beets VS picard

beets parses this with regex. So do an unknown number of personal scripts that have run unmodified for a decade. Change the column order, the header text, or the separator, and you break all of them silently.

Beets is not a streaming server — it is a music library management tool. It fixes tags, fetches metadata from MusicBrainz, normalizes album art, detects duplicates, and organizes files into a consistent directory structure. If your music library is a mess of inconsistent tags and folder names, run Beets before pointing any server at it. Navidrome, Ampache, and every other server on this list will produce better results when fed a well-organized library.

I just use Plex hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Plex Amp. I download mp3s from Bandcamp/wherever, and use beets [0] to auto-tag.

[0] https://beets.io/

I've used beets to import and tag a huge personal music library:

https://beets.io/

A music library organizer, as a replacement for my current workflow with Beets (https://beets.io/).

Beets takes almost 5 minutes per incremental update of ~1000 folders of tagged flacs with my current configuration, when all I really want it to do is:

I quite like the command line centric application http://beets.io/ as well too.

If you have the files downloaded, picard is also useful - https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab.

It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.

If you're wanting to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:

* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.

* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.

If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).

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.