I’m working on building a personal alternative to Spotify and YouTube Music and I’ve hit two roadblocks.
Genre labeling in my library is inconsistent and manually updating 2500+ MP3s isn’t feasible. I’ve tried using beets with the LastFM plugin in quiet mode but no luck. Any ideas?
Where can I bulk download diverse music catalogs? I’ve snagged some ‘top 90s/80s/hiphop/etc’ collections, but 2500 songs don’t go far.
What I miss about Spotify and YouTube Music is their ability to auto-play similar tunes based on my current selection. Any advice would be appreciated.
For downloading music in bulk, I personally subscribe to Deezer and then run Deemix in Docker which allows me to download offline audio in FLAC. I then serve those FLAC using Plex and Navidrome.
If you start with the option to move, then it’s bound to happen. If you take small steps and start with using -p (pretend) and use -t/--timid when importing/moving, then you get the hang of it and it works great. When I started I used 3-4 albums in a folder and tried to experiment with settings and plugins until I got what I needed.
Beets will work, but you have to put in the effort to get all your music imported correctly (you have a backup, right!), then lastfm plugin will work fine (and metadata, and album art, and lyrics, and …). Once you get started, it’s pretty easy to add new stuff in. It does tend to work better with albums, I’ve mostly moved to getting an album when I’ve wanted a single song, because space is cheap, and I’ve found some interesting stuff that way.
Picard is probably the most popular tool for this, but a problem with any auto-tagger is that you may disagree with the genre selection. Because the data is all crowdsourced you also see inconsistencies… Like “Hip-Hop” and “Hip Hop” both in use. Either you live with that stuff… Or, you do it yourself.
2500 tracks isn’t actually that much to do manually. Chip away at it with a great tool like mp3tag, and once you are caught up, do new additions as you get them.
Someone here said:
It does tend to work better with albums, I’ve mostly moved to getting an album when I’ve wanted a single song…
This is so true. Loose single tracks are a pain in the ass too. Try to get full releases.
I use lidarr together with plex and jellyfin. For downloading, I have chosen the usenet and it works pretty good full automatic. You just need the right indexers.
There is a certain not cheap (paid monthly) one where you feel like a vip using headphones. Sadly I seem to be not allowed to share the name of the Indexer here for some reason. I did once share the best german indexer (my opinion) and my comment got deleted.
Identifying: Picard (I think) by musicbrainz
Organizing and keeping track: Lidarr
There are alternatives to lidarr but that’s what I did for my ~300 files.
Picard matches by current metadata and to some extend by acoustic ID (similar to shazam).
Still better to review files before commiting the metadata (album, year, version, miss matched releases similar releases in name by cover bands or release name etc.)
For downloading more: I had great success with scarce releases (rare touhou songs) on soulseek.
For bulk diverse, pre-tagged and sorted collections you really have to go to p2p like soulseek.
For tagging picard is really the only option that can handle bulk tagging with some level of trust and authority, but definitely have a backup or work in chunks just in case it goes awry.
For a spotify replacement, Plexamp is really doing well as long as you have decently tagged media.
It can do all the mood radio and playlist suggestion stuff that Spotify and others have been doing.
Plexamp is great. I have not spent too much extra time tagging tracks. Plexamp does a good job of seeing your tracks and albums and catagorizing them into genres amd moods.
Sorry for necroposting, but can I bulk download a custom playlist from soulseek? I understand it as a semi-private torrent tracker, so I’m guessing I’ll have to seed back every single music (even if it’s not forced I still will). That’ll make it even more annoying, all files are stored twice, once sorted and dumped into a filefor playback, and once inside the "torrent"s folder.
Also also do I have to look out for something before jumping head first into soulseek?
I use mpd-sima for autoplay functionality. It would in turn require using mpd or mopidy.
It queries last.fm for recommended artists and tries to find a match in your playlist. It works, but honestly it’s not great. I don’t think it’s any fault of the software. Last.FM doesn’t know your library and seems to return limited results, so it’s like a game of battleship actually getting a hit. (Not quite that bad, but the analogy holds water, overall)
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For downloading music in bulk, I personally subscribe to Deezer and then run Deemix in Docker which allows me to download offline audio in FLAC. I then serve those FLAC using Plex and Navidrome.
back in the day i used picard. is that still a thing?
here it is
Easytags for metadata
I’ve used MP3tag to fix a lot of my downloads, it pulls from Discog.com, and you can edit multiple items manually.
