Greetings Lemmings!
I am not new to self hosting; been at it for a few years. And I have neglected a very important part of my home lab; MUSIC!
So I stream music from Navidrome to all of my devices.
My music library has grown organically over the years, for probably the past 17 years. And a few times I had manually organized and fixed up some of the tags. But ultimately I ended up with a mess of a library.
I am working on cleaning that up. Though I absolutely should have cleaned it up before I created 2 backup scripts.
In short, I have a script that is called from a systemd service on a timer that runs my backup script that essentially more or less uses rsync to mirror the files in LiveMusicDir to MusicArchive1. This happens on my docker host where my Navidrome lives. The Music is on an NFS share hosted outside of the docker host.
The next step I run another similar setup on my desktop; systemd service running a script on a timer that uses rsync and other dependencies to track changes.
What I plan to do is organize the source. I am using beets, and learning as I go.
What methods do you use for managing a large music library?
Definitely more advanced than what I do! I’ve also been collecting for a long time, and I’ve just been storing the media. I went from Windows/x86-64 to Mac/ARM64 a few years back, and I have kinda limited options that way. I would have just gone to Linux if my computers didn’t die, but at the time, Apple made sense.
I do Apple Music, but, that doesn’t answer the question. I also self-host my music via a Plex server. I got Plex Pass for well under $100 on sale years and years ago. Much harder to recommend now. Plexamp is awesome for music, and I also use Prologue (iOS app) for audiobooks hosted on Plex.
For tagging, I use Mp3Tag and tag manually. It was free on Windows, but the guy wants $30 for it on Mac. It’s a long story as to why, but after he was kind enough to explain it to me… I paid the man. (For my part, I’d used it for free for many years and I got a lot of miles out of it, and still do, and it’s a good, well maintained app from a solo developer.) There are free alternatives. Not so many good ones on Mac (part of why I paid). For album art, I get them from Apple using this handy site (not mine): https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/ — you can use 600px or you can use either 2000px or 3000px, I forget which. I’m good with 600px. I think Apple uses the smaller size for phones and the bigger one for TVs and Macs (especially as iMacs have 5K screens now).
My library might also not be as big as yours is. Plex says I have 14,462 tracks indexed. Maybe those are rookie numbers, I dunno. I pretty much have everything I want. All I’d really want now is to take my Apple Music playlists and download them to m4a 192k or similar. I have a few decade playlists that are like 500-600 songs each (80s, 90s, and 00s).
I just use kid3 to check and fix the tags on each album as I get it.
I have gone in so many different directions. When I was on Windows I would use MusicBee or MediaMonkey for tagging, I would do it album by album. It was pretty great, but I haven’t used Windows in years. There are not any Media players that are for local files that I even like for Linux.
So, I ultimately moved to Navidrome. Have lost some of my tunes, but was at 50k at one point. I am back down to about 23k.
Beets seems pretty neat so far, automatic is my goal!
Navidrome looks like good stuff. If I ever move off of Plex, I’ll absolutely be looking at it. I’m running macOS, but my goal is to buy a gently used Windows PC from a business or something (like they couldn’t upgrade it to Windows 11 or whatever’s after that) and replace Windows with Linux, and use it as a server. My Mac (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM) is more than enough machine to run multiple servers, but I’d rather do that with a dedicated machine running some *nix that I can terminal into from the Mac. Navidrome does run on macOS with minor tweaking that is not above my skill level, but when I set up the server I’ll be looking real hard at alternatives.