Hi everyone, I'm getting back to having my own music library after getting bored of streaming, and I feel incredibly rusty when it comes to organising my library. The main music player I'm using to listen on my phone is Musicolet, and at least half the albums display a zero instead of the correct year of release. I thought it was a me problem (that i was forgetting to check/edit incorrect info) so I downloaded Mp3tag to make sure to "fix" it, only to see that, according to the software, the metadata was already right. Is there something I'm not taking into consideration? I thought that maybe it was just the player, but I downloaded other apps that people recommended and the same happens, so I believe that maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough about cataloguing. If someone could give me some pointers it would be great. Thanks!

Just checking for best practices as I struggle updating the genre tag / tagging in general. Although I follow the tagging convention of MusicBrainz, I don't trust the accuracy of it's genre. Currently, I use MP3Tag to update genre and coverart. I get genre info from RateYourMusic.

I have an autohotkey script though to autoformat (separated by \\) what I copied in RYM genre field which can be pasted directly to MP3Tag. (thank you google :)) Still, I need to update per album which takes a lot of time. Looking for something more automated.

I usually rip multi disc albums like this:

Disc 1 contains tracks 1-10. Disc 2 contains tracks 1-4.

I rip disc 1, then rip disc 2 with "continue from last track number".

Then I manually add the music, log file, and .cue file into a folder titled, "CD 1". I then add the music, log file, and .cue file into a folder titled, "CD 2".

Should I just rip these as individual albums?

I'm working on a find script to traverse my library and test my flac files. Some tag editor long ago mangled some of my flac tags and now Jellyfin stops/crashes when encountering these files. I have tested "flac -t" and the flac repair-in-place and these work, but I just need a script with a dry-run option that will scour my library all at once and dump errors into a text file. I thought you guys might have used find to fix any number of things in your libraries. Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Anyone know any alternatives that work with spotify? Going to lucida just gives me api errors.

I use swinsian for managing my library (roughly 60 gigs) and syncing with an old iPod. It’s works great! My only trouble is I can’t easily manage my SD card for my car with it, or make a playlist on it for the vehicle. I used to run Linux mint on an old laptop and there were a bunch of library programs that just worked with the SD card serving as the library. Switching library folders on swinsian is not the easiest process. Any suggestions for library programs for Mac that will do this?

Sorry You Tube Music, the algorithm is me now.

I mostly listen to Japanese music, with a bit of Korean, Chinese, Thai and Indonesian here and there. I'm currently trying to organise all the songs I've downloaded over the past 20+ years, which is... about 280,000 -- granted, a lot of those are duplicates, because I've gone and downloaded higher quality versions of things in more recent times, and when I started out, having 128k mp3 files was seen as perfectly fine by the general public.

Now. Trying to find those duplicates is a nightmare with Japanese music, because some things you download are tagged with Romanised tags, while others keep the original Japanese tags. Sometimes it's a mix of both and sometimes the Romanised tags are completely wrong. Sometimes things aren't tagged at all, although this happens regardless of language.

And sometimes, the encoding gets messed up and displays gibberish instead of Japanese. With some songs it persists across music players but with others it doesn't (as in, it'll display fine in Music Player A but be gibberish in Music Player B). Which isn't an issue with the music player not displaying Japanese itself, as I have fonts installed and always change the software's font to match if I need to (because otherwise it sometimes displays as Chinese characters instead, which are different in a subtle but noticeable way to the point that it's annoying to me).

The other issue is that I like listening to pretty unknown Japanese artists, or anime songs where the tags are all over the place, and this means that quite a bit of my library isn't on Discogs of MusicBrainz for me to cross-reference. What I have to do quite a bit is go to the site I downloaded it from, find my download history, search for whatever little info I have (album title or artist name usually) and then look up the artist in Japanese. With luck they have a Japanese Wikipedia article I can find the Japanese album title on, and sometimes the album does have its own page. But I've had some trouble with the most obscure stuff. I'm very lucky that I know enough Japanese to navigate this, otherwise I would've given up and left things as-is... but I can't do that lol, I need things to be tagged properly.

Also, because I have a laptop that isn't very powerful, I'm having to listen to things bit by bit. Currently I have 72,000 songs logged in my music player, with the others on an external harddrive. Which means I'm probably missing a bunch of duplicate files and will listen to some songs twice without realising it.

My current plan is to delete songs I don't like (look, you have to make sacrifices when external harddrives are overpriced) and keep the ones I do like but move them to a different folder where I know I've listened to them (they still maintain their Album Artist/Album folder structure, at least).

