My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk.
Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.
1. Buying used and reasonably priced original music CDs
2. Ripping them with EAC[1] and an external LG BH16NS55 to FLAC format (takes 120 seconds per CD - this drive is FAST and ACCURATE)
3. Auto-import the ripped FLACs into my beets.io database via cronjob (which also unifies the metadata automatically in 99% of the cases)
4. Inplace-convert the FLACs to 192kbps mp3 via `beet convert`
5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB
6. Point a self-hosted Navidrome instance and a Windows VM with iTunes to the beets folder
7. Use Substreamer App with Navidrome's smart playlists[2] and "favoriting" on my Android phone / iPhone as well as iTunes syncing my iPod Nano 7 via smart playlists
Works absolutely flawless and is less work than I expected. Since I automated everything possible, the only manual thing I need to do is the BUYING, the RIPPING and the Bluray ARCHIVING part.
Why bother with MP3s in this day and age?
I have a whole little flowchart like this too but one thing I'll mention is that I use cueripper with eac as a fallback. When I end up using EAC I run the result through cuetools to get the verification log and store it with the original rip in a sort of source directory. Then I split the single cue file to individual flac tracks (I convert them from wave if I had to use EAC) and tag them all/add images etc. the final destination is media monkey and an iPod running Rock box. I keep a spreadsheet with every CD and the rip results and whether metadata has been applied and whether it's been moved over to the iPod.
I use MP3 because it works on just about everything I own. Nothing is more annoying than when you have nicely prepared a USB stick with travel music and in the car nothing works and the computer is 500 km away.
This is why most people bother with MP3 still, we don't care that there is something more recent. Or rather, we do care but have no use for it yet. Not always is the new thing better than the old for your use case.
Great choice... I use Mp3 because its pretty much the works for everything format. Works on USB-Sticks for my car, the old Radio in the Kitchen, etc.
CueRipper looks nice, maybe I'll evaluate, but for now my workflow is totally fine.
The good part is, that if I one day choose to get rid of the MP3s, all I have to do is reimport my FLAC archive (of course I have a Hardisk-Version of the Bluray backup) and I'm done. With `beet convert` I can choose every other compressed format or quality and just need to wait a few hours to "recompile" my whole collection.
Many moons ago I decided to rip everything to AAC, until one day I brought cd full of mp4 files to my dad’s car…and realized that none of them could be played.
Thank you for this. I am trying to figure out what it is I want to do with my collection.
EAC doesn't seem like it would have anything set up for an autoloader like the Nimbie, but dbpoweramp does; on the other hand, the major music-sharing groups seem to prefer EAC.
Sadly, there's nothing out there that will be relatively accurate and precise when it comes to extracting beats per minute, key, and the nebulous "energy" characteristics. I would love to have those.
I think I will also have to work to do things like pushing lyrics and artwork into the FLACs, seeing what metadata "makes it" in the re-encoding to something like a 320kbps MP3.
Have you tried "Mixed in Key" for detection of BPM and key? I used this a long time ago for EDM and for that it works great. I don't know if it works reasonably well for other genres.
I use EAC, because I made this choice a while ago, but there are some other tools around, that can even better automate the process of ripping to flac.
Speaking of metadata: Beets does this pretty well. You should try it, even if it takes a few hours to get used to it. There are a few good youtube tutorials.
Part of the consideration is that I would eventually like to get into the music sharing scene (I have fought this for a very very long time) and there's considerations of which tools and which source of metadata complicating my decisions. Which is the "preferred" among which group?
Beets sounds like it should be part of the mix, but so does MusicBrainz Picard.
I would use 320kbps mp3s. At this point the space savings from 192kbps isn't worth anything and it's one of those things you wish you'd thought through so you won't have to do these steps again.
I'm not an audiophile. For me 192kbps is good enough at the time, but I get your Point. Space should not be a problem these days and why not go as good as possible. Maybe I'll change that in the future.
Like I described above I keep the FLAC Archive on a Harddisk, so if any day I decide to change my library format (e.g. to AAC to use FLAC), it is like one rsync, one import and one convert.
How did you get EAC working exactly? I tried to use it on numerous occasions and each time it would randomly freeze or repeatedly show a dialog box (I forget what it was now, something about tips maybe) until I closed the software. Even while I did nothing the boxes kept appearing. This would cause it to overlay itself endlessly in a loop.
