A few people commenting that some of their collection "doesn't exist in any DB", the best way to fix it is to add it to Musicbrainz[0] yourself!
I have found that adding things to Musicbrainz is actually pretty easy (and if you are so inclined like me, pretty rewarding and fun).
Streaming releases (and Bandcamp) you simply drop the release URL into Harmony[1] and it does most of the work for you.
Musicbrainz can represent nearly everything musically related and its all freely licensed, a very cool thing to exist.
Most (non-destructive) edits are auto-applied, whilst the rest go through a 7 day voting period (they are still applied by default unless someone votes against). The barrier to entry is very low.
You're still assuming that all of a person's music metadata _belongs_ in a global database. Some of my collection includes:
-"frankenstein" musical soundtracks where I've assembled my favorite version of each song from all the various published recordings. Sometimes I've even edited pieces of different recordings together into a hybrid track.
-a soundboard recording of my friend's high school talent show performance
-Music I've personally recorded from video games or other random sources
-Songs where I've edited out parts I don't like (such as overly-long drum solos) leaving just the parts I do.
I've organized these things in a way that makes sense for me, not for the world.
This is like a bookshelf that can only store books with an ISBN that can be classified in the Dewey decimal system. Too bad about your family photo scrapbooks or your personal sketchbooks!
What I think they're doing (and what I've done) is add music that wasn't already in the global database to it. For example, a promotional CD, or releases from a small publisher, etc.
In these cases, you're not adding personal metadata or mixtapes.
That said, definitely do self organization if it works for you. Most of your examples seem like they're suitable for custom playlists.
I have similar reservations about custom tags. My collection makes heavy use of non-standard tags, such as performer:<instrument>, opus, key, subtitle, or style. I can't find anything in the documentation about which tags are supported, or for which formats (I keep A/V registrations in Matroska containers, using the same tagging convention -- like using performer:<role> to save actor credits).
There is value for me in having a central database for this data, for example to find misspellings of the same name. But the fear of having 20 years of custom data entry destroyed by an overzealous tool makes me very hesitant to even try a solution like this.
Wow I've needed harmony for years, thanks for sharing! My dumb ass was filling out the Musicbrainz by hand for like two months before I just gave up on beets.
I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over.
This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.
Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:
* brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)
* commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
* non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)
* fan-recorded concerts
* fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)
* fan edits/remixes of commercial releases
* playlists & mix tapes
* mixed media releases
Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will still take thought.
This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.
> * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
I fixed those two by adding the missing releases to the database beets uses as its data source (musicbrainz.org), and importing the album in Beets afterwards. I still get notifications for edits to entries I contributed over a decade ago!
Everyone else is telling you to go update musicbrainz, and that's a sensible course of action for the first two bullets, but the much easier path is to import all these files with whatever metadata they have.
There is no canonical metadata for a fan recording of a concert or DIY CD-R, so you lose out on nothing by importing the files as they are today.
Once you're over the hump of the first import, beets is a fabulous tool for ingesting new music. It's well worth it.
This is the answer I arrived at myself a few hours into importing my own music library. Cleaning up metadata for commercial releases is a nice feature beets offers, but the real value (IMO) of beets is it's a powerful toolbox for managing a large music library, and that's true even if you were to eschew musicbrainz integration for all your music.
I do think it's a pretty fair complaint that it really feels like the software is fighting against you when you first encounter something absent from the musicbrainz database (especially if it's something fundamentally unsuited to be added to the database), but I'm not sure if there's an easy solution other than telling people "just hit the `import with existing metadata' button, it's totally fine" when they complain about it.
Can I ask what you choose to manage your library with today? I feel like streaming has made me stray so far from the joy (and pain) of library curation, and I’d really like to get back to it, I just don’t know what folks are using these days.
I have all of my mp3s on a NAS and point plex at it to index. I’ve also set it up as a source for Sonos (which I’m growing less fond of as each day passes).
I guess my point is that I like having a directory of music (organized by artist/album) and make the discovery applications I use do the work of finding and playing the music I want.
I've always struggled to get my classical CDs tagged in a way that makes sense to me. Apple has figured it out in their classical music app and I should probably see if I can copy what they did in my personal library.
> fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)
I've long enjoyed extracted audio from eg Glastonbury sets. I've only got a few that I particularly enjoyed and where the specific track was on youtube - is it that sort of thing? Is there a community of such reprobates?
