https://web.archive.org/web/20010502171211/http://www.mp3tag...

My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk.

Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.

1. Buying used and reasonably priced original music CDs

2. Ripping them with EAC[1] and an external LG BH16NS55 to FLAC format (takes 120 seconds per CD - this drive is FAST and ACCURATE)

3. Auto-import the ripped FLACs into my beets.io database via cronjob (which also unifies the metadata automatically in 99% of the cases)

4. Inplace-convert the FLACs to 192kbps mp3 via `beet convert`

5. Archiving the converted perfectly tagged FLACs to Bluray discs, as soon as the archive size hits 25GB

6. Point a self-hosted Navidrome instance and a Windows VM with iTunes to the beets folder

7. Use Substreamer App with Navidrome's smart playlists[2] and "favoriting" on my Android phone / iPhone as well as iTunes syncing my iPod Nano 7 via smart playlists

Works absolutely flawless and is less work than I expected. Since I automated everything possible, the only manual thing I need to do is the BUYING, the RIPPING and the Bluray ARCHIVING part.

1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

2: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/1417

This is why most people bother with MP3 still, we don't care that there is something more recent. Or rather, we do care but have no use for it yet. Not always is the new thing better than the old for your use case.

CueRipper looks nice, maybe I'll evaluate, but for now my workflow is totally fine.

The good part is, that if I one day choose to get rid of the MP3s, all I have to do is reimport my FLAC archive (of course I have a Hardisk-Version of the Bluray backup) and I'm done. With `beet convert` I can choose every other compressed format or quality and just need to wait a few hours to "recompile" my whole collection.

After that, it’s just mp3 (and flac)

The Optical Drive can be passed through to the VM.

If you still get errors, it's probably a hardware issue.

Like I described above I keep the FLAC Archive on a Harddisk, so if any day I decide to change my library format (e.g. to AAC to use FLAC), it is like one rsync, one import and one convert.

However, I never use anything but Verbatim, never had a bad experience with it.

Exactly my experience. Verbatim is worth the additional cost in my opinion. I mainly do the archival as a hobby... not sure I ever gonna need it :-) However, I'm pretty scared of ransomware these days, so I tried to make my setup as ransomware proof as possible and zfs-auto-snapshot + self burned blurays with the most important data seemed like a good idea :-)

I am of the opinion that (multiple) hard disks might be the most recoverable. I might be wrong.

That said, beet (beets.io) is much more convinient / accurate / easy to use and once it is configured properly. EAC has partly inserted the most important metadata stuff (artist, album, etc.) after ripping. So I use a cronjob, that runs `beet import` with "ignore if no match is found", that fully automates the process of embedding the metadata (also cover, lyrics and so on).

Works really well and I don't need to perform ONE mnaual step. Although Mp3Tag is a great tool (and I mean really great), doing all the tagging manually costs just too much time.

Opus is more exotic and does not work on all my players though (e.g. my car or kitchen radio)

You should See my audio books workflow with m4b-tool and audiobookshelf, which is probably even better ;)

Did you know ffmpeg has a non free Encoder (libfdk_AAC) thats sounds slightly better?

Maybe I'll never get it done, there is so much to cover... from

- what I know about iPods

- why modern Android Phones still can't compete in my opinion

- why the Apple Earpods can't change volume on Android devices and vice versa (https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol)

- how you can harvest Earpods remote to create a durable good sounding headset using the right pinout

- that OneMore seems to have implemented the Apple Remote Protocol without anyone noticing

- why I wrote my own command line cross platform audio tagger (https://github.com/sandreas/tone)

- why I self-host my audio stuff

- and why nobody seems to care about an audio everything solution (music, audio books, podcasts, etc.)

So, let's hope I'll find the time :-)

EAC doesn't seem like it would have anything set up for an autoloader like the Nimbie, but dbpoweramp does; on the other hand, the major music-sharing groups seem to prefer EAC.

