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A maintain my own digital music collection. The only two tools I use for maintaining the CD portion of my collection are k3b and MusicBrainz Picard. k3b can rip

A maintain my own digital music collection. The only two tools I use for maintaining the CD portion of my collection are k3b and MusicBrainz Picard. k3b can rip to flac and it will on embed metadata present on the CD itself. Then after I rip it, I add it to Picard. I use the "lookup CD" feature in Picard, which gives me a selection of releases to choose from. Among the choices, I usually see a release matching the catalog number on my CD's case. When I don't see a matching release, I will typically add the disc ID to an existing release, or I will create a new release, or sometimes even creating a new release + new release group and add the necessary metadata to MusicBrainz. I haven't tried any automatic tagging process like the ripping program the article talks about does, mostly because I want to use Picard to make sure the metadata is correct or contribute to MusicBrainz if it isn't. I like MusicBrainz a lot because applications like Plex use it very well to group release groups together and will (usually) deduplicate identical recordings so that identical tracks can share a rating. It's a really great database and is kept up to date pretty well.

mayneack 1y ago
Yeah, imo using musicbrainz/picard is great for the process of bringing something into your collection. I encounter errors like others here have mentioned, but they're straightforward to fix. Importantly, it sets up a reference to an evolving update process so changes down the line can get back to my files cleanly.
commotionfever 1y ago
since you mention Picard and wanting contribute to MusicBrainz. I'm working on a new fast tagger[1] in the spirit of Picard or beets. Just a little different and more scriptable It makes it's best attempt to match with MusicBrainz, but if there's no match it it offers links to pre-seed MusicBrainz with tools like Harmony https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Harmony (https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/ https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/) is amazing, and completely changed my relationship with MusicBrainz. What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.
  - commotionfever 1y ago
    haha that's funny! I made a WASM TagLib for Go https://github.com/sentriz/go-taglib https://github.com/sentriz/go-taglib
    - CharlesW 1y ago
      Cooool, I love that you arrived at the same conclusion! Mine's not ready for its ShowHN, but as an enthusiast, I'm super-excited to dig into yours. Very nice work!
CharlesW 1y ago
MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember. If you're not sure how to get started, try this: • Drag your album folders (one at a time so it doesn't get confused) into the pane that initially shows "Unclustered Files (0)" and "Clusters (0)". • Select the "Clusters" folder in that pane and click "Lookup". This will find any close matches, and in my experience works ~25% of the time. • For albums that weren't auto-matched, right-click the album folder name and choose "Search for similar albums…". As long as you're sorting by "Score", often you'll find a reasonably-good match in the top 5 options. • NEVER use "Scan", basically. For matched albums, carefully review things like album covers, titles, etc. before you "Save" the updated metadata. After using it to rebuild my personal music library, including ~200 contributions to the MusicBrainz database, I still haven't cracked (for example) how to stop Picard from defaultly replacing a perfect, 1500px album cover with a less-good, 1000px cover from its database.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  >NEVER use "Scan", basically never use "scan" because it will never work? or because it is somehow destructive and will mess up your "cataloging"?
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    I have no doubt that it sometimes works, and would be happy to accept a verdict of "skill issue" if the problem is me. Scanning a Cluster should (IMO) cause Picard to generate a series of AcoustID fingerprints/IDs from the tracks, then use that series to identify the best match (with extra points for handling missing tracks, etc.). But especially in the case of collections/compilations, the end result often resembles a transporter accident. Thankfully it's non-destructive, so it's straightforward to "Remove" all of the tracks you dragged in earlier along with the various albums that MusicBrainz created during the discombobulation process. To be clear, my overall opinion of MusicBrainz and MusicBrainz Picard is that they are unappreciated triumphs. It would be nice if Wikipedia and Internet Archive diverted 0.01% of their fundraising to them. Google is the primary hero in their story, supporting them with over $500K so far. https://metabrainz.org/sponsors https://metabrainz.org/sponsors
riedel 1y ago
I recommend also AudioRanger for resorting and moving stuff into the right places. For ripping I use ExactAudioCopy, which supports also flac.
prmoustache 1y ago
What does "maintain" means in that context? Once you have ripped your cd and stored it somewhere there is nothing to maintain afaik (well appart than having backups if you don't want to ever rip them again).
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  The word implies "organize". I have thousands of text files on my computer. I don't need to "maintain" them (beyond backups, as you mention), but if I want to find one that contains a particular phrase that I can't quite remember the exact wording for... I'd better hope I stored it in a meaningful directory's subdirectory's subdirectory, with a meaningful title.
- retrodaredevil 1y ago
  Mostly I just use Picard it for initial tagging, which usually only needs to happen once. Sometimes Picard has changes it wants to do such as updating to a higher resolution cover art, or to refer to a different MBID after a merge. Yeah, not much to maintain, but Picard does keep my tags up to date if necessary.

