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. And they’ll still be terribly-organised.
Just another person recommending Musicbrainz Picard.
I had about 600 sketchy music files. I had started using Kodi and I wanted my music library to look nice. So I cleaned up all the art and metatags. It was a bit of an undertaking. I actually added a few of my albums to their database. I’m happy with the result. MBP is a really cool project.
no it won’t. the fog is coming.
No need to change the names, they are too legendary. Well, seriously, these strange names and the like can be left simply as nostalgia.
I’m old enough to be one of Napster’s early adopters. Unfortunately most of my collection has been lost to either malfunction or negligence but due to most of the major streamers being fucking evil I’m back sailing the musical seven seas. And plus my internet is about 100x faster now so yohoho mehearties.
And no ads 😁
My man, I’ve been putting off sorting that shit for twenty years now. In the meantime I’ve circled back to CDs !
I have 4630 MP3s on my phone. Most of it is organized well enough. An album per folder. Lots of them are even tagged correctly. The folder on my PC that is holding probably 3X that is a horrible mess.
Well surely you can just use a program to rename the files based on their properly maintained ID3 info?
My folder doesn’t even have a consistent file format, almost nothing has that kind of data included.
I used Musicbrainz Picard to sort out my old library. I was honestly impressed with how much I could find all the data for, but it did need help for a lot of things.
Yeah I’ve been in that same boat. My music collection is made up of stuff I stole off Limewire, ripped compilation CDs, soundtracks, stuff I recorded off the radio…most are mp3, I’ve only started using FLAC last year, ID3 or other metadata stuff is completely inconsistent or missing.
There are services that will identify the track based on examining the audio and provide data for it. I used a piece of Linux software called EasyTag for that purpose.
I was telling someone just yesterday about limewire when one of my playlists popped up the song I had downloaded 22 years ago.
I may have to try easytag instead of manually searching, right clicking, adding the data to the properties tab.
I still use mp3s because:
- No financial cost
- Not tied to any one app or service
- More customization: Can be played back at any speed or modified in some other way
no fucking commercials or streaming bullshit.
ZERO FUCKING DOLLARS GOES TO JOE FUCKHEAD ROGAN.
that’s enough justification for mp3 imho
I find music on YouTube and autoconvert it to MP3 with yt-dlp and ffmpeg. It fetches new music from my personal “Favorite Music” playlist, downloads the highest quality audio source, converts it to MP3, embeds the metadata and cover art and tries to parse the artist and title as best as possible.
yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" --playlist-start 1 --playlist-end 999 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=123abc -o "./files/%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies-from-browserNeeds minimal adjustment sometimes if the title format is weird, but works 95% automatic. What I like most about this is the fact that music vanishes all the time from YouTube, but it doesn’t affect me. No one deletes the files from my harddrive but me.
Pro tip, make sure the browser you’re copying the cookies of isn’t logged in. Otherwise they may ban you sooner or later.
Is there a good guide to passing cookies to yt-dlp? Its one of those things I’ve been meaning to learn but never quite got around to yet…
Doing God’s work
I want to marry you.
TYVM
I have just been downloading as it is with
yt-dlp -x(created an alias so I just typedl) and then rename and sort the files manually as I find stuff is so often in different naming formats
I’ve got a directory like that on my computer, nested under a couple of /old_computer directories. At some point in the early 2000’s I switched to a system of (still not so well named) full albums as hard drive sizes increased and internet connections got faster, leaving the old original directory of one-offs from the dialup days to wither.
My favorite part is the New Music directory where I stick new stuff I obtain until I give it a listen to it make sure that 1) it’s something I actually want to keep and 2) whether there is any quality issues with the encoding. There’s stuff in there with timestamps from like 2002. Yeah, I’m still planning to check that out…someday…
/media/zfspool1/music/new/new/frommurray2008/
It’s half a terabyte and I’ve found all sorts of shit in there, but I doubt I’ll ever get it organized. I mocks me in defiance.
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.
mp3tag (mp3tag.de) is great too.
Picard sometimes falls short on cover arts and track names of some niche or non-english albums because of that mp3tag with discogs is sometimes needed
For Linux there’s puddletag, which is very similar to mp3tag
puddletag was actually based off mp3tag, but even has stuff mp3tag doesn’t have. highly recommend.
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
Picard is literally the only Jellyfin related tool I use that isn’t fully automated, because somehow the automated versions I could find were doing things like renaming files on a 60% confidence of the filename and I had to nuke and re download my library.
So instead I open Picard, click 6 whole buttons, and my entire library/new files are renamed, tagged, and sorted 100% accurately.
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.
Unless you’re like me and your 25 years worth of mp3s was lost in a hard drive failure a couple of years back… 😢
Mine is included in my backup script, rsync to several other devices.
Data loss is tragic, I feel for you
For me it was 10 years worth of mp3s in my pen drive
I had the perfect collection back then
o7 we all learn the backup rule one way or another.
thanks for the reminder to test mine!
Wanna know the funniest part? I have a bachelor and master of computer science! 🤣
hey now, they’re flac files and painstakingly sorted with the help of musicbrainz 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…
Check out beets.
Why, what does it do better than picard?
Saved me a ton of time for some massive imports, but I do get @Wolf314159@startrek.website point, night not be the best tool for other cases.
It’ll destroy all your painstakingly crafted and curated ID3 tags much faster than Picard. I’m not salty or anything. Anyway, the lesson for me was that music is simply too complicated from a library perspective to trust to highly-automated tools like beets. Picard kind of encourages you to go directory by directory and release by release, and that is a good thing. These days so are does most of the library stuff for newly added things, but I usually end up fixing it all basic to my standard with Picard later.
Yeah, definitely agreed. There are so many edge cases. I tend to put new downloads/purchases in an “intake” dir and then run that through picard, which then saves it at the final local storage path with whatever tags I decide to use
I noticed the other day my car can play MP3 CDs and Ive been thinking about popping the one I used to have in my first car in there. It’s still in one of the 5 CD books I have in my closet.