Sadly, there's nothing out there that will be relatively accurate and precise when it comes to extracting beats per minute, key, and the nebulous "energy" characteristics. I would love to have those.

I think I will also have to work to do things like pushing lyrics and artwork into the FLACs, seeing what metadata "makes it" in the re-encoding to something like a 320kbps MP3.

Speaking of metadata: Beets does this pretty well. You should try it, even if it takes a few hours to get used to it. There are a few good youtube tutorials.

Beets sounds like it should be part of the mix, but so does MusicBrainz Picard.

Spotify doesn't even have to disappear, it just has to lose access to the songs you care about or raise their prices to the point where they are unfair, or degrade their service in other ways until it's not worth using.

Personally, I'm paranoid about using internet based services to fetch metadata for my local media collection. I imagine their servers log those requests, each filename, the metadata pulled, IPs, and timestamps, and that they keep that data around for at least some length of time. Not sure how many sell that data, but what I'm listening to isn't really anyone else's business and I don't want the RIAA or anyone else to use that information as evidence against me somehow or coming around asking for proof of purchase for every MP3 they got from those logs.

And even the much-praised weekly playlist is hit or miss - sometimes it’s weeks with abhorring stuff, then for once I get a good one with two to three songs I actually like.

Totally separate from the "song radio" playlists what you probably mean

And it’s awful. Like I’m stuck in an echo chamber. I want to find new music!

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

For songs that have covers, it will ID the song as any of a number of similar covers. I just tried to use it to tag something from the Grease 2007 revival soundtrack (which, as of this writing, doesn't exist in Musicbrainz), and it happily identified it as the same song from the 1994 revival, which is wrong. This makes me hesitant to use it to identify songs if I don't already know what the identification should be.

Services eventually disappear. Not many people recall about Vitaminic, a gem of the early 2K that along MySpace gave countless unknown artists and bands the opportunity to put their music online, then one day poof! and it was gone with all its content. I had saved a few quite interesting tracks on my hard drive and attempted to search for the artists in the hope they moved elsewhere, but no way: they were gone forever. So, screw online services: I'm not going to waste any energy in something whose kill switch is in someone else's hand.

I'm sure there's a CLI or something that can accomplish what I'm trying to do though.

It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it leaves behind old folders and files. e.g. If I have a few directories of MP3/Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans, it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned up manually.

But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing everything in one application.

* Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]"

[1] https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ -- a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok.

You can also always use builtin Music.app for organization + tagging. I've been using it (or iTunes before) to manage my local music library for 10 years now and it's the best thing of my life, a big plus is I can also sync my library to my iPhone (altho the software quality downgraded a lot since the Big Sur rewrite). I also wonder if there's a cross platform alternative: a good tagger + a good player / organizer + easy to sync to phone + a good player on phone

[0] https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/

The fanciful ideas on the POPM frame were very interesting. The ID3v2 standards author's late 1990s, pre-massive-spam-onslaught design choice to include an email address seems kind of quaint now!

Turns out that there's no standard tag for this, but the most common (from what I searched was POPULARIMETER, where you store it in EMAIL|RATING|PLAYCOUNTER format. Email is a string (optional), rating is an int 0-255※, and playcounter as an integer.

So I wrote a Python script that would read the file on disk, match it with the entry in iTunes DB, populate POPULARIMETER, then verify everything was set correctly in MP3tag.

This took a few hours to do, mostly due to discovering how to do it and verifying everything worked correctly. Unfortunately the MP3 players I use now (VLC and mpv) don't support updating the POPULARIMETER field, so it'll be left as an unchanging relic from my iTunes days.

※ - 1 star → 0.2x255 = 51, 2 star → 0.4x255 = 102, etc

In my quest to find an offline MP3 player for my kid, I spent a bunch of time looking at models, but none of them give you the ability to sort (and shuffle) by artist, album, and genre the way the old iPods did.

I still store most of my music in iTunes (renamed to Music in later macOS versions). I’m also happy with the tag editing of iTunes, especially after installing some custom tag-editing AppleScripts from https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php and modifying some of those scripts.