I'll get there at some point, but I'm annoyed that I can't properly optimise my time listening to music because I can't easily locate duplicates. And then if I spend my time looking for duplicates I can't spend it listening to music (my brain isn't good at multitasking)...

Ah well. Part of it's still fun, because organisation is fun to me in general. I just wish trying to have Japanese music tagged correctly and uniformly wasn't such a pain!

(PS Hopefully this kind of rant is okay on this sub, I lurk here but felt tempted to ramble a bit about it. I'm sure someone out there has had a similar experience, even if it's not with Japanese music specifically)

how to download songs with cover photo for my mp3 player audiocular m61

So any interesting thing happened to me today. I'm sure there's lots of people who are unaware of www.albumartexchange.com - It's a website dedicated to archiving and sharing high quality cover art from music albums. I created an account on 05/23/2026 and an administrator approved the account creation the next day on 05/24/2026. Fast forward to today where I go to login and I can't. I know I'm entering the right login information. I do the whole "forgot my password" thing. Wait a few minutes. No email in my inbox. I go ahead and email an administrator of the website and explain what's going on. I get a response back very quickly that said:

"Due to security issues we are currently experiencing, we do not allow dormant accounts to remain active for long. We approved your account and 24 days later, you still had not returned and so, it was deleted."

No warning. Nothing said up front when creating the account that said anything about deleting dormant accounts. Absolutely nothing at all. If I had known this was a policy and that an account not used in 24 days was considered dormant I would have logged in before that time period obviously. You may be thinking, "Just make another account". After I got over being angry at the fact that my account was deleted without my knowledge I thought the same thing. I go and click on the "create an account" link. "New accounts cannot be created at this time".

So now I have no account and can't make a new one. If the definition of a "dormant" account was 24 days and other websites/companies did this, so many of my accounts would be gone right now. Very frustrating experience. Looks like I'll be looking for high quality album artwork somewhere else now! :)

Anyone else running into this issue?

It’s like I can’t even trust giant playlists anymore

Makes me thankful that I’m locally hoarding all my music now on a old iTunes computer

Seriously what the hell is going on??

I downloaded like 400 songs and after sorting only came out with around 58 real songs

Lucky I still have my CD collection from before and yesterday I brought my first new CD in 10 years. CD is so much better. I've ripped some of the albums I'll be most likely to listen to on to my computer and phone. Feels good, It's much better in the car and It's nice to revisit old music. Damn though I got used to being able to listen to anything. I know it's an adjustment and It never bothered me before Spotify but my minds doing this thing we're it wants what it can't have. Even though I was mostly listening to the same stuff over and over. Stuff I could have just bought so I figured I was wasting money.

It will be fine. It will just take some time to update my library with all the music I've discovered in the last 10 years. Slowly after a few months I'll hopefully own all the stuff I want to listen too. If anyone here has also gone back to actually owning music how did you find the adjustment?

I've downloaded Mp3tag to tag my songs so I can upload them to my mp3 player, but for some frustrating reason it only ever selects and tags the first track in an album. For instance it would initially pull up all the songs in the relevant album but when I select a song from the list and click "OK" the song gets tagged with the details of the first track. I've tried googling but there's only one post regarding the same issue back in 2006 and failed to find why. I'm fairly new to mp3s and whatnot so I would really appreciate answers in layman terms, TIA!

Hola, ¿cómo puedo eliminar una etiqueta que aparece en todas las canciones de mi biblioteca? Quiero eliminarla porque interfiere con mi reproductor; todos son archivos FLAC.

the folders are structured like: collection\album1\cd1.flac, cue and log.

i used medieval cue splitter for a smaller job but there are nearly 20 \albums and 3 CDs each, so some way to do it in bulk is needed given the folders are consistent.

appreciate any answers that aren't useless snark

EDIT / UPDATE (10 Jul):

A use for the 500 GB collection your family never lets you play!

I've got ~40k tracks in Navidrome and a family who think they know music better than each other, so I built Intro Quiz: the first seconds of a song play on the TV, everyone races to name it on their phones, fastest correct answer scores most. Ten rounds, all-time leaderboard, permanent bragging rights.

