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.
Remember you can always check out CDs from the library and rip them to your collection.
MusicBrainz Picard https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
I’ve used this to fix all my fucked up MP3 mess and it really helped a lot. Just make sure you change the input and output folders and let er rip!
It’s free
I don’t really do the folder of MP3s thing any more.
I am much more into the Jellyfin full of FLACs thing these days!
I bet up in the attic next to one of my sweet old Abit motherboards I have a dusty old hard drive with a folder full of music from the 90s and early 2000s.
That reminds me that I should definitely plug my phone into my desktop and do a ton of music folder creation and reorganizing. I’ve got over 500 files and I really need to fully organize every single one and reorganize the ones that are organized already. Same with my much smaller set on my desktop. Luckily that one isn’t nearly as bad.
I have a few thousand mp3s and they are all neatly organised with tags and sorted in folders by artist and album. Whenever I add something i make sure it follows my naming scheme and has all the tags. Has been like that since I got my first few albums when I was like 10.
Maybe I’m on the autism spectrum.
I have something similar on my laptop, but it’s only partially implemented on my desktop and phone. I only recently, within the last few years, really started to care. Some gear in my autistic brain started turning and now I need to have my music organized. I’ve just been held back on my phone and desktop because of how much work it would take, even though it would probably take less than an hour.
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.
I’ve been doing something similar but but very basic. I didn’t know you could also add thumbnails and metadata! Mind = blown…
I will change my old ways ASAP. A new era begins!
I want to marry you.
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
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
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.
deleted by creator
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.
I actually got rid of all my old MP3s years ago. Not because I regret acquiring them, but because the quality sucked. Even 320kbps. You can’t tell CD from MP3 through my stereo, or in the car. But it is really obvious through my headphones, and ruins my critical listening experience. Had to re-rip all of my CDs to lossless, and lost all the ones I didn’t have CDs for.
immaculately sorted. IMMACULATELY!
Mine is sorted as well but I named the folder “unsorted”
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
Amen. Glad to hear I’m not the only one baffled that Spotify’s app development is total garbage. It is one app that doesn’t get updated ever - once I have a working version. If it were up to me, I’d happily never use it again
I’ve been sorting my MP3 files since 2003. It’s a Sisyphian task. Every few years I’m like “ok, let’s sort those songs with the new, improved sorting method I just came up with” and after a few hours or days of intense sorting I just quit and let them be.
Maybe this will be the year I finally sort them out! 🤣
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
Yeah forgot to mention the lack of ads and the reliable access anywhere part
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
Holy shit, soulseek is still a thing??! TIL
Slskd is an app that is meant to be run in docker to integrate with your arr stack for music
I was today years old when I found out the arr stack is called like that because it’s used to sail the high seas… Arr 🏴☠️🦜
I have a happy middle ground:
I pay for Tidal’s student subscription. I leverage the fact Tidal streams FLAC files that can be decrypted by your account to build my local collection.
So I never actually stream or use their app, but technically am paying for the downloads.
I tried buying FLACs from companies that actually wanted to sell FLACs but they have ridiculously bad catalogues.
The files downloaded this way are usable offline? Is there some utility you are using to do this? I am very interested.
Yep, they’re regular FLAC files with tagged metadata.
You can use them as normal. Copy to another device, to an iPod, use them on a video editor, send to a friend.
This has been going on for ages, Tidal never patched it, so I think they quietly are okay with it because not many users do it anyway and at least you’re paying for the service.
any links for more info?
Look up soulseek
I think any links would violate Lemmy.world’s policies.
But a quick search for “Tidal downloader github” will give you several options.
But the ides is that when Tidal streams to specific devices they basically upload an encrypted FLAC to an AWS host and the device downloads the file and uses your account as the key.
So people create apps that do all that, but instead of simply streaming the FLAC, they download and save it. They require a paid account, or an active free trial. I pay for the discounted student one, which still gives you access to the maximum audio quality.
