Just based on my own experience with my wife and kids, it’s the whole “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” thing. While I have services running for photo & file storage, books, music, and video (plus a Proton family plan and several other services), the only thing my family uses is Jellyfin.

I’ve mostly given up now. I keep everything up because I use it all and love working on it. Maybe one day they’ll express some concern with privacy or ownership, and then I can pounce. But people need to be ready to move.

Would you make someone you love a home server?

Hell no. I have one because I like tinkering and don’t mind maintaining it. My loved ones are not those kinds of people. So then it becomes more of a chore for me and less of a fun personal project.

I haven’t figured that part out. I try to just remember to fix things the next time I’m at the computer. My issue is that all my music is kept on the server and any tagging app I’ve found is for local files.

There are web accessible versions of beets and Picard, but I have found them more trouble than they’re worth.

TBH, I know the functionality is there, but I have never taken the time to look at it. It looks like more than it is. It’s a few clicks to search and find the right release, make my edits, 2 clicks to auto number, 2 clicks to rename. Sometimes I let the rename move the files for me too. Depends on the format.

I’ve gone back and forth on this, but ultimately, I enjoy the tagging process and accept it as part of my workflow.

When i’m adding a release to my collection, I throw it into a temo directory, open the album folder in MP3Tag, query MusicBrainz (or Discogs if necessary) for the basics, replace the cover image if I’m not happy with the one from the source, add additional genre tags and do cleanup, auto renumber tracks/discs. Once it all looks good, I use the tags-to-filename feature to rename everything to AlbumArtist/[OriginalYear] Album/### - Title (### - Artist - Title for multi artist releases) then copy it to my library.

It sounds like a lot, but it isn’t bad. Like I said, I enjoy it.

Updating tags shouldn’t change the actual music though. That seems really strange and like something else is going on.

What drew you to Tandoori from Mealie? It’s been a while since I compared them and I can’t quite recall why I chose Mealie. Which I’m happy enough with. Just curious.

Perfect. I’m 2/3 through my initial scan after a week. Suppose I should hold off updating Navidrome until it’s done.

Mostly because I’m a lot pickier about my music collection than video. There is no chance of Navidrome overwriting my tags. It just doesn’t have the ability.

With a large collection (getting up toward 28,000 tracks), I also wanted to make sure that whatever I was using had a comfortable, music first interface. Jellyfin felt cumbersome in contrast to Navidrome.

Navidrome for me. I have a physical collection of around 2000 albums across CD, vinyl, and cassette, plus a lot of digitally only purchases over the years. Finally getting it all on my own server and being able to just tap a button to shuffle the entire collection is just about everything I ever wanted.

Yeah. I used FileFlows for a bit to download lyrics and I do already have replaygain being added every night for new additions.

I see you’re settling in beets and if that works for you, that is excellent. Just this week, I started running it on copies of some albums in my collection to see how it did.

Over the last year, I’ve ripped (or cleaned up existing) about 25,000 songs. My process has really been rip them with whatever tags I can find, put them all through MP3tag to retrieve and clean up metadata, then run a script to backup the FLAC off-site, convert to MP3 locally, and copy to my NAS in my preferred directory structure.

I was thinking maybe I don’t want to deal with the tagging, hence my trials with beets. But you know, I don’t necessarily trust everything in Musicbrainz or like how they handle some things, so I’m probably going to stick with the semi-manual tagging. I am looking at still using beets to handle lyrics, replaygain, and fleshing out less important metadata.

That’s the thing, I think my tags are mostly in really good shape and I’m happy with them. Maybe I’m just looking to solve a problem I don’t have.

Hm. So maybe my current process for tagging is one I should still keep and just shift some of the less important work to beets. I kind of like that.

This is kind of how I have been operating. Rip to FLAC. Manage the lookup and tagging manually. Then I have a series of scripts to convert to MP3, apply RG, and send the FLAC to an off-site backup, move MP3s into the library.

I thought maybe I’ve been too anal about my tags and I should just work through letting it standardize and add IDs to everything. But now you all have me questioning that part.

My mail carrier gave me a talking to when I started getting a lot of records in the mail during covid. He didn’t like them sitting in the mailbox in the heat. Haha. I mean, good looking out, guy, but I think we’re good.

Not going to lie, I spent the weekend having Gemini step me through each bit that I wanted to accomplish. I think having a solid idea of the specifics of what I wanted to do helped a lot. Previously id gone in like “manage my collection, app!” with no clear idea of what I even needed.

“I tried with beets, but you really have to do a lot of research in advance to understand what it is doing and the settings you need, and it’s not one-size-fits-all.”

This is exactly how it’s gone for me in the past. This is maybe my 3rd or 4th attempt at it, but I finally feel like I’m getting a handle on it.

I suppose I should take another look at Picard as well. For a lot of years, I’ve relied on MP3tag for everything. It’s just a simple interface, I know how to make it do what I want. I like managing tags.

But I figure with beets, I can take care of the tagging and some things I’ve been doing manually or have other processes for - like downloading lyrics and applying ReplayGain information.

My plan with beets is to just take it an artist at a time, see how it goes, and then if I can’t find a groove or don’t like what it’s doing, I can give up.

Now you have me downloading 10GB of MP3.com pages so I can go searching for old albums. :D

Do you keep those releases separated from your main library (file-wise)? I’m trying to decide if it makes sense to segregate them and manage them completely outside of beets.

I see what you did there.