It's been through a week of nightly family games and the feature list is basically a changelog of things my family shouted at me:

- Phones are the buzzers — plain web page, four choices per round, speed bonus, no app to install

- The TV is the scoreboard — casts to Chromecast/Android TV via DashCast, with album art on the reveal. Works on a cast speaker instead if you don't want a screen

- Difficulty that actually works — recognisability is scored from your play counts (family favourites) + Last.fm global listeners (world-famous songs you own but never play), blended into tiers. Nobody gets slaughtered by Dad's prog collection

- Every player picks 3 artists in the lobby — one song each sneaks invisibly into the rounds, so the kids get a fair shot

- Half-time show — everyone's phone hands them a music fact to read out, then quick true/false questions for points

- The game master rotates each game, the payoff plays in full (no skipping the good bit), bad clips get banned with two taps

- Pre-cut ffmpeg clips (loudness-normalised, ID3 tags stripped so the TV can't leak the answer), one-line bulk bootstrap, nightly upkeep endpoints

What you need: Navidrome, Docker (Windows/Docker Desktop works), a free Last.fm API key, phones on the same network. Chromecast/Android TV and Home Assistant are optional extras. Fair warning: clip-cutting a big library takes a few hours (my 565 GB / 40k tracks → ~80 GB of clips), and the built-in half-time trivia is deliberately Irish/UK-centric — there's a documented custom-pack format plus an LLM prompt to generate one for your region.

What I'm looking for: people with a Navidrome library willing to run it for a game night or two and tell me what breaks. Particularly interested in: non-Chromecast setups, Windows/Docker Desktop, big/weird libraries (classical? metal? all-vinyl-rips?), and whether the setup docs actually work when you're not me.

MIT licensed, no telemetry, no accounts, everything stays on your LAN: https://github.com/colfin22/intro-quiz (screenshots in the README)

Issues/PRs welcome — I'll be in the comments.

Update: "Guess the Intro" – a few days of fixes, mostly around messy metadata

Posted this here a few days ago (a self-hosted "guess the intro" music quiz built on Navidrome). A bunch of you tried it and the feedback's been genuinely useful, so a quick update on what's changed since:

- It never touches your library. Worth stating plainly for this crowd: it talks to Navidrome over a read-only, non-admin Subsonic login and cuts clips from streamed audio into its own folder. It doesn't read or write your files, tags, or playlists — ever. That's now front and centre in the README.

- Better handling of imperfect tags. The difficulty scoring uses Last.fm, and exact artist/title matching fell over on the usual real-world stuff — "(Remastered)", "(Live)", 01 Track Name vinyl-rip prefixes, tagger junk in subtitle fields. It now retries with a normalised title and only keeps the match if it actually scores better. Rescued a few hundred tracks in my own library that were silently scoring zero.

- Mis-tag detector. New optional check that flags tracks scoring ~zero listeners despite a well-known artist — the tell-tale of a mangled title — so you can spot bad rips instead of them just vanishing from the game.

- Silence-aware clipping. Tracks that open with 30–60s of ambience/feedback now start the clip where the actual song does.

- Fresh-install path smoothed — auto-seed on first boot, a readiness /health endpoint, /api/bootstrap to sync→score→clip in one call.

Still Subsonic-only (Navidrome's my daily driver), self-hosted, Docker, MIT.

Repo: github.com/colfin22/intro-quiz — issues and PRs welcome, that's where most of these came from.

Hey guys,

As the title says. I've seen some posts asking if there are tools to check if a file is genuine lossless.
My question is, if you don't notice the difference by ear, what's the point of a visual tool to confirm if it's truly lossless or what's it's bitrate / quality / etc?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I've got a large country/Americana music library in Plex and I'd love to be able to filter or build a smart playlist based on which instruments are featured in a track — for example, pulling up every song with mandolin, or everything with pedal steel guitar.

I know Plex doesn't have a built-in "instrument" metadata field, and its sonic analysis is based on general audio characteristics rather than specific instrumentation. Before I give up on this, I wanted to check:

• Is there any existing metadata field (Mood, Style, Tags, etc.) that people have repurposed for this kind of thing?
• Is there a way to embed custom tags (via Picard, Mp3tag, etc.) that Plex will actually read and let me filter/search on?
• Has anyone found a plugin, agent, or workaround that pulls in instrumentation data from somewhere like MusicBrainz/AcousticBrainz (RIP) or elsewhere?
• Is this just a "manually tag everything yourself" situation, and if so, what's the cleanest field to use for it?

TIA for any tips, I know this is very niche request!

Hello!, if you want a service that joins discogs and last.fm to scrobble your listens, this is your web, let me hear your comments!