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.

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

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-browser

Needs 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.

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

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.

hey now, they're flac files and painstakingly sorted with the help of musicbrainz picard

Nah, it has very much been replaced with properly sorted .flac files. What ever is left is stuff I don't listen to anymore.

And a long list of WIERDA~1.MP3 that could contain anything.

My library is better organized than Spotify's database at this point.

I still use mp3s because:

1. No financial cost
2. Not tied to any one app or service
3. More customization: Can be played back at any speed or modified in some other way

Unless you're like me and your 25 years worth of mp3s was lost in a hard drive failure a couple of years back... 😢

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.

Some of this stuff I downloaded off the original Napster.

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, my old Kindle with 4gb of storage can hold an entire library.

Try Mp3tag

Remember you can always check out CDs from the library and rip them to your collection.

Not unless you keep up with migrating your files. Drives fail over time.

Well surely you can just use a program to rename the files based on their properly maintained ID3 info?

True. Mine's already over 25 years old. Just keeps hopping from hard drive to hard drive.

Spotify is 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 good 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'd totally fail to work at the worst times no doubt

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 have two directories. The original badly sorted one and the duplicate directory that I ran through some tagging software that failed to properly tag everything. Of course I was going to fix that and so I added things there that aren’t in the original directory so I have to keep both around.

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

I'll sort it next year. Or next computer. Or...

How to protect against bitrot?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation

My man, I've been putting off sorting that shit for twenty years now. In the meantime I've circled back to CDs !