UnicornTranscoder VS picard

Just having support for a remote transcoder, along the lines of unicorn transcoder or rffmpeg would be a good first step to let us start homebrewing a solution.

There's this project - https://github.com/UnicornTranscoder/UnicornTranscoder That lets you use a remote transcoder, but idk if the project is maintained anymore.

There are some projects to distribute transcoding jobs like the Unicorn Transcoder (last activity in 2021), Remote Transcoder (last activity in 2017) or the Kubernetes project (last activity in 2020)

Interesting, I wasn't aware they tweaked it so much. Projects like Unicorn Transcoder made it seem like you could just drop-in replace it with a different binary.

There was/is a Project for remote transcoding, the Unicorn Trancoder which might help but the last commit in that project was made in Oct. 2021.

On the other hand, there is a Project called Unicorn Transcoder which is to offload the transcoding job on a different machine. If that works with plex optimization or just the "on-the-fly" transcoder, I don't know.

Make sure to checkout Picard:

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Which uses the MusicBrainz DB to auto tag and correct audio file names. Makes it really easy to organize a large collection of (pirated) audio.

I highly recommend Musicbrainz Picard: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

It will match against the Musicbrainz database and will acoustically ID your files, so the tags can be completely wrong. Just dump folders of albums into the client, it will group and sort things and ID them. It works great.

No need to use the server, Navidrome allows any client to connect remotely (WAN included) and play music that is hosted on the server. It also can be set up to transcode on the fly uncompressed music when it is accessed from a metered connection to minimize bandwidth usage. I barely scratched its surface, but it looks promising. The only requirement is that it needs the correct metadata to identify songs and download the correct lyrics, album images etc. There's a software called Musicbrainz Picard however that can be used to identify songs with incomplete or missing id3 tags data and it works using audio fingerprinting against a remote database so it should be accurate.

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Back to your post, if you need to play music from the server, take a look at the mpd daemon and its remote interfaces. It does the opposite as it plays from the server while the clients would be used as remote controls so that you can for example install mpd on a small single board computer (or more scattered around the house), configure them to access local or remote mount point, then grab your phone and tell the server to play the desired song.

https://www.musicpd.org/

Have you tried https://www.funkwhale.audio/?

It can be used effectively as a "private spotify". Labeling is a solved problem thanks to https://picard.musicbrainz.org/, and the fact that a lot of the music you buy these days comes pre-labeled already.

You then have a web-app (and/or a mobile app, if that's your thing) where you can stream music as you would with Spotify.

You can even build yourself a little music-sharing commune with friends, where you all upload the albums you buy and accumulate a nice collection of diverse tunes.

I use picard for my collection. My work flow is Picard > Lyrics Finder > Foobar for BPM, RealGain and DR > Custom python script to pull genre and mood from Last.FM and spotify> then Advanced Renamer to perform naming clean up of folder names. I lowercase and underscore spaces. Also does files if I happen to need Mp3Tag when Picard doesn't find anything. Once this is done I move files on to may NAS.

Musicbrainz Picard - A great application that I've used in the past to identify and organize my saved music collection. It's not focused on adding semantic tags though: it's used for adding metadata to .mp3 files.

I do the same but run it though Picard[0] before adding to Plex.

[0]https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

feed all of your music to something like 'musicbrainz picard' - it will sort out all the tags and provide the artwork too