Organising your digital music collection can be a Herculean effort. Yet when you have several gigabytes of tracks to sift through, your only chance of finding what you want to hear is if your music files are properly tagged.

Don't panic if your machine can't tell Barry White apart from the White Stripes, though: the creators of Picard feel your pain. That's why, by the time Picard is finished with your music collection, each file will know the album it belongs to, the artist who performed it, its track number within the album and a host of other details.

Picard is simple to get hold of - it's available in the software repositories of most distributions. That means it's just a matter of running either the apt-get install picard or yum install picard command to get started. However, while the default view when you launch Picard is sufficient, we think that it adds an unnecessary degree of separation between you and your files. Thankfully, Picard also includes a far superior File Browser view, which you can switch to by going to View > File Browser.

Now that you've changed the view, any new files you add to Picard will initially show up in the middle panel under the heading Unmatched Files. Click on one of these files and the left-hand pane of the bottom panel will display any metadata currently associated with that file.

Our first step in getting your music organised is to cluster all files from the same album under one heading. So, select the files you've just added and click the Cluster button on the toolbar. Depending on the album metadata present for each of the files, Picard will group all songs from the same album together. Files that don't belong in a clustered album will remain listed as Unmatched Files.

Retrieve metadata

To get more information about your music files, select songs or a cluster from the Unmatched Files list and click the Lookup button in the toolbar at the top of the interface.

Be aware that Picard may take some time to retrieve information about the selected songs, depending on the speed of your internet connection. If the program can't find the data automatically, you can also find track information manually by clicking the Lookup button in the New Metadata window. This will summon your browser and point you in the direction of the MusicBrainz database.

After fetching the relevant information, Picard displays the name of the album that the song or songs belong to in the panel on the right. Picard also removes these songs from the Unmatched Files list and moves them into this new album entry in the far right panel. Double-click this to expand the album and view the new metadata for the tracks.

Now it's worth noting that Picard uses each track's previous metadata, if any, to make intelligent guesses at pairing the correct data with your tracks. It will also show you how certain it is of those guesses by displaying a small coloured rectangle next to each track - green is a good match, yellow, orange and red represent increasing degrees of uncertainty.

Inspect each track in turn, right-clicking the song and clicking Save if the software has got it right. This tells Picard to attach the new metadata to this song. As a visual indicator, the coloured rectangle changes to a green tick to show the track information has been saved.