It provides a nice interface for managing and editing tags that integrates well with other command-line tools and keeps your file system well-organized/up-to-date as you edit the tag contents. The batteries-included integration with datasources like musicbrains and discogs is nice, but, at least for me, beets is mainly a better tool for accomplishing the same tag and file janitoring I was doing with things like foobar2000 and eyeD3 a decade ago.
If you're using Navidrome or similar to stream your music then check out beets-alternatives [0]. It lets you sync (and optionally convert) your library or a subset of it to another location, in my case my music storage mounted with Rclone. It's especially useful if you need to have a different naming structure in your target directory for whatever reason. I like to keep each disc of a multi-disc album in in its own subdirectory but most streaming servers seem to prefer all tracks of an album to be in the same directory. With Beets-alternatives I can have a different naming structure for each collection vs. having to rename my primary collection to suit whatever streaming server I happen to be using.
I've tried many times to find a nice UI for beets and somehow never come across this. It is exactly what I've been searching for all these years... Thanks for sharing!
I spent a couple of nights working out how to configure beets to my liking and have loved it ever since. My “workflow” is now:
- buy album on Bandcamp
- download zip
- beet import {zip file name}
And beets extracts the zip, matches the album to musicbrainz, updates any metadata, and drops the files into the directory structure that I like (naming the files how I like them, too).
Very rarely an album will need some more attention, in which case I use Picard to fix it before using beets to import it.
A very similar workflow on my end, both beets as the main tagger/organizer and Picard to pick up whatever can't be processed through beets. Beets is amazing!
Sometimes there’s just weirdness though - for example recently I bought an album and the band included all the tracks from their previous album as bonus tracks. So I used Picard to split them into the 2 “proper” albums.
(Only because I have an axe to grind) I really dislike "genre" and work hard to strip that metadata tag. It is so reductive. And flawed as well.
Do we assign a "genre" to an artist? Album? Song?
The band R.E.M.: "College Rock"? "New Wave"? "Alternative"?
(Wow, don't even get me started on all the ways you can further slice up "alternative" into "shoe-gaze", "twee", etc. It's, ha ha, naval gazing for the music intelligentsia.)
R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville"? "Country"?
I think "live" and "soundtrack" might be the only two interesting "genres".
More seriously, there’s no reason you can’t assign more than one genre to a song, or say that “it’s a mix of A and B”. You can extend the concept to albums and artists just as easily.
I’m not familiar with R.E.M., but on rateyourmusic.com they’re marked as alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock. “Don’t go back to Rockville” is marked as Jangle pop, and the “Reckoning” album overall is mostly Jangle pop with some influences from post-punk and Paisley Underground.
You may not agree with these categorizations, but it’s a crowd-sourced website so you can go vote for different genres. You may also disagree with the existence of all of these genres, some of which I’ve never heard of myself (but as I said, I haven’t listened much to R.E.M. in general), but my point is more that if you’re familiar with them then you kind of know what to expect from the song.
I’d never heard “don’t go back to rockville”, but just from these genres you named to make your point, I already knew what it would approximately sound like. And indeed listening to it confirmed that.
RYM genres would be extremely useful to have as a beets autotag plugin and I've been waiting for years for their API to be opened up specifically for them.
Genres are fun to play with too. If something has breakdown and maybe some screams? Put 'core' at the end. Its all up to interpretation and it gives us some easy short hand to discuss music.
I don't think theres anything wrong with labelling genres, its good for describing things. If I say "I love post hardcore, does anyone have more of that?" its a lot easier than going "hear me I out, I like punk sounds but maybe not necessarily punk songs?" What about movies? Can books have a genre? seems like a silly thing to take issue with. Alternative is a huge umbrella and it means something very different now than it did in the 90's when it meant pavement or sonic youth.
'naval gazing for music intelligentsia' did a pitchfork writer run over your mom?
I Find it stupid for artists but helpful for albums. NB: I use RYM as source (via https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/rymscrap) for my extended metadata, gotta exploit that autism.
There are probably broad categories that I might find myself using, but for my own core collection of music (deeper than it is wide, mostly), it barely matters.
I've loved beets (and MusicBrainz Picard) for years. This bit from the beets docs has always stuck with me when organizing my library.
"An Apology and a Brief Interlude
I would like to sincerely apologize that the autotagger in beets is so fussy. It asks you a lot of complicated questions, insecurely asking that you verify nearly every assumption it makes. This means importing and correcting the tags for a large library can be an endless, tedious process. I’m sorry for this.
