I’m working on building a personal alternative to Spotify and YouTube Music and I’ve hit two roadblocks.

  1. Genre labeling in my library is inconsistent and manually updating 2500+ MP3s isn’t feasible. I’ve tried using beets with the LastFM plugin in quiet mode but no luck. Any ideas?

  2. Where can I bulk download diverse music catalogs? I’ve snagged some ‘top 90s/80s/hiphop/etc’ collections, but 2500 songs don’t go far.

What I miss about Spotify and YouTube Music is their ability to auto-play similar tunes based on my current selection. Any advice would be appreciated.

  • EccTMEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I would’ve suggested MusicBrainz as a metadata library to pull genre tags from, but I’m pretty sure beets uses that as it’s source too. I tried beets on my collection, but ended up just using MusicBrainz Picard and tagging things manually because beets would basically pick the first match it found a lot of the time, and there was usually a more correct option in the database.

    As far as bulk downloading diverse music catalogs, I don’t really know of any good sources, but there probably are music-focused trackers out there that could provide that. I’ve just slowly build my collection up album by album as I found things that interested me. Maybe check the likes of last.fm and ListenBrainz for most played music in their stats, and start collecting those?

    How do you intend to access your music collection? Navidrome? or are you just building up folders of music?