The great part is you get album art, live lyrics, high resolution audio, an organized and properly tagged library with zero work. The output FLACs are regular files - no DRM or weirdness, I use them on a MP3 player.
i gave it a cursory duckduckgo! everything looked a couple years old. I’ll keep digging.
i wouldn’t mind a dm! if you’ve the time.
You want a new generation tidal downloader.
On GitHub.
So a Tidal downloader new generation.
One could call such a thing tidal-dl-ng if they’re trying to save some letters, I guess.
thanks for helping out an old man!
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’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 😁
I was dipping my toes back in the seas earlier today, but did not find a good option, is there one you like for music other than rutracker which appears very sketch and needs an account?
Unfortunately, the fish aren’t as plentyful as they were back in the good ol’ days but I’m still finding most of what I want on pirate bay or 1337X. It’s just a case of finding the option with the most reliable seeds.
Aren’t private trackers the best method? But good luck getting an invite to them.
Side note, if someone has connections, I’m interested.
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.
Got any good resources for learning?
In my (limited) experience Docker is just “run some script from a random GitHub that loads more stuff from a random GitHub… now you have a blob of code on your PC somewhere that’s unmodifiable and inaccessible unless it’s a web app in which case it’s listening on a random port with no access to any system resources”
I assume there’s something more I need to be doing but all the learning resources just kinda assume you understood wtf it’s doing.
Switch “some script” to “docker compose” and you are a subject matter expert.
all the learning resources just kinda assume you understood wtf it’s doing.
Welcome to the linux community.
I mean I’d rather get told to “rtfm” than hear “it just works” with no explanation
I tend to think of docker containers like light virtual machines.
You can start with an image of a very simple bare operating system, or from an OS with a few things installed (in my case I have lately been using images from dockerhub under nvidia/cuda-ubuntu so that my container spins up with ubuntu and the drivers and SDK for my GPU).
Then essentially the Dockerfile becomes the sandbox from which to test installation scripts, see what works by trial and error if necessary, to install the programs you want – if you make a mistake or the install script fails as in the comment above, you can just kill the container and spin up a new one without the “doesn’t really work wrong but its never quite right again” issue :)
I know this does sound like ‘rtfm’ but I definitely have made a lot of use of the Docker manuals: https://docs.docker.com/manuals/
These manuals, plus stack overflow searching for Dockerfile tips, and github repos for the software I want to use that sometimes do contain Dockerfiles, have been enough to get me acquainted with spinning up my own containers and installing what I need, and use docker compose to run multiple containers on a single host that can talk to each other. Beyond that, I had to search a bit harder (mostly on StackOverflow, but also a bit of tail-chasing using ChatGPT) to learn how to configure overlay networks to allow containers to talk to one another from on different servers, and using docker stack to spin up a swarm of containers as services on a cluster.
Yeah… that all makes sense and those docks seem decent. The piece of the puzzle that’s missing for me is: how does docker turn a yaml config that says like … (from their example):
> frontend: > image: example/webapp > ports: > - "443:8043" > networks: > - front-tier > - back-tier > configs: > - httpd-config > secrets: > - server-certificate… into actual operating, functioning container blobs? e.g. How does it know that “secrets: server-certificate means that it should take an ssl cert and place it in the container? How does it know where to place that certificate?
I haven’t used secrets but I would go through the docker compose secrets docs
https://docs.docker.com/compose/how-tos/use-secrets/
At a glance it seems to be informative, but I’m not sure if it explains in depth how it is doing things under the hood.
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 used 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 use Symfonium and an easily happy with it, if it helps. Not foss - you have a one time fee (aka buying - not a subscription), however. I found it worth it, and use it in conjunction with a Navidrome instance.
I’ve been using Tempo with Navidrome and it’s really good!
+1 for Feishin if you want a desktop client as well.
Sorry I am on iOS. I use Play:sub and I love it. Maybe there’s an android version?
I fucking love beets
