Submitted 9 hours ago by Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
I have a folder of MP3s, some of which date back to 1999, just a few years after the format was popularised. Most of them have utterly terrible names (think RIDEONAM.MP3). I think at this point they might even survive the heat death of the universe.
You’ll find that MusicBrainz Picard is a heaven sent tool to properly tag your files, with optional proper renaming.
It takes some getting used to, and I find it works best in whole albums, but produces a much more professional library.
Oh I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. I wonder how this integrates into something like Jellyfin if I want to host my own personal music streaming for myself.
In addition to autorenaming Picard can also auto organize into folders. So any time I buy new music, I run it through Picard to ensure metadata is correct, grab lyrics, and put it in the right folder that is then picked up by my self hosted navidrome
I use Jellyfin also.
My workflow is like this: buy CDs from Discogs, rip them to FLAC, adjust filenames, covers and metadata with Picard, push the files to Jellyfin that promptly detects the new files.
I also use Soundconverter in Linux to generate MP3s files for devices that don’t support FLAC.
I’m very happy with this setup and my collection has never been so organized.
hey now, they’re flac files and painstakingly sorted with the help of musicbrainz picard
Why, what does it do better than picard?
I have that too! I also have that one folder of random shit that I’ve avoided sorting for the last 20 years.
I also have that one folder of random shit that I’ve avoided sorting for the last 20 years.
pff I have so many folders like that that I have folders for those kinds of folders. I should probably put those folders all into a single folder…
left spotify and started downloading all my music from [COMPLETELY LEGAL AVENUES] and bandcamp. It’s good to have music that Spotify cannot take away from me.
I download music from YouTube. Are the “completely legal avenues” better than that? In that case can you provide links in DM so I make sure to block these domains and to promptly inform the authorities? Thank you.
Slskd is something that you should never consider using
True. Mine’s already over 25 years old. Just keeps hopping from hard drive to hard drive.
We’ve evolved towards a software-managed autotagged library of lossless audio now, but yeah, pretty much.
I just had a chat with my friends about how the family plan price went up 30% while the basic functionality doesnt fucking work half the time
Yep. Got archives with some files dating back to around 1999/2000, a fair part of the stuff impossible to find anywhere nowdays. Same for movies.
Nah, it has very much been replaced with properly sorted .flac files. What ever is left is stuff I don’t listen to anymore.
File format has nothing to do with proper sorting. I’ve got 350k songs properly organized by artist, album, etc, but mp3. I’ve no need for flac.
File format has nothing to do with proper sorting.
Correct, it doesn’t.
Main difference to mp3 is that flac is “lossless” so the audio quality is a bit better, but it requires considerably more space (though still a pretty insignificant compared to video).
I really want to go this route. Had Spotify, tempted to get Tidal but I don’t want to deal with content coming and going anymore. I have about 300 gigs of random MP3s, and Flac files. I want to obtain more and move over fully to flac. Any recommendations on making the transition back to locally stored music.
I’m currently making the move myself and I’ve had a really easy time with soundiiz.com and YouTube-dl with a Linux GUI. Basically soundiiz takes your playlist from one service and makes an identical one on another service. You move all your jams to YouTube and rip the audio out of them with youtube-dl. Here’s a wikihow with the deets
I gave up on trying to sort my initial batch and just started replacing.
First I try to find a full discography of an artist by a solid release group (for example "PEMEDIA or “88”). With those you can just copy the entire folder into the artist directory and plex/jellyfin etc will perfectly detect it. Then just add new albums as they are released.
You can probably find a converter that will rip those files from Youtube for you. I did mine a year and a half ago. If I open Spotify it’s just to see the playlists they made for me, because those are actually pretty good, but I rip those files and store them too.
I just wish people would name their shit well enough that I don’t accidentally download live albums anymore.
That can be fixed easily* with programs like beets
* = the program itself is easy to use, but installing and configuring it, requires a PhD in Linux-Arch-ology___
No I’m sure there will be an obscure shell script that someone wrote to do all of the install for you that will suddenly fail on a broken python dependency (because why not) and then leave your system in semi-altered state that doesnt really work wrong but its never quite right again
I 100% learnt to use docker specifically to avoid the exact situation you described.
Musicbrainz Picard is a lot easier than beets, although it does require some introductory concepts to make sense (e.g. terminology like “release”, “release group”). And it makes it too easy to accidentally poison datasets in an attempt to be helpful. Harder to automate than beets, too.
Both of them also benefit from a decent knowledge of where your files came from, not as good for a random pile of mp3s.
Picard is very manual, I fucking love it though
I use MusicBrainz Picard when I stopped paying for Spotify. Went over my old library, audio tag matched all my songs, added all metadata, sorted everything. I moved it to Nextcloud and using the Music Player plugin, I have my own Spotify using any supersonic/ampache client. Life is good.
What client do you recommend on Android
I fucking love beets
So will all my records. And probably tapes. And probably my stack of hdds that I have 3 backups of.
Bite me, corpo streaming leeches
Spotify or the last subscription I have. I'm otherwise completely free of big tech.
The reason I can't let it go is because I actually would never find new music I like without it's algorithm. I've found such got music based off it's recommendations. I know I could still find these bands without a premium subscription. But, music is a big part of my life and I just don't want to faff around when trying to find some music I like. For the same reason I think I'd struggle to self host my music because it's totally fail to work at the worst times no doubt
The reason I can’t let it go is because I actually would never find new music I like without it’s algorithm.