mayneack 1y ago

Yeah, imo using musicbrainz/picard is great for the process of bringing something into your collection. I encounter errors like others here have mentioned, but they're straightforward to fix. Importantly, it sets up a reference to an evolving update process so changes down the line can get back to my files cleanly.

commotionfever 1y ago

since you mention Picard and wanting contribute to MusicBrainz. I'm working on a new fast tagger[1] in the spirit of Picard or beets. Just a little different and more scriptable It makes it's best attempt to match with MusicBrainz, but if there's no match it it offers links to pre-seed MusicBrainz with tools like Harmony https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag

CharlesW 1y ago
Harmony (https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/ https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/) is amazing, and completely changed my relationship with MusicBrainz. What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.
- commotionfever 1y ago
  haha that's funny! I made a WASM TagLib for Go https://github.com/sentriz/go-taglib https://github.com/sentriz/go-taglib
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    Cooool, I love that you arrived at the same conclusion! Mine's not ready for its ShowHN, but as an enthusiast, I'm super-excited to dig into yours. Very nice work!

CharlesW 1y ago

MusicBrainz Picard is wonderful, but has one of the most unintuitive "first contact" experiences I can remember. If you're not sure how to get started, try this: • Drag your album folders (one at a time so it doesn't get confused) into the pane that initially shows "Unclustered Files (0)" and "Clusters (0)". • Select the "Clusters" folder in that pane and click "Lookup". This will find any close matches, and in my experience works ~25% of the time. • For albums that weren't auto-matched, right-click the album folder name and choose "Search for similar albums…". As long as you're sorting by "Score", often you'll find a reasonably-good match in the top 5 options. • NEVER use "Scan", basically. For matched albums, carefully review things like album covers, titles, etc. before you "Save" the updated metadata. After using it to rebuild my personal music library, including ~200 contributions to the MusicBrainz database, I still haven't cracked (for example) how to stop Picard from defaultly replacing a perfect, 1500px album cover with a less-good, 1000px cover from its database.

fsckboy 1y ago
>NEVER use "Scan", basically never use "scan" because it will never work? or because it is somehow destructive and will mess up your "cataloging"?
- CharlesW 1y ago
  I have no doubt that it sometimes works, and would be happy to accept a verdict of "skill issue" if the problem is me. Scanning a Cluster should (IMO) cause Picard to generate a series of AcoustID fingerprints/IDs from the tracks, then use that series to identify the best match (with extra points for handling missing tracks, etc.). But especially in the case of collections/compilations, the end result often resembles a transporter accident. Thankfully it's non-destructive, so it's straightforward to "Remove" all of the tracks you dragged in earlier along with the various albums that MusicBrainz created during the discombobulation process. To be clear, my overall opinion of MusicBrainz and MusicBrainz Picard is that they are unappreciated triumphs. It would be nice if Wikipedia and Internet Archive diverted 0.01% of their fundraising to them. Google is the primary hero in their story, supporting them with over $500K so far. https://metabrainz.org/sponsors https://metabrainz.org/sponsors

riedel 1y ago

I recommend also AudioRanger for resorting and moving stuff into the right places. For ripping I use ExactAudioCopy, which supports also flac.

prmoustache 1y ago

What does "maintain" means in that context? Once you have ripped your cd and stored it somewhere there is nothing to maintain afaik (well appart than having backups if you don't want to ever rip them again).

IAmBroom 1y ago
The word implies "organize". I have thousands of text files on my computer. I don't need to "maintain" them (beyond backups, as you mention), but if I want to find one that contains a particular phrase that I can't quite remember the exact wording for... I'd better hope I stored it in a meaningful directory's subdirectory's subdirectory, with a meaningful title.
retrodaredevil 1y ago
Mostly I just use Picard it for initial tagging, which usually only needs to happen once. Sometimes Picard has changes it wants to do such as updating to a higher resolution cover art, or to refer to a different MBID after a merge. Yeah, not much to maintain, but Picard does keep my tags up to date if necessary.