns.
- A text search. The app sends title and artist, tidied first: HTML entities decoded, bracketed download junk stripped, "feat." noise cut. If the title is a placeholder such as "Track 01", or generic like "Intro" with no artist to disambiguate it, no search is made at all, since a confident hit on a meaningless title scatters a library across unrelated artists.
Either way the reply carries the recording's releases with it, so one request also yields album, album artist, year, country, disc and track numbering, and the original release date. Genre comes from the recording's own community tags. Label and catalogue number do not: MusicBrainz leaves both empty on a Super-Tag sweep and in the tag editor, and Discogs is where they come from.
MusicBrainz allows one request a second, so a long sweep spends most of its time waiting, around 1.2 seconds a track. In the tag editor, Identify then MusicBrainz searches one track and lists scored candidates; Apply writes your pick straight to the file and the library.
AcoustID fingerprints
AcoustID identifies a recording by how it sounds, so it works when the tags are wrong, scrambled or absent. The app builds a compact fingerprint from the leading two minutes or so of the audio and posts that, the track's duration and your application key. The audio file is not uploaded.
Fingerprinting is opt in. Paste a free application key into Settings → Authentication → API Keys → AcoustID Application Key, and the tag editor's Identify then Fingerprint button comes alive. Without a key Super-Tag still runs, falling back to the ISRC and text-search paths above.
Under Settings → Library, in the Metadata Cache (experimental) group, AcoustID source sets how these lookups resolve: Direct (my AcoustID key) is the default, Off skips fingerprinting, leaving ISRC and text search working, and Hosted (cache-server proxy) routes through a cache server set up in the same group, needing no key of your own.
Discogs
Discogs is the pressing-level database, and the only source here that fills in label and catalogue number. It needs a free personal token, pasted into Discogs Token in the same API Keys group.
It works one release at a time from the tag editor, never in a Super-Tag sweep: press Identify then Discogs. The app searches on the track's catalogue number first when it has one, then falls back to artist plus album. Applying a release writes its styles, or its genres where it lists none, plus label, catalogue number, barcode, country and year, leaving every field Discogs knows nothing about alone.
Searching Discogs is free. Applying a release is a Lifetime feature, not included in the trial.
Cover art and artist images
Search art, in the tag editor's Artwork section, sends artist and album to MusicBrainz, then asks the Cover Art Archive for the front image of each matching release and shows thumbnails to pick from.
After a Super-Tag run the app fills the gaps itself, going straight to the Cover Art Archive art for the release each track resolved to, and to a Deezer album search when that release has none. Tracks that already carry your own cover are left alone, and what it finds is cached beside your library data, not written into your files. Lyrics follow in the same background pass, from LRCLIB. See Lyrics.
Artist images come from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons where the artist's MusicBrainz page links to them, and from Deezer where it does not.
What each source costs
| Source | Key or token | Metered |
|---|---|---|
| MusicBrainz | None | Within Super-Tag's allowance |
| AcoustID | Your own free application key | Within Super-Tag's allowance |
| Cover Art Archive, Deezer, Wikidata, LRCLIB | None | No |
| Discogs search | Free personal token | No |
| Discogs apply | Free personal token | Lifetime feature |
Super-Tag is metered at 100 tracks on Free and 1,000 during the trial, and only tracks it actually tags are charged. That budget is shared with the MusicBrainz release applied after a CD rip. Applying a single MusicBrainz candidate in the tag editor is not metered. See What the free allowance covers.
For what each request contains, see What the online lookups send. If a sweep finishes and nothing seems to have changed, see Super-Tag said it applied but nothing changed.