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Music Management

Music management is the set of systems and processes to get and categorize songs so it's easy to browse and discover new content. It involves the next actions:

  • Automatically index and download metadata of new songs.
  • Notify the user when a new song is added.
  • Monitor the songs of an artist, and get them once they are released.
  • A nice interface to browse the existent library, with the possibility of filtering by author, genre, years, tags or release types.
  • An interface to listen to the music
  • An interface to rate and review library items.
  • An interface to discover new content based on the ratings and item metadata.

Components⚑

I've got a music collection built from mediarss downloads, bought CDs rips and friend library sharing. It is more less organized in a directory tree by genre, but I lack any library management features. I have a lot of duplicates, incoherent naming scheme, no way of filtering or intelligent playlist generation.

playlist_generator helped me with the last point, based on the metadata gathered with mep, but it's still not enough.

So I'm in my way of migrate all the library to beets, and then I'll deprecate mep in favor to a mpd client that allows me to keep on saving the same metadata.

Once it's implemented, I'll migrate all the metadata to the new system.

Lidarr⚑

I'm also using Lidarr to manage what content is missing.

Both Lidarr and beets get their from MusicBrainz. This means that sometimes some artist may lack a release, if they do, please contribute to MusicBrainz and add the information. Be patient, Lidarr may take some time to fetch the information, as it probably is not available straight away from the API.

One awesome feature of Lidarr is that you can select the type of releases you want for each artist. They are defined in Settings/Profiles/Metadata Profiles. To be able to fine grain your settings, you first need to understand what do , Primary Types, Secondary Types and Release Status means.

If you want to set the missing picture of an artist, you need to add it at fanart.tv. It's a process that needs the moderators approval, so don't expect it to be automatic. They are really kind when you don't do things right, but still, check their upload guidelines before you contribute.