Greetings Lemmings!
I am not new to self hosting; been at it for a few years. And I have neglected a very important part of my home lab; MUSIC!
So I stream music from Navidrome to all of my devices.
My music library has grown organically over the years, for probably the past 17 years. And a few times I had manually organized and fixed up some of the tags. But ultimately I ended up with a mess of a library.
I am working on cleaning that up. Though I absolutely should have cleaned it up before I created 2 backup scripts.
In short, I have a script that is called from a systemd service on a timer that runs my backup script that essentially more or less uses rsync to mirror the files in LiveMusicDir to MusicArchive1. This happens on my docker host where my Navidrome lives. The Music is on an NFS share hosted outside of the docker host.
The next step I run another similar setup on my desktop; systemd service running a script on a timer that uses rsync and other dependencies to track changes.
What I plan to do is organize the source. I am using beets, and learning as I go.
What methods do you use for managing a large music library?
A mishmash of beets and the old ways got me to where I am, navidrome with a bit of mpv & kodi.
I’m currently trying to ignore it and plan to return with a new workflow over the next year or so. Beets will be part of this but also need some python, shell glue and other tools working together, and things are changing at little faster than they once were.
I spent a little time a few months back grabbing NPR and KEXP audio at scale with yt-dlp and having them land with decent tags as navidrome compliant albums and now feel a little more confident incorporating oddities into sacred realm of jazz flacs.
But the one folder to rule them all is still in the planning stages.
The way I used to do, I can’t believe I spent that much time. I would literally go folder by folder and rename things. Then when I got a little older and a little smarter used MusicBee or MediaMonkey to tag and rename music files. But even that became too much for me to want to do.
Ultimately I want the most automated way I can do it. But luckily all new music coming in is named with the same format every single time, and is properly tagged.
It’s all of my legacy stuff I have to clean up really.
Yeah, I’m not about to rush in but I suspect over the next year or so I’ll be letting an llm loose on my old crates to see what happens and MacGyver some sort of Dread Pirate Robot that can run locally and is a frankenstein of beets, plugins and other projects that will eat music and shit albums.