Maybe it will help to think of it as a tradeoff. By carefully examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks. People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But there’s value in intimate, complete familiarity with your collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting tags as quality time with your music collection. That’s what I do."
Beets is amazing. The fact that it exists is a blessing for those like us who maintain our own music library.
I've been wanting to build my own Plex alternative for a while now. I've tried all the other tools out there, but Plex is definitely the least bad tool that let me enjoy my music without subscribing to Spotify and others.
I've already spent hours trying to figure out all the things that are required to make this new system. And it's unbelievably complicated. From parsing metadata to converting music, to understanding how deep and complex tagging work for music (yeah, it doesn't sound like it at first, but it truly is infinitely complex), I'm overwhelmed by how hard it would be to build a tool that compete with a combination of beets/iTunes.
There are a lot of alternatives for music servers in the world. Can I ask if you've explored Plex alternatives (Jellyfin, Emby, Lyrion, Navidrome, various Subsonic/OpenSubsonic-compatible servers, etc.), and if so, what you need that they don't do?
I ask because I'm working on a new music app for iOS which has pluggable sources, and so my bias is that most of the issues preventing me from easily enjoying my music library are actually on the client side.
I can install Plex, all my movies, tv-shows, anime and music is there.
Then I can drop Plexamp on my phone, log in with my Plex account and all my music is right there and if I rate a song on my phone, it's updated on Plex and vice versa.
Tried Beets once because it pairs well with Navidrome, it's pretty feature packed and exhaustive in what it does. Though after fiddling with it and realizing that it's more effort for my use case than I'd like I ditched it and now I don't really bother tagging. I hope to do the same thing for Navidrome too and find something to replace it with similar to KDE Elisa which makes it easy to make playlists on the fly and organize music around folders instead of tags.
Different strokes for different folks, that's not to say that Navidrome and Beets aren't amazing pieces of kit.
Readit News
I have found that adding things to Musicbrainz is actually pretty easy (and if you are so inclined like me, pretty rewarding and fun).
Streaming releases (and Bandcamp) you simply drop the release URL into Harmony[1] and it does most of the work for you.
Musicbrainz can represent nearly everything musically related and its all freely licensed, a very cool thing to exist.
Most (non-destructive) edits are auto-applied, whilst the rest go through a 7 day voting period (they are still applied by default unless someone votes against). The barrier to entry is very low.
0. https://musicbrainz.org/
1. https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/
-"frankenstein" musical soundtracks where I've assembled my favorite version of each song from all the various published recordings. Sometimes I've even edited pieces of different recordings together into a hybrid track. -a soundboard recording of my friend's high school talent show performance -Music I've personally recorded from video games or other random sources -Songs where I've edited out parts I don't like (such as overly-long drum solos) leaving just the parts I do.
I've organized these things in a way that makes sense for me, not for the world.
This is like a bookshelf that can only store books with an ISBN that can be classified in the Dewey decimal system. Too bad about your family photo scrapbooks or your personal sketchbooks!
What I think they're doing (and what I've done) is add music that wasn't already in the global database to it. For example, a promotional CD, or releases from a small publisher, etc.
In these cases, you're not adding personal metadata or mixtapes.
That said, definitely do self organization if it works for you. Most of your examples seem like they're suitable for custom playlists.
There is value for me in having a central database for this data, for example to find misspellings of the same name. But the fear of having 20 years of custom data entry destroyed by an overzealous tool makes me very hesitant to even try a solution like this.
This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.
Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:
* brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)
* commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
* non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)
* fan-recorded concerts
* fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)
* fan edits/remixes of commercial releases
* playlists & mix tapes
* mixed media releases
Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will still take thought.
This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.
> * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
I fixed those two by adding the missing releases to the database beets uses as its data source (musicbrainz.org), and importing the album in Beets afterwards. I still get notifications for edits to entries I contributed over a decade ago!
There is no canonical metadata for a fan recording of a concert or DIY CD-R, so you lose out on nothing by importing the files as they are today.
Once you're over the hump of the first import, beets is a fabulous tool for ingesting new music. It's well worth it.
I do think it's a pretty fair complaint that it really feels like the software is fighting against you when you first encounter something absent from the musicbrainz database (especially if it's something fundamentally unsuited to be added to the database), but I'm not sure if there's an easy solution other than telling people "just hit the `import with existing metadata' button, it's totally fine" when they complain about it.
> * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)
> * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
This is a great opportunity to fill in those blanks for those services :) I didn't have much to contribute to MB but did have a few albums to add.