Have you tried just surfing bandcamp? I love discovering new shit there and my friends are like howd you find this!
You just too used to agorithms. I have zero issue finding new music without them to th point whwre i has to stop exporing new artists because i already listen to over 2000 artists without algos
I’m a bit old fashioned, when I want new music I listen to the radio, I get that doesn’t work for everyone though :)
The radio? But there's so many commercials!
And a long list of WIERDA~1.MP3 that could contain anything.
Did you know that if you have more than nine, it truncates to the first two characters, then an undocumented four-character hash, then ~1?
Just Microsoft things.
I thought they removed 8.3 file names a while back though?
How to protect against bitrot?
RAID1 combined with a separate backup drive, and ZFS with EEC RAM helps a lot, too (as another poster mentioned).
No, it’s not a full 3-2-1 backup solution, but you have to spend quite a bit as a data hoarder to actually get that. As far as I can tell, few data hoarders actually have a 3-2-1 backup without squinting about the details.
ZFS is your friend.
superuser.com/…/how-exactly-do-btrfs-zfs-and-rela…
But nothing replaces a good backup strategy! Borg backup can help you there.
In like 5 years we’ll all have self-hostd LLM agents and you just send the lil’ bastard on YT to scrape the audio in higher bitrates all over again. It’ll be FINE.
I also have MP3s that are 20+years old at this point, and they were bad rips in the first place. Some of them from CDs that skipped during the rip. bitrot on this low quality MP3 I’m too lazy to re-get is on me.
Honestly, the community should make such a tool.
Since the argument is that LLMs scraping content isn’t piracy, if we just “scrape” the songs with a LLM it’s protected use.
heh I’d like to trust that plan for sure
yt-dlp already tougher to use today than in years past—and assuming everything will survive new content deals, uploader purges, etc. is optimistic
ZFS NAS and ECC ram. Or backup to back blaze and let them worry about it
M-disc
My library is better organized than Spotify’s database at this point.
You’re missing the new albums from dead singers generated by the slop machine though.
This, except the same also applies to those with OCD tendencies who spent like 2,000 hours meticulously renaming and organizing file and folders. At times the archive has felt pointless but you’re correct – I should never get rid of it. Even besides the sunk cost fallacy aspect, it might actually turn out to be very valuable in the future. I don’t listen to a ton of music anymore but I recently axed Spotify and started using Plexamp for when I do listen. I like Plexamp – just needs a bit more polish to feel like a AAA app.
I find it funny how we’ve resorted to streaming services in an age where you can put 256 gigabytes ono a pinky nail sized storage solution. Ereaders are even better, an old kindle with 4gb of storage can hold an entire library.
What? you have your own music that you can listen to any time, even offline without some annoying app?
And you can get niche and non-corporate music that’s not on that app?
That’s not progress, get with the times!
Not unless you keep up with migrating your files. Drives fail over time.
Gotta have a good backup strategy for sure. I would’ve lost my collection a few times if I didn’t have one.
I have two hard drives from decades ago full of entire albums that are meticulously sorted and tagged. It was.my magnum opus of OCD.
Try Mp3tag
A wild Mp3tag mentioned!!
I’ll sort it next year. Or next computer. Or…
And it won’t have modern ai rubbish in it, just old gold.
I wish. I lost my 1TB drive of somewhat sorted MP3s and it took all the energy of collecting music with it. I’ve been using Spotify since then. But I still miss that drive.
Yeah, that’s what I thought too, until that drive failed during a system upgrade. I’m not ripping 300+ CD’s AGAIN. Youtube it is.
Soulseek is your friend, use nicotine+
That’s why I have at least 3 copies of my library at any time.
I… Still use the same tools I’ve used about two decades ago…
Jamp! Organizer, and/or MP3 Tagger. MP3 Tagger for fixing the id3 tags, and Jamp! for renaming the files in bulk how I want (artist - song, usually).
only if you keep backups
I’m always disappointed to remembt that the average computer user doesn’t keep any backups whatsoever :/
Imma go against the grain on this one and say, thank fuck for Spotify, I don’t want to waste my time sorting and downloading music that i can have on demand anywhere anytime and I can discover cool new music every week.
Ofc, you know, everyone should do what they like, personally I like the spotify model, the same way Steam stopped my gaming piracy, it stopped my need to pirate music.
i still go to the high sees for Movies and TV shows because personally I am passionate about that and I don’t want to deal with shit like music being switched in Scrubs because licenses expired, the music in that show is a huge part for a lot of episodes you can’t just switch it out.
Have you heard of MetaBrainz? I reckon they have tools to help with music stuff, including tagging and organising music, and keeping track of listens and getting recommendations. Take a look into the MetaBrainz Projects
Gnome Easytag worked perfectly circa 2005.
Back in the day I used iTunes to manage my mp3s, used it to properly fill out their metadata, and then used it to rename all the files appropriately, but there’s tons of other software to do that.
I also lost the last 1/3 of my music library when my roommate spilled beer on my laptop (frying it), and then midway through transferring the files off I tripped on the usb cable and shattered the hard drive.
stoly@lemmy.world 18 minutes ago
I can’t possibly calculate how many hours I spent curating my music library. I don’t use it anymore but you better bet that I still have it saved to the cloud and locally and it’s there in case I need it.