I've been using EAC over 20 years and have never seen anything like what you're seeing. (that said, I might be on a pretty old version, I'm not sure) Try to reinstall it and make sure you do not select the GD3 plugin on installation. It's the only option I'm aware of that might come with a nagware type dialog box.
My apologies, I misspoke. It's the program itself that, without my intervention, will go haywire, regardless of whether I've followed a guide or started from scratch. I seem to be the only one with this particular problem, so I never knew how to fix it.
I use regular Verbatim 25GB disks. Since I keep the original CDs and usually use the Mp3s to listen, this is only a part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Nothing meant to be 200 years archival proof :-)
However, I never use anything but Verbatim, never had a bad experience with it.
Very cool archival setup! Funny you say that about Verbatim. I have a several old burned discs from the 2000s and 2010s where the dye has degraded and is no longer readable, but I have one specific blue Verbatim disc my childhood friend burned for me in the late 90s, and it still reads today!
Exactly my experience. Verbatim is worth the additional cost in my opinion. I mainly do the archival as a hobby... not sure I ever gonna need it :-) However, I'm pretty scared of ransomware these days, so I tried to make my setup as ransomware proof as possible and zfs-auto-snapshot + self burned blurays with the most important data seemed like a good idea :-)
Na you don't. Of course I keep a HDD copy on my Backup-Server, I just mentioned the Bluray thing, because I try to keep my 24/7 System as clean as possible.
What about the metadata? Do you listen to whole CDs at a time? I find that adding the tags for each song takes more time than all of the other steps you mentioned. Of course I use Mp3tag for that, but still, would be nice to auto populate somehow.
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) has a Metadata provider, which matches the audio CDs and pulls data from different sources.
That said, beet (beets.io) is much more convinient / accurate / easy to use and once it is configured properly. EAC has partly inserted the most important metadata stuff (artist, album, etc.) after ripping. So I use a cronjob, that runs `beet import` with "ignore if no match is found", that fully automates the process of embedding the metadata (also cover, lyrics and so on).
Works really well and I don't need to perform ONE mnaual step. Although Mp3Tag is a great tool (and I mean really great), doing all the tagging manually costs just too much time.
beets corrects all the metadata in a very automagic and decent way. If you never tried, it's open source software and totally free. It takes some time to configure and get used to, but it is worth it.
That's a choice I made years ago. Maybe today I would change this, but I did not feel the pain to reencode my whole library yet. Maybe in the future. At least I know I can do it very easily by just reimporting the FLACs and change one config switch in beets :-)
Opus is more exotic and does not work on all my players though (e.g. my car or kitchen radio)
I do something similar to OP but do the final transcoding to HE-AAC VBR 64kbps (ffmpeg params `-c:a aac_at -profile:a 4 -b:a 64k -aac_at_mode 2`). The tracks sound more than acceptable to me and this way I can easily store my entire collection (+80k tracks) into my iPhone. Modern codecs are wonderfully efficient.
Thanks for sharing your params... This is nice, maybe that's something I should consider. I need to test wether my car supports aac. My ipod does and kitchen radio is not that important.
You should See my audio books workflow with m4b-tool and audiobookshelf, which is probably even better ;)
Did you know ffmpeg has a non free Encoder (libfdk_AAC) thats sounds slightly better?
> Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day
Spotify doesn't even have to disappear, it just has to lose access to the songs you care about or raise their prices to the point where they are unfair, or degrade their service in other ways until it's not worth using.
Personally, I'm paranoid about using internet based services to fetch metadata for my local media collection. I imagine their servers log those requests, each filename, the metadata pulled, IPs, and timestamps, and that they keep that data around for at least some length of time. Not sure how many sell that data, but what I'm listening to isn't really anyone else's business and I don't want the RIAA or anyone else to use that information as evidence against me somehow or coming around asking for proof of purchase for every MP3 they got from those logs.
Spotify does this thing for me where, no matter what you do, after an hour or so of listening you find yourself hearing the same 50 or so songs, over and over and over until you go mad. I still pay for it, and use it a bit, but playing my own collection is so much nicer.
