I’m interested to see what others are doing here. All I do is update tags with MusicBrains before dropping them on my NAS for Plex & Jellyfin.

I may not understand your question, but I use Jellyfin as the backend for my music collection. It draws metadata from MusicBrainz and passes my listen stats to ListenBrainz. I believe that those plugins are in Jellyfin’s default repository.

Right now I’m bouncing between OSs, but on Windows my CD ripper (EAC) draws metadata from MusicBrainz as well. On Linux I’ve been using K3B as a ripper which still works (nearly 20 years after I first discovered it!), but oddly for KDE software, is not as configurable as I would like. I believe it also draws metadata from MusicBrainz.

I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.

Chromaprint Discogs Acoustibrainz submit Replaygain

I think that’s it off the top of my head. I also keep my albums separated by release, as there’s multiple releases of albums and I didn’t like mixing that stuff up.

I have a library that’s been growing for about 20 years now. I don’t think I got too serious until around 2009, which is when I discovered music servers to host my library and quickly realized how bad its structure was. It took years of me getting folders done correctly followed by then working on tags. Automation scared me to much since the results were not always 100%. Once it was done I have kept a system to keep it that way the best I can.

So for me once I get new content I use the app tagscanner to edit everything to the way I like, then I drop them into music Picard were I found a tutorial online a few years ago to set it up to just edit music genres. I found the one thing I never got right was music genres so finding this tool was incredible. Took months to run large sections of the library though. Now I got every track labeled with up to 5 genre tags. Once that is done I change folder names to what I want, drop them into my music directory folder which is root > artist > album (don’t care about year since it’s tagged). Scan music into my musicbee app and if any are missing covers I right click and tell it to find them. Then do a scan with navidrome to add it all there.

Artist name, album name, track name, track number, album art. Album artist in the metadata. Composer, label in the metadata.

What more do you need?

Not much for beets. My config.yaml is just:

library: ~/.config/beets/musiclibrary2.db

import:
    move: yes

terminal_encoding: utf8

plugins: fetchart embedart

(so fetchart and embedart are the only plugins)

(from then on, a Navidrome server hosts the music, and I tend to use a Windows app called 'Feishin' to play it)

This is just a small list, but plugins like beetcamp, deezer, and lastgenre among others have been helpful to tag music. If you use deemix or buy music from bandcamp those plugins are extremely helpful. Lastgenre needs some configuring and monitoring to make sure irrelevant tags aren’t assigned to songs though.

If you’re into scripting, calliope is another tool that can interact with Spotify, lastfm, and musicbrainz (though musicbrainz stuff in my experience was unreliable). I’m using calliope to scrap together a solution to sync my local favorites in my music library and sync that to Spotify. It can also create playlists for Spotify from your local music library, and get Lastfm recommendations based on an artist or song.

I wish there was a way to input genres from RYM. I now manually copy-paste those when adding new albums.