Haven't seen anything in music space that's like Calibre for books, except on mobile. Mobile I understand (though it still annoys me to no end) - as an industry, we've decided to eschew a perfectly good abstraction of a file system, an abstraction that could be learned once and used everywhere, and instead decided that every app will have to reinvent and reimplement document management experience on its own, each in its own inconsistent way.
I know there are CLI music players, though I haven't used them much. Of the ones I did, Winamp 3 was nice; Foobar2000 was great once I switched its default layout to display folder-oriented structure of the music library. I stayed with Foobar2000 for almost a decade (now I just use YouTube for streaming), because every other player I've tried out either didn't support incremental filtering (super convenient feature), or didn't understand that I don't care about metadata on mp3s (most of the time they're missing or wrong anyway) - I want its "library" to reflect the folder structure, instead of the player adding its own VFS on top of the native FS.
And now there's the same problem with ebook readers. I've recently tried to find a Windows epub reader that would just open the file, like a PDF reader opens a PDF. I failed. Everything wants to bundle its own "book library" management. But here's the thing: I already use Zotero for managing my research documents, including an occasional epub. I want a reader that will open an epub that I double-click on in Zotero.
(EDIT: Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned Sumatra; maybe I'll give it another shot. I previously dismissed it because I don't need another PDF reader, and I really like Drawboard PDF - I use its annotation features a lot.)
At least in the image space, photo library management is a separate category of applications from photo viewers.
I share your frustration at the modern reluctance to use the filesystem properly, but it’s not a perfectly good abstraction for this problem. Users often want to browse and sort movies or books according to multiple metadata fields (eg. title, author, date). Hierarchical filesystems are not good at this, hence the metadata that is available is often low quality, and users need “library managers” to help them collect and display it.
I know there are CLI music players, though I haven't used them much. Of the ones I did, Winamp 3 was nice; Foobar2000 was great once I switched its default layout to display folder-oriented structure of the music library. I stayed with Foobar2000 for almost a decade (now I just use YouTube for streaming), because every other player I've tried out either didn't support incremental filtering (super convenient feature), or didn't understand that I don't care about metadata on mp3s (most of the time they're missing or wrong anyway) - I want its "library" to reflect the folder structure, instead of the player adding its own VFS on top of the native FS.
And now there's the same problem with ebook readers. I've recently tried to find a Windows epub reader that would just open the file, like a PDF reader opens a PDF. I failed. Everything wants to bundle its own "book library" management. But here's the thing: I already use Zotero for managing my research documents, including an occasional epub. I want a reader that will open an epub that I double-click on in Zotero.
(EDIT: Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned Sumatra; maybe I'll give it another shot. I previously dismissed it because I don't need another PDF reader, and I really like Drawboard PDF - I use its annotation features a lot.)
At least in the image space, photo library management is a separate category of applications from photo viewers.