I'm a fan of YouTube music's algorithm. I don't even have playlists. I just like songs that I enjoy, and whenever I need music I click something in the homepage and enjoy old and new songs that YouTube thinks I will like.
That’s why I disable all of Spotify’s smart playlist and auto play features. When my playlist/album ends I want to select something new, not be spoon fed whatever everyone else is listening to!
Same for me, I could never understand the hype around their suggestions. Even random playlists like „coffee house music“ (which I exclusively turn on when friends are over) seem to be personalised to me - so much so that they pretty much immediately veer off into heavy rock or other stuff that I may have come across, but that definitely isn’t good as a chill backdrop.
And even the much-praised weekly playlist is hit or miss - sometimes it’s weeks with abhorring stuff, then for once I get a good one with two to three songs I actually like.
Don't get me started on the weekly playlist. Spotify refuses to accept the fact that I don't speak Ukrainian. Yet a big chunk of the Playlist consists out of Ukrainian music. Probably Spotify is not able to differentiate between Ukrainian and Russian, which I listen to a lot
Considering sanctions, Ukrainians are probably the largest Spotify consumers of Russian content right now, and obviously will listen to Ukrainian content too. So their engine probably goes "oh you like Russian stuff, so chances are you're Ukrainian, here's some Ukrainian stuff for you".
Well, it does have some nice features. It autocreates playlists of my girlfriends and my music. And playlists of different genres I listen to. And playlists by release year of genres that I like. And playlists of songs I used to listen to some years ago.
Totally separate from the "song radio" playlists what you probably mean
No, I mean the regular old playlists, like, road trip indie, the shower playlist, late night jazz, what have you. The stuff with cover images and descriptions that looks totally curated. Those are at least enriched with music you listen to, if not downright generated individually.
And it’s awful. Like I’m stuck in an echo chamber. I want to find new music!
I find YouTube Musics Discover Mix good for music discovery, I guess with the downside that you need to actively use YT Music a bit to feed the algorithm. Spotify has a tendency to suggest stuff that is overwhelmingly popular but YT Music isn't afraid to throw in something a lot more obscure that the overlaps with the artists or genres you listen to.
I found so many great new Songs (ProgMetal and similar) through Spotify, but the quality of recommended Songs really deckined gor me in the past two years.
It will match against the Musicbrainz database and will acoustically ID your files, so the tags can be completely wrong and it can ID the song from it's sound fingerprint. Just dump folders of albums into the client, it will group and sort things and ID them. It works great.
It's a miraculous project. I have something like 300+ albums from 170+ artists and it tooks me only a few days to cleanly retag everything, with about 99% of the albums just working.
I wish there had been something like MusicBrainz but for movies, they now have BookBrainz[1] so that would have covered most aspects of digital content.
> It will match against the Musicbrainz database and will acoustically ID your files, so the tags can be completely wrong and it can ID the song from it's sound fingerprint.
For songs that have covers, it will ID the song as any of a number of similar covers. I just tried to use it to tag something from the Grease 2007 revival soundtrack (which, as of this writing, doesn't exist in Musicbrainz), and it happily identified it as the same song from the 1994 revival, which is wrong. This makes me hesitant to use it to identify songs if I don't already know what the identification should be.
I only wish it wasn't written in Python - writing good GUI apps is way too hard with it, also the lack of static typing makes development of anything beyond simple scripts a potential minefield.
I remembered that taking care of metadata of 1000+ mp3 music and syncing them between music players and backing up with CD-RWs were time filler. They still are, but I enjoyed doing so. Digital garden in web 1.0 era I could say.
I was so proud of my meticulously tagged mp3 collection, and even took the time to add album art to everything. I always wanted mp3s tagged with the original album they came from, even if they were from a greatest hits CD or something. (Looking back, this wasn't quite the right mindset, as sometimes the versions on a greatest hits CD or similar will be slightly different than the "real" album version, but it was my collection!)
> I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.
Services eventually disappear. Not many people recall about Vitaminic, a gem of the early 2K that along MySpace gave countless unknown artists and bands the opportunity to put their music online, then one day poof! and it was gone with all its content. I had saved a few quite interesting tracks on my hard drive and attempted to search for the artists in the hope they moved elsewhere, but no way: they were gone forever.
So, screw online services: I'm not going to waste any energy in something whose kill switch is in someone else's hand.
