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

In bed.

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.

Oh, good to know! I’ll take a deeper look at it this week.

Watcharr is for building a backlog and recording what you’ve watched.

Seerr does let you build a backlog, but it’s more for the users of your media server to be able to request items for acquisition. Once approved, it sends the request to be automatically downloaded and added to your library.

Now since you have me looking… I installed Watcharr and it’s okay. Has a Discovery section. Easy to add things and mark them watched. But no stats, no integrations. It just seems a little barebones.

So I installed Yamtrack. The UI isn’t really as intuitive to me and there doesn’t seem to be a Discover function. BUT I love that it can track books, video games, and others as well. It also has Jellyfin integration.

I’m going to live with Yamtrack for a bit and see. It would be great to have a tracking app that also handles media requests. Seerr let’s you build a watchlist, but it isn’t all that helpful or fleshed out.

Looks like there’s also Watcharr if you want to stick with piratey sounding apps.

I have a Beelink Mini S that I got 4 or 5 years ago (N5095, 8GB RAM, 256GB SDD). It was $200 new at the time. It’s easily handling the hosting of 20-25 services.

For the little that you plan on doing with it, I think you could grab just about anything.