However, I am rethinking storing all my music in iTunes given that it can’t play Opus or FLAC files (last I checked) and it makes loud glitchy sounds when it plays an MP3 file whose sample rate is 32k instead of 44.1k. I’ve already had to give up on storing all my music files in the iTunes folder now that my entire music library doesn’t fit on my laptop’s storage. Thus, I have been using Meta more.

Edit: I see another commenter also mentioned Meta and Music.app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471849

Do you use it for portable mp3 players? Wondering why mp3gain instead of ReplayGain capable player, seems wrong to edit the music data itself instead of just tagging the gain values.

There's certainly no nice bulk tagging functionality, however.

Basically use Picard to fill in meta-data, then Mp3tag to tidy up, add the album art and tweak naming conventions to my preference when needed.

I wrote a Powershell script that sets the date a minute newer when it updates ID3 V1 tags so I can compare files and know that one came from 2005 and has had metadata updated since then. I haven't found a bulk tagger that does this.

It's easy to see which bitrate a track/album has, you don't need to keep dates for that? What's harder to see is what encoder was used -- modern LAME at even 128kbps is a totally different game than some 90s Xing or Fraunhofer.

Better would of course be to have lossless files of the originals and mass convert to mp3 when needed, but I suppose that's a different discussion.

Mp3Tag has a timestamp preservation setting. There's also the ability to run an external script/program on all selected files (via the Tools sub-menu of the context menu) or by configuring File>Export with a script.

For those wanting to preserve original timestamps I'd suggest storing them into custom tags in the files themselves as a backup. Mp3Tag can be set up to do this automatically using an Action (its scripting syntax). That way one can always restore them back using a script.

Being able to pull tag data from Amazon was really useful, though...

I used this way back on Windows 2000 in high school!

Now, I have to decide if this is West Coast electro skiffle or its Canadian folk influenced digital beats.

We wind up needing another tag, to do classical/pop/folk in.

Also, players don't agree on artist/composer/orchestra or on movement numbering, you can't even rely on BWV. I've had multiple CD sets split by the amazing variance of back catalogue mining meaning an 11 part cd set of Chopin can match a 9 or 10 part set and a single release cd or two.

The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare, matched only by how hard approximation of date is in EXIF

*Truth*. I find it really frustrating to only be able to assign one genre and one grouping to a song or album. Rating is another one. A 0-5 system is woefully insufficient to rate music. (If I had my way, it would adopt Robert Christgau's grading system[1] that runs from "Dud" to "A+"...)

[1] https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php

The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems.

[0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.

What made it even more frustrating was that I already had to restrict (and still do) to players that properly support "Album artist" tags if I want sensible filtering/searching/listing of albums that have multiple artists credited or is a compilation of songs from different artists. So I was left with a paltry selection of players that properly supported everything I wanted (and didn't suck), couldn't even setup a subsonic server (although that had other issues too..), and NO SINGLE android app could deal with it.

I eventually had to revert all this nonsense and use the "Genre" tag as god (apparently) intended.

So moral of the day, (or TL;DR) don't do weird shit with tags.

When I do smart search on original album issue year like "60s" I find I get hit by amazing truths about what was contemporaneous music.

"Switched on Bach" alongside "the Beatles" and "the song of the green berets" as well as Charles' Aznavour and Mingus, Terry Riley, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Keith Jarret, the Hollies, and Rogers & Hammertime (sorry -stein) It was a mixed up musical period. Thank God the fab four split up before the 70s.

Len Deighton's spy hero listens to Stockhausen and Miles.

I don't bother with genre tags. And if my main collection grows enough to require them (currently ~500 albums), I think I will just be creating playlists.

As for album artist, every player I came across could support it (except Rhythmbox I think). I currently have Navidrome, MPD, and Doppler (Mac) pointed at the same collection. Swinsian (Mac) does support the grouping tag.