Not sure if this is necessarily something that’d help your situation, but I also am trying to get away from Spotify. Too many missing songs…
I use beets and soulseek but my ambitions are lower than yours.
I used beets once, misconfigured something and boy what damage it did to my music partition it was easier to wipe it and restore from backup.
Its powerfull but can cause some damage with copy / merge / rename etc.
If you start with the option to move, then it’s bound to happen. If you take small steps and start with using
-p(pretend) and use-t/--timidwhen importing/moving, then you get the hang of it and it works great. When I started I used 3-4 albums in a folder and tried to experiment with settings and plugins until I got what I needed.I thought i got it, endee up nuking all my music
Lol! That was me last night but fortunately I played with fake copies and directories and wow. It could have been bad
Beets will work, but you have to put in the effort to get all your music imported correctly (you have a backup, right!), then lastfm plugin will work fine (and metadata, and album art, and lyrics, and …). Once you get started, it’s pretty easy to add new stuff in. It does tend to work better with albums, I’ve mostly moved to getting an album when I’ve wanted a single song, because space is cheap, and I’ve found some interesting stuff that way.
Musicbrainz Picard
Genre tagging is a huge pain in the ass!
Picard is probably the most popular tool for this, but a problem with any auto-tagger is that you may disagree with the genre selection. Because the data is all crowdsourced you also see inconsistencies… Like “Hip-Hop” and “Hip Hop” both in use. Either you live with that stuff… Or, you do it yourself.
2500 tracks isn’t actually that much to do manually. Chip away at it with a great tool like mp3tag, and once you are caught up, do new additions as you get them.
Someone here said:
This is so true. Loose single tracks are a pain in the ass too. Try to get full releases.
There is no way to do this in bulk, quickly. I’ve spent 20+ years collecting and it’s still nowhere near “perfect”.
Use Picard, try your best to match the actual release.
I use lidarr together with plex and jellyfin. For downloading, I have chosen the usenet and it works pretty good full automatic. You just need the right indexers.
What indexers do you use for music?
There is a certain not cheap (paid monthly) one where you feel like a vip using headphones. Sadly I seem to be not allowed to share the name of the Indexer here for some reason. I did once share the best german indexer (my opinion) and my comment got deleted.
Identifying: Picard (I think) by musicbrainz
Organizing and keeping track: Lidarr
There are alternatives to lidarr but that’s what I did for my ~300 files.
Picard matches by current metadata and to some extend by acoustic ID (similar to shazam).
Still better to review files before commiting the metadata (album, year, version, miss matched releases similar releases in name by cover bands or release name etc.)
For downloading more: I had great success with scarce releases (rare touhou songs) on soulseek.
Picard’s interface is super wonky. I’ve been using tag scanner for over a decade and it’s been great.
For bulk diverse, pre-tagged and sorted collections you really have to go to p2p like soulseek.
For tagging picard is really the only option that can handle bulk tagging with some level of trust and authority, but definitely have a backup or work in chunks just in case it goes awry.
For a spotify replacement, Plexamp is really doing well as long as you have decently tagged media. It can do all the mood radio and playlist suggestion stuff that Spotify and others have been doing.
Plexamp is great. I have not spent too much extra time tagging tracks. Plexamp does a good job of seeing your tracks and albums and catagorizing them into genres amd moods.
Sorry for necroposting, but can I bulk download a custom playlist from soulseek? I understand it as a semi-private torrent tracker, so I’m guessing I’ll have to seed back every single music (even if it’s not forced I still will). That’ll make it even more annoying, all files are stored twice, once sorted and dumped into a filefor playback, and once inside the "torrent"s folder.
Also also do I have to look out for something before jumping head first into soulseek?
Soulseek is more like an old school peer to peer network like kazaa, limewire, winmx, ed2k etc.
I haven’t seen any clients with a playlist downloader, though that sounds like a cool feature to suggest.
You don’t have to seed.
deleted by creator
I use mpd-sima for autoplay functionality. It would in turn require using mpd or mopidy.
It queries last.fm for recommended artists and tries to find a match in your playlist. It works, but honestly it’s not great. I don’t think it’s any fault of the software. Last.FM doesn’t know your library and seems to return limited results, so it’s like a game of battleship actually getting a hit. (Not quite that bad, but the analogy holds water, overall)