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.

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

Aside from properly ripping and tagging your own physical collection I'd generally refer you to r/piracy but I think they've gone a bit strange since the blackout. I'm fairly sure anything more specific in that direction would not be appropriate for this subreddit.

Downloading MusicBrainz will be a lifesaver for you.