If the artists didn't own their own copyrights, there's a good chance that their stuff is available somewhere else by now. There are many companies out there that do nothing but put your music onto spotify and youtube for exposure; anything owned by a label is probably there.
Fun fact is that I have at least one CD where there was an audio track misprint (one track repeated). I didn't actually notice until I ripped it and used Picard to analyze the tracks.
I also once found two tracks where Spotify's own data was wrong (wrong audio files associated with the album/track names).
After failing in my attempts to escalate it through Spotify support several times, I ended up having to reach out to Glenn MacDonald on Twitter to get it fixed.
I love MusicBrainz Picard but the UI doesn't seem to allow me to mass-manage my TB collection of music. Just crashes after trying to load it all into RAM for 20 minutes or something.
I'm sure there's a CLI or something that can accomplish what I'm trying to do though.
I'm glad the sole dev is able to support themselves by donations from this and now their paid Mac version. It's been an indispensable tool for batch audio tagging and the community is very helpful.
So true. Whenever I need to use it I go and look for an update first and am always relieved (and amazed) that it's still going 20 year later. Best example of software done right.
Kid3 has been my go-to for a long time, but lately I've been using Strawberry[1] as my all-in-one music player, organizer, and tagger.
It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it leaves behind old folders and files. e.g. If I have a few directories of MP3/Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans, it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned up manually.
But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing everything in one application.
* Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]"
It's been my stalwart for years, and I appreciate it very much. But it's nowhere near as finished a product as mp3tag, with much greater fragility. For instance, right now after the last update, which throws a python error. Mp3tag on the other hand has worked flawlessly and in every conceivable way since the dawn of time. Like foobar2000, it's one of the best pieces of software ever written.
Thanks, going to try this out. Mp3tag is one of the few apps I use regularly that I've still been resorting to firing up a Windows VM for (or running it through Wine).
Foobar2000 has a very good tag editor. I especially like how it can batch-sync the title tags from the filenames (via Properties -> Tools -> Automatically Fill Values). And the other way around to rename files using their tags (via File Operations -> Rename To). Super useful.
Apparently ID3 included some strange frames such as the Popularimeter (POPM) for storing emails and ratings! lawik goes through some om them in this post which I found entertaining.
I came across his article about a month ago and likewise enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed (but only a little) when I discovered afterwards that his suggestion of using event time codes to set off explosives on stage was actually suggested in the ID3v2 standards themselves!
The fanciful ideas on the POPM frame were very interesting. The ID3v2 standards author's late 1990s, pre-massive-spam-onslaught design choice to include an email address seems kind of quaint now!
On macOS there's also Meta[0] which I found better than mp3tag.
You can also always use builtin Music.app for organization + tagging. I've been using it (or iTunes before) to manage my local music library for 10 years now and it's the best thing of my life, a big plus is I can also sync my library to my iPhone (altho the software quality downgraded a lot since the Big Sur rewrite). I also wonder if there's a cross platform alternative: a good tagger + a good player / organizer + easy to sync to phone + a good player on phone
I stopped bothering with MP3s over a decade ago in favor of AAC (in .m4a) and for that I use AtomicParsley (https://github.com/wez/atomicparsley) on the command line...should anyone be looking for such a tool.
Interesting; I just discovered and used this tool a month ago. For years I've been wanting to migrate my few hundred remaining MP3 files from iTunes/Music to just store them on the file system but iTunes DB stores play count and star rating in their DB, not in the file itself.
Turns out that there's no standard tag for this, but the most common (from what I searched was POPULARIMETER, where you store it in EMAIL|RATING|PLAYCOUNTER format.
Email is a string (optional), rating is an int 0-255※, and playcounter as an integer.
So I wrote a Python script that would read the file on disk, match it with the entry in iTunes DB, populate POPULARIMETER, then verify everything was set correctly in MP3tag.
This took a few hours to do, mostly due to discovering how to do it and verifying everything worked correctly. Unfortunately the MP3 players I use now (VLC and mpv) don't support updating the POPULARIMETER field, so it'll be left as an unchanging relic from my iTunes days.
