It might be an MBS problem. I applied tags to some recordings and they aren't being returned in the XML for some reason.

> I applied tags to some recordings and they aren't being returned in the XML for some reason.
I used WS2 to test if I could get my own tag through that and I was succesful:
http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording/b5c6647d-5b8a-40a9-a08d-99552e2b075a?inc=user-tags+user-ratings Maybe you were missing the "inc=user-tags+user-ratings" part in the end?
I tagged the recording with "breaks", yet with Picard I can't get the tag even when allowing any (not just mine) tag to be grabbed. Instead I only get release level tags: http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/7dd633af-8c64-446c-bf6a-033e9a16ccb8?inc=user-tags+user-ratings (in this case "trance").

The test I did was against /ws/2/release, /ws/2/recording works fine for me. In the second link you should also include the "recordings" inc argument. Here's what I did:

Added tags test1, test2, and test3 to the first three recordings of http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/f22729a2-c6ed-4870-8406-85f1a68abf17?inc=user-tags+recordings respectively. The XML only displays tag test3 under recording 3. I tried on another release and it's also only displaying my tags under a single recording.

Ah, yes I added 1 tag for each recording on the release and http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/7dd633af-8c64-446c-bf6a-033e9a16ccb8?inc=user-tags+recordings returns a tag for only one recording. Weird.

But... not sure this is how it should be handled, but using ?inc=recordings would return every recording MBID which could be used to ?inc=user-tags each recording separately to get the tags. It would probably not be the optimal way to handle it, but it should work.

I either case there seems to be bug here and I'm not sure if I should clone this one or just change it.

We shouldn't have to fix a server bug in Picard, so I'll convert this to an MBS ticket and let the server devs deal with it.