I’m finally making a real effort to add beets to my life. I’ve been hesitant because I like what I like and I (mostly) know what I’m doing, you know? I also have a lot of local independent albums that are just not likely to get tagged anyway.
But here I am. Yesterday I was able to work through:
- Implementing my preferred directory structure and naming conventions
- Adding album art (embedded and in the folder)
- Embedding lyrics
- Adding ReplyGain information
I use Navidrome as my server and have a collection of about 2000 albums.
What are some of your tips for using beets?
What cool things are you doing?
What should I be thinking about as I go about this?
So much safer to go one album at a time using Picard. Picard makes it easy to go down the list of a disorganized directory, identify most things automatically, allow in depth review and modifications to what Picard came up with, and standardize file naming. I’ve tried to let programs like Lidarr and beets automate it, but they always ends up causing more and more complex problems to discover and solve after awhile. Music releases are complex and sources are diverse, using distinct standards of form and format. It’s not a problem that can realistically be solved for my entire music library without the guiding hand of a librarian. I could listen to my library for over six months without repeating, even 1 album out of a 100 mis-tagged or misidentifyied could take me years to discover.
I do like to automate the less critical and more machine oriented library tasks like adding genres tags, replaygain, and lyrics as you do. Just not things like the metadata tags, file naming, or album art (embedded or otherwise).
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.