Those should be on MusicBrainz. There's even a bootleg release type for fan recordings/illegal copies, and official style guides for live bootlegs.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases...
I guess my point is that I like having a directory of music (organized by artist/album) and make the discovery applications I use do the work of finding and playing the music I want.
I've long enjoyed extracted audio from eg Glastonbury sets. I've only got a few that I particularly enjoyed and where the specific track was on youtube - is it that sort of thing? Is there a community of such reprobates?
https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=glastonbury&type=event&...
Thanks for saving me time, I guess? I just maintain very spartan id3 tags on my music, artist, album, song name, track id, and that's about it.
What more would beets give me? How would it improve my experience?
[0]: https://github.com/geigerzaehler/beets-alternatives
It lets you set up fully or partially automated import pipelines with a nice web UI to manage any manual steps needed.
Importing is usually as simple as dropping a zip in a folder and the rest is managed automatically.
https://github.com/pSpitzner/beets-flask
- buy album on Bandcamp
- download zip
- beet import {zip file name}
And beets extracts the zip, matches the album to musicbrainz, updates any metadata, and drops the files into the directory structure that I like (naming the files how I like them, too).
Very rarely an album will need some more attention, in which case I use Picard to fix it before using beets to import it.
Sometimes there’s just weirdness though - for example recently I bought an album and the band included all the tracks from their previous album as bonus tracks. So I used Picard to split them into the 2 “proper” albums.
Do we assign a "genre" to an artist? Album? Song?
The band R.E.M.: "College Rock"? "New Wave"? "Alternative"?
(Wow, don't even get me started on all the ways you can further slice up "alternative" into "shoe-gaze", "twee", etc. It's, ha ha, naval gazing for the music intelligentsia.)
R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville"? "Country"?
I think "live" and "soundtrack" might be the only two interesting "genres".
More seriously, there’s no reason you can’t assign more than one genre to a song, or say that “it’s a mix of A and B”. You can extend the concept to albums and artists just as easily.
I’m not familiar with R.E.M., but on rateyourmusic.com they’re marked as alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock. “Don’t go back to Rockville” is marked as Jangle pop, and the “Reckoning” album overall is mostly Jangle pop with some influences from post-punk and Paisley Underground.
You may not agree with these categorizations, but it’s a crowd-sourced website so you can go vote for different genres. You may also disagree with the existence of all of these genres, some of which I’ve never heard of myself (but as I said, I haven’t listened much to R.E.M. in general), but my point is more that if you’re familiar with them then you kind of know what to expect from the song.
I’d never heard “don’t go back to rockville”, but just from these genres you named to make your point, I already knew what it would approximately sound like. And indeed listening to it confirmed that.
Yeah, that is kind of making my point. Others perhaps enjoy creative pigeon-holing.
'naval gazing for music intelligentsia' did a pitchfork writer run over your mom?
Dead Comment
Genre: Yes
There are probably broad categories that I might find myself using, but for my own core collection of music (deeper than it is wide, mostly), it barely matters.
"An Apology and a Brief Interlude
I would like to sincerely apologize that the autotagger in beets is so fussy. It asks you a lot of complicated questions, insecurely asking that you verify nearly every assumption it makes. This means importing and correcting the tags for a large library can be an endless, tedious process. I’m sorry for this.
Maybe it will help to think of it as a tradeoff. By carefully examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks. People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But there’s value in intimate, complete familiarity with your collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting tags as quality time with your music collection. That’s what I do."
I've been wanting to build my own Plex alternative for a while now. I've tried all the other tools out there, but Plex is definitely the least bad tool that let me enjoy my music without subscribing to Spotify and others.
I've already spent hours trying to figure out all the things that are required to make this new system. And it's unbelievably complicated. From parsing metadata to converting music, to understanding how deep and complex tagging work for music (yeah, it doesn't sound like it at first, but it truly is infinitely complex), I'm overwhelmed by how hard it would be to build a tool that compete with a combination of beets/iTunes.
I ask because I'm working on a new music app for iOS which has pluggable sources, and so my bias is that most of the issues preventing me from easily enjoying my music library are actually on the client side.
I can install Plex, all my movies, tv-shows, anime and music is there.
Then I can drop Plexamp on my phone, log in with my Plex account and all my music is right there and if I rate a song on my phone, it's updated on Plex and vice versa.
Different strokes for different folks, that's not to say that Navidrome and Beets aren't amazing pieces of kit.