Managing offline music library

[CitricScion]

How do you do it? I ask because that's not something I currently do, but I am curious. There are a few albums that I would love to keep copies of because it's music that means a lot to me, but I don't want to have random music files all over the place and I don't know if there's a better way to manage it on my computer or on my phone for when I want to play it.

Bonus points if you have solutions for Linux desktops, but I think sharing how you organize your library on whatever system will be helpful for somebody!

[rejectconvenience]

Calling upon @kamp for his sage wisdom of music library management

For me, it's been an ongoing nightmare, and I wish I had a better way of doing it. I've been writing scripts and all kinds of stuff, but it's gotten out of hand. I mainly have been using an old version of macOS to manage everything, since I use the iPods, but I have started playing around with Plex's music features.

[CitricScion]

I hadn't even considered Plex for this. I thought it was just a front end to give you like a Netflix UI for watching your own copies of content. That is interesting to consider.

[Stefen_Maxwell]

Calling upon @kamp for his sage wisdom of music library management

For me, it's been an ongoing nightmare, and I wish I had a better way of doing it. I've been writing scripts and all kinds of stuff, but it's gotten out of hand. I mainly have been using an old version of macOS to manage everything, since I use the iPods, but I have started playing around with Plex's music features.

I found an old program for linux called gtkpod that allows you to add music and podcasts to your ipod. I have been using that.

[tracz]

One program that I've come to really like is MediaMonkey. Unfortunately it isn't available on Linux but with some cursory searching it seems like it's functional through WINE (you could also pull out the big guns and mount your media folder in a Windows VM). It has a nice auto-organizer that can reorganize your entire media library into a cohesive structure; I use Artist>Album>Track, but it's very customizable. Depending on your use case this may or may not be of use, but it also supports syncing to various local and remote sources, including syncing directly to an iPod without using iTunes!

As far as iPod syncing goes, there's also the option of switching to Rockbox. Its database is optional and computed on-device, so there is no need for an external program like iTunes to precompute the database. I use robocopy to sync my iPod, but I imagine rsync would work great on Linux.

[JINSBEK]

For records produced by bands and programmatic composers (e.g. Beethoven, Erik Satie), I’ve always made file directories like this:

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Music \ Band \ Album \ 01 - Song.mp3

For media like video game, anime, and film scores, which: frequently have fan covers and even fan albums; may employ multiple composers (e.g. Attack On Titan has a new composer for its final season); and may have multiple soundtracks per season, they’re organised like this:

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Music \ Chrono Trigger \ OSV \ DISC 1 \ 09 - Yearnings of the Wind.mp3
Music \ Chrono Trigger \ OSV \ DISC 1 \ 09r zohar - Wind Scene Concert Paraphrase.mp3

The score for Chrono Trigger was split across three discs. The r at the end of track 09 shows that it’s a remix/cover by a fan that wasn’t part of a substantial fan album. zohar is the name of the fan artist, followed by the name of this recording.

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Music \ Deus Ex \ 001 - Training.mp3
Music \ Deus Ex \ The Long Night \ 08 - DuClare Chateau (Wine for Two Mix).mp3

My source for the Deus Ex video game soundtrack isn’t a physical official soundtrack with multiple discs, so all the songs are in the same directory. The Long Night is a substantial fan album, so it gets its own subdirectory.

[Crazyroostereye]

A tool I use is Musicbrainz Picard, which is available for Linux, That is able for the most part to Identify your Music and then pull the Metadata from Musicbrainzs Database, a community Maintained Database of Recordings, and writes them to the File, including proper Album Images if avaliable. And Another feature it offers is, to automatically Move your Music in to Appropriate Folders defined by a Schema you can set yourself.

Another Neat thing is that Plex, Lidarr and Jellyfin all use the Musicbrainz DB for they're Media Managment when it comes to Music.