Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

>Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz

Those should be on MusicBrainz. There's even a bootleg release type for fan recordings/illegal copies, and official style guides for live bootlegs.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases...

Tried Beets once because it pairs well with Navidrome, it's pretty feature packed and exhaustive in what it does. Though after fiddling with it and realizing that it's more effort for my use case than I'd like I ditched it and now I don't really bother tagging. I hope to do the same thing for Navidrome too and find something to replace it with similar to KDE Elisa which makes it easy to make playlists on the fly and organize music around folders instead of tags.

Different strokes for different folks, that's not to say that Navidrome and Beets aren't amazing pieces of kit.

I've tried to use beets a number of times and given up each time.

- beets can't delete transcoded files which have been deleted at source.

- beets can't re transcode existing transcoded files when the source has been modified.

- It's impossible to preserve the original directory structure when transcoding because it strips all path separators for "security".

I use a Bash script I've been maintaining for a number of years instead.

For physical media, Discogs is the way to go...

I use MusicBee for everything too and sounds like my workflow is the same as yours. I basically take whatever is tagged on the file straight out of Bandcamp and then manually follow Discogs-like rules for normalization of the artist name so the directory structure works out, plus adding iTunes compilation metadata to deal with the "various artists" issue, adding BPM, customizing genre and comments etc.

I think I started all this fussiness exactly because back in the old days when you synced to CDDB, you'd get somebody else's useless record label classification for a reissue or international release that obscured the original label, which in certain genres of music is quite important to be able to better categorize the music for auto playlists. Original year is also critical for auto playlists where you're looking for tunes around a certain era. I also have a vague memory of old CDJs or Serato or some damn thing not displaying the name I wanted so having to shuffle stuff around to Composer or Album Artist or something to make it work, and now here I am with custom-tagged all the things.

My problem is I was considering replacing all my 320k MP3s with FLACs, which I have for all my Bandcamp purchases and most of my CD rips (although not from Beatport and other online stores)... but I realized it was going to be absolute hell to try and match the untagged files that I downloaded and put straight into cloud storage with the tagged files I already have in the library. It would need some kind of heuristics to fuzzy match the files with what's already there, then retag them with my preferred tags from the MP3, then move the file into the same location the MP3 is, then move the MusicBee proprietary metadata (play count, add date etc) across, then delete the MP3. I keep thinking there has to be a program or a plugin for this, but seems like not, so for now I've just given up and decided that 320k is good enough, actually, which makes me wonder why I'm keeping all these FLACs around in the first place. Not like I'm starting the Library of Alexandria here, I just like music.