※ - 1 star → 0.2x255 = 51, 2 star → 0.4x255 = 102, etc
Ha! Yes, play count (and reasonable if not always to my taste) tagging is about all I miss from iTune, and iTunes and Time Machine is about all I miss from Mac OS. I used to have "Smart Playlist" or whatever it was called that would randomly select say 30 songs with a play count less than 3 to put on my Shuffle to keep me out of musical ruts. I miss that.
I use both the Windows and macOS version almost daily (work vs home), and I'm happy to report that the macOS version is just as efficient as the Windows one when dealing with huge directories. I regularly have to deal with thousands of files at a time, and it just zips through them. One of my all-time favorite applications, no doubt.
I know. I really miss my old iTunes library. I had the genres and other metadata just the way I liked them.
In my quest to find an offline MP3 player for my kid, I spent a bunch of time looking at models, but none of them give you the ability to sort (and shuffle) by artist, album, and genre the way the old iPods did.
I still store most of my music in iTunes (renamed to Music in later macOS versions). I’m also happy with the tag editing of iTunes, especially after installing some custom tag-editing AppleScripts from https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php and modifying some of those scripts.
However, I am rethinking storing all my music in iTunes given that it can’t play Opus or FLAC files (last I checked) and it makes loud glitchy sounds when it plays an MP3 file whose sample rate is 32k instead of 44.1k. I’ve already had to give up on storing all my music files in the iTunes folder now that my entire music library doesn’t fit on my laptop’s storage. Thus, I have been using Meta more.
Media Monkey is great also if you have a large collection. I use the ratings and occasion tags to organize my collection. I like how the meta data is part of the mp3 so you take it wherever your mp3 goes. I guess it’s not economically viable to have a streaming service to allow such flexible customization.
mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection.
> mp3gain from 2005 is another indispensable part of a large mp3 collection.
Do you use it for portable mp3 players? Wondering why mp3gain instead of ReplayGain capable player, seems wrong to edit the music data itself instead of just tagging the gain values.
mp3gain is at the frame level. Sonos in particular does not honor ReplayGain. So the workflow is to adjust the volume with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the ReplayGain. That way it plays on devices that don't honor Replay Gain. Sonos sucks for local mp3s - it's the only way to get the volume to come out the same for everything.
> So the workflow is to adjust the volume with mp3gain, then re-analyze those levels and set the ReplayGain
Doesn't that already happen automatically when you bake the adjustment into the file using mp3gain?
Also small sidenote: There's also a modded version of mp3gain that supports AAC files, too, including the same workflow of optionally baking the adjustments into the AAC data itself for ReplayGain unaware-software. (https://github.com/dgilman/aacgain)
EasyTAG is great in the sense that it has sufficient set of knobs to digest all kinds of MP3 tags seen in the wild, and then convert them to the preferred format.
What I was looking for is a tool to delete all tags from mp3s so the media players only show the file name. Directories for the band, subdues for each album and each song as a file is how I organize music, but audio players often add their own semantics to what should be a simpler concept.
What I find frustrating is that we write these tools for each individual file format. Calibre for tagging books, this tool for tagging music, another tool for tagging images. This stuff should probably be supported directly for all kinds of files in the operating system.
Windows can read/edit ID3 tags and many other types of metadata formats. It's hidden away in the details, but you can select those columns to show in a details directory view.
There's certainly no nice bulk tagging functionality, however.
I'm meticulous about tagging and backing up MP3s for different mixes in car stereos and other devices. One problem is that I have so many MP3s and different copies I don't know which are tagged and when they were ripped. I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.
I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.
> so I'll know how old the rip is - bit rates have increased a bit since last century.
It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer.
Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.
> I prefer to retain the file's modified date when I just update tags so I'll know how old the rip is
Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the ability to run an external script/program on all selected files (via the Tools sub-menu of the context menu) or by configuring File>Export with a script.
For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore them back using a script.
You should consider just adding a `ripped on` tag, or if you're worried about it being a bad encoding then consider re-ripping from sources into a lossless format.
In case someone finds it useful, I wrote a simple in-browser app for editing the chapter tags of an MP3 file (for podcasts), which can also edit some basic other tags like title and cover image: https://mp3chapters.github.io/ It's based on the node-id3 library, via browserify. It would likely be possible to build an in-browser batch tag editor with the same idea, which then wouldn't require installing an app.
