1. Obtain flac cd-ripped originals
2. Convert to 256bit center-weighted opus
3. Use Picard to tag music, save to artist - album/song file & folder pattern
4. Sync to my subsonic-compatible server

In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.

This is a recurring, and I never see wrtag mentioned. Has anyone tried it?

It also uses MusicBrainz. Unlike beets, it stores metadata in the music files. It is from the author of Gonic.

Different angle on this, and it may or may not fit your setup, but it changed things for me.

I’ve been accumulating audio since the early 2000s. Twenty-some years of ripped CDs, vinyl rips from release groups, random downloads. Several thousand albums. At some point I accepted that tags were never going to be consistent across that pile, because the sources never agreed on anything in the first place: a 1979 vinyl rip tagged by whoever released it, a CD rip from 2004, and a modern FLAC have nothing in common metadata-wise, and no tagger reconciles that without me babysitting it.

So I stopped trying to fix the tags and leaned on the folder structure instead. My tree already carried everything I cared about: genre at the top, then artist, then Artist - Year - Album, with subfolders for live, compilations and singles. That structure took years to build and it’s reliable in a way my tags never were.

I run Velvet (mStream fork) as the server for it. It serves the library by folder structure rather than by tag database, so there’s nothing to scan, nothing to match, nothing to get wrong. And I vibe-coded Sharesonic, an Android client for it, because I wanted to browse my library the way it’s actually organized and share a track, a playlist or an entire folder as a public link without exporting anything. Personal project, it’s on GitHub if anyone wants it.

To be clear about what this does and doesn’t solve: it doesn’t repair your files. If Picard truncated audio on you, that’s a real problem and it needs fixing at the file level, not at the player level. Worth checking whether the audio itself is actually shorter or whether it’s just the duration metadata disagreeing with the stream, because both look identical from the player side and only one of them is destructive.

The trade-off is real. You lose cross-cutting queries: no “everything from 1977 across all artists”, no proper album artist handling for compilations. If that matters, stay on Jellyfin and keep grinding through Picard. If you mostly navigate by “I want to hear that specific album”, folders are faster than any tag database.

I just started properly tagging new music at some point and now my library is largely tagged correctly.

For tagging I use kid3, great KDE application for that.

I also sort my music into a folder layout like this to know where I got it from and potentially upgrade the quality.

MusicRaw
  - Artist1
    - Bandcamp
      - Album1
    - Tidal
      - Album2
      - Album3
    - Youtube
      - ytrip album
  - Artist2
    - Album1 (not moved to a separate source)
    - Tidal
      - Album2
      - Album3
    - ytrip album

I then have a script to loudness-normalize (come fight me) all music and write it to another subfolder.
A second script takes those normalized files and symlinks them into a structure like this:

Music
  - Artist1
      - Album1
      - Album2
      - Album3
      - ytrip album
  - Artist2
      - Album1
      - Album2
      - ytrip album

I tried switching to Picard, but for somewhat obvious reasons it doesn’t support my insane structure.

I use a manual approach for my music:

First, I use Musicbrainz Picard to tag my music according to their database. Most of the time, “lookup” just works, bacuse the source files are already pre-tagged sufficiently, sometimes I need to “analyze” the files, which is slower, but works with whatever “lookup” didn’t catch.

Then I use kid3 to manually clean up my tags, like fixing Genres. I also use its renaming function to keep the filenames uniform - Artist/YYYY - Album/## - Title.ext

After that, the files get normalized using replaygain/mp3gain.

Only then will the files get moved to my NAS, where every device will be able to access them, and overnight my phone will automatically grab any newly added music and copy it to the phones SD card.

I’ve gone back and forth on this, but ultimately, I enjoy the tagging process and accept it as part of my workflow.

When i’m adding a release to my collection, I throw it into a temo directory, open the album folder in MP3Tag, query MusicBrainz (or Discogs if necessary) for the basics, replace the cover image if I’m not happy with the one from the source, add additional genre tags and do cleanup, auto renumber tracks/discs. Once it all looks good, I use the tags-to-filename feature to rename everything to AlbumArtist/[OriginalYear] Album/### - Title (### - Artist - Title for multi artist releases) then copy it to my library.

It sounds like a lot, but it isn’t bad. Like I said, I enjoy it.

Updating tags shouldn’t change the actual music though. That seems really strange and like something else is going on.

Usually beets is the solution but it uses the same source as picard. Songs shouldn’t get shorter though? Sorting should be the same though, independent of the software.

Music/artist/release/title

I gave up a couple of years ago. It is too much work for too little gain.

For the more mainstream music I have I went through and used Picard and manually reviewed everything and altered accordingly before saving the changes. This was only around 10km tracks so wasn’t too bad, just slowly chipped away at it over time. Now it is in a good place anything new I add I can just do the same and it doesn’t take too long.

I tried a few automated ways but they are all unreliable. I don’t believe this is really anything you can automate and still get accurate results, tou have to put in the time.

My DJ library which is mostly stuff that would never be recognised by any software is about 25k songs and growing. I went through and systematically loaded all the tracks in batches into mp3tag and manually reviewed and edited every track to be tagged correctly and within the naming convention I had chosen whilst at the same time giving me the opportunity to cull anything I didn’t want.

It was extremely time consuming but ultimately the only way I was going to achieve what I wanted.

After that they would all be run through mixed in key. So now anything new I get goes through the same process of mp3tag to mixed in key to the library and now I’m in a good place.

Note for anyone else doing this, always do mp3tag first, if you run mixed in key first then even just opening the tracks in mp3tag it will often overwrite your key tagging (if you are using comments tag to contain keys) so you’ll have to run mixed in key again. Even if you dont edit any of the tags on that track.

Ultimately I think you have to put in the time to get what you want, any automated solution is going to give you lots of incorrect results and end up tagging your stuff into a worse position than you were in to start with.

i have 3 separate folders in one Navidrome folder: one for bandcamp because they have good ID3 tags (just good old download and copy), one for lidarr and a beets folder for any music i acquire outside of the first two. Navidrome shows everything as one library.

Yeah, at some point, I told Picard to just re-sort everything and that was not a good idea. Some songs got renamed or put under a different artist, because I guess, the actual song is not in the MusicBrainz database.
I do have a backup that I should restore actually, but yeah, difficult to notice such changes and especially to know how much damage was done.

I did also figure, I should just add the unknown songs into MusicBrainz, but boy, I added one album and that took more than half an hour…

Definitely leaning more and more towards that unsorted life…

I just sort by Artist and Album.

I group my albums by artist, and I sort them by artist, then year of release, then album name.
Each song in the album is sorted by track number.

Music/Albums/Pink Floyd/Pink Floyd (1973) - The Dark Side of the Moon/06 Pink Floyd - Money.flac

I also make sure all tags are set correctly so that they get sorted correctly in programs like Jellyfin and Finamp

beets with a whole bunch of custom scripts. I tried using picard but found it to be completely useless, it rarely finds a match and when it does it decides it belongs to multiple album editions rather than just 1.

By Artist and Album, then let Plex handle the rest. It’s pretty much the standard format for torrents so 95% is just drop in and done. I occasionally do youtube DLs for very recent releases but those I rename and sort by hand.