I've just spent some time the last few days using this to clean up my music collection. I had a ton of duplicates in different bitrates but some were already tagged how I wanted them and some weren't. The tool is great but I wish it had some kind of side-by-side mode where it was easier to compare the tags of two files.
I download a lot of FLAC recordings of taper-friendly bands and Mp3tag is indispensable. I wish it could easily read the info.txt files that usually accompany the recording and assign track names but that is about it.
I wrote one of these mp3 tag editors for personal use back in the day using C++Builder or Delphi. I can't remember which one but I remember it was a pleasant experience.
Dear god, no. I don't even want to think about someone else messing up my library. I think music enthusiasts are very particular about their media and library management.
Genre started out useful. Five or six categories. Classical made sense. Pop made sense.
Now, I have to decide if this is West Coast electro skiffle or its Canadian folk influenced digital beats.
We wind up needing another tag, to do classical/pop/folk in.
Also, players don't agree on artist/composer/orchestra or on movement numbering, you can't even rely on BWV. I've had multiple CD sets split by the amazing variance of back catalogue mining meaning an 11 part cd set of Chopin can match a 9 or 10 part set and a single release cd or two.
The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare, matched only by how hard approximation of date is in EXIF
Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I’m old enough to remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0]
The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems.
[0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.
About 10 years ago I went on a massive retagging of my library and decided to use the "Grouping" tag as a high level genre tag, while the actual "Genre" would contain all the messy/impossible to normalize subgenres. This was a suggestion I picked up from some article I read back then and seemed like a good idea, plus it was supported by a tagging plugin in MusicBrainz Picard. There were problems with mp3s that used older tagging formats and it was ultimately resolved by upgrading those to a newer version of id3. But what ultimately broke the deal was that most players had spotty or no support at all for the "Grouping" tag. Pretty much nothing wants to use the "Grouping" tag as a genre filter, if they even acknowledge its existence at all.
What made it even more frustrating was that I already had to restrict (and still do) to players that properly support "Album artist" tags if I want sensible filtering/searching/listing of albums that have multiple artists credited or is a compilation of songs from different artists. So I was left with a paltry selection of players that properly supported everything I wanted (and didn't suck), couldn't even setup a subsonic server (although that had other issues too..), and NO SINGLE android app could deal with it.
I eventually had to revert all this nonsense and use the "Genre" tag as god (apparently) intended.
So moral of the day, (or TL;DR) don't do weird shit with tags.
Gold response. Plex basically says "stick to an artist/album directory hierarchy and do composer somehow which doesn't conflict and Album-Artist sort tag reading is your friend but if you fuck it up I AM COMING AT YOU LIKE AN ANGRY GOOSE WITH A KNIFE" and so I dropped into line.
When I do smart search on original album issue year like "60s" I find I get hit by amazing truths about what was contemporaneous music.
"Switched on Bach" alongside "the Beatles" and "the song of the green berets" as well as Charles' Aznavour and Mingus, Terry Riley, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Keith Jarret, the Hollies, and Rogers & Hammertime (sorry -stein) It was a mixed up musical period. Thank God the fab four split up before the 70s.
Len Deighton's spy hero listens to Stockhausen and Miles.
I manage my collection as physical CDs. My current format for files and folder is "{album artist} - {year} - {album}/[Disc {disc #}/]{track #} {title}.ext". I mostly listen as albums, not playlists. This gave me enough information to locate music both using the filesystem and a library manager. I do have extra tags (I'm using beets to manage the collection), but I don't really bother with them.
I don't bother with genre tags. And if my main collection grows enough to require them (currently ~500 albums), I think I will just be creating playlists.
As for album artist, every player I came across could support it (except Rhythmbox I think). I currently have Navidrome, MPD, and Doppler (Mac) pointed at the same collection. Swinsian (Mac) does support the grouping tag.
"The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare"
*Truth*. I find it really frustrating to only be able to assign one genre and one grouping to a song or album. Rating is another one. A 0-5 system is woefully insufficient to rate music. (If I had my way, it would adopt Robert Christgau's grading system[1] that runs from "Dud" to "A+"...)
Some of the better media players and library management tools will allow a delimiter in the Genre field to allow multiple genre tags. Personally, I'm using Roon which lets you set such a delimiter to look for in the genre tag.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag...
My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk.
Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.