I have a folder of MP3s, some of which date back to 1999, just a few years after the format was popularised. Most of them have utterly terrible names (think RIDEONAM.MP3). I think at this point they might even survive the heat death of the universe. And they’ll still be terribly-organised.

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    772·
    21 days ago

    You’ll find that MusicBrainz Picard is a heaven sent tool to properly tag your files, with optional proper renaming.

    It takes some getting used to, and I find it works best in whole albums, but produces a much more professional library.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
    53·
    21 days ago

    We’ve evolved towards a software-managed autotagged library of lossless audio now, but yeah, pretty much.

    I just had a chat with my friends about how the family plan price went up 30% while the basic functionality doesnt fucking work half the time

    • Lonewolfmcquade@lemmy.world
      1·
      19 days ago

      Amen. Glad to hear I’m not the only one baffled that Spotify’s app development is total garbage. It is one app that doesn’t get updated ever - once I have a working version. If it were up to me, I’d happily never use it again

  • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
    39·
    21 days ago

    I find music on YouTube and autoconvert it to MP3 with yt-dlp and ffmpeg. It fetches new music from my personal “Favorite Music” playlist, downloads the highest quality audio source, converts it to MP3, embeds the metadata and cover art and tries to parse the artist and title as best as possible.

    yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" --playlist-start 1 --playlist-end 999 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=123abc -o "./files/%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies-from-browser

    Needs minimal adjustment sometimes if the title format is weird, but works 95% automatic. What I like most about this is the fact that music vanishes all the time from YouTube, but it doesn’t affect me. No one deletes the files from my harddrive but me.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
    29·
    21 days ago

    That can be fixed easily* with programs like beets

    * = the program itself is easy to use, but installing and configuring it, requires a PhD in Linux-Arch-ology

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
      9·
      21 days ago

      Musicbrainz Picard is a lot easier than beets, although it does require some introductory concepts to make sense (e.g. terminology like “release”, “release group”). And it makes it too easy to accidentally poison datasets in an attempt to be helpful. Harder to automate than beets, too.

      Both of them also benefit from a decent knowledge of where your files came from, not as good for a random pile of mp3s.

  • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    27·
    21 days ago

    left spotify and started downloading all my music from [COMPLETELY LEGAL AVENUES] and bandcamp. It’s good to have music that Spotify cannot take away from me.

    • tired_n_bored@lemmy.world
      10·
      21 days ago

      I download music from YouTube. Are the “completely legal avenues” better than that? In that case can you provide links in DM so I make sure to block these domains and to promptly inform the authorities? Thank you.

    • kadu@lemmy.world
      4·
      21 days ago

      I have a happy middle ground:

      I pay for Tidal’s student subscription. I leverage the fact Tidal streams FLAC files that can be decrypted by your account to build my local collection.

      So I never actually stream or use their app, but technically am paying for the downloads.

      I tried buying FLACs from companies that actually wanted to sell FLACs but they have ridiculously bad catalogues.

        • kadu@lemmy.world
          1·
          20 days ago

          Yep, they’re regular FLAC files with tagged metadata.

          You can use them as normal. Copy to another device, to an iPod, use them on a video editor, send to a friend.

          This has been going on for ages, Tidal never patched it, so I think they quietly are okay with it because not many users do it anyway and at least you’re paying for the service.

        • kadu@lemmy.world
          4·
          20 days ago

          I think any links would violate Lemmy.world’s policies.

          But a quick search for “Tidal downloader github” will give you several options.

          But the ides is that when Tidal streams to specific devices they basically upload an encrypted FLAC to an AWS host and the device downloads the file and uses your account as the key.

          So people create apps that do all that, but instead of simply streaming the FLAC, they download and save it. They require a paid account, or an active free trial. I pay for the discounted student one, which still gives you access to the maximum audio quality.

          The great part is you get album art, live lyrics, high resolution audio, an organized and properly tagged library with zero work. The output FLACs are regular files - no DRM or weirdness, I use them on a MP3 player.

          • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world
            2·
            21 days ago

            i gave it a cursory duckduckgo! everything looked a couple years old. I’ll keep digging.

            i wouldn’t mind a dm! if you’ve the time.

            • kadu@lemmy.world
              4·
              21 days ago

              You want a new generation tidal downloader.

              On GitHub.

              So a Tidal downloader new generation.

              One could call such a thing tidal-dl-ng if they’re trying to save some letters, I guess.

  • remon@ani.social
    261·
    21 days ago

    Nah, it has very much been replaced with properly sorted .flac files. What ever is left is stuff I don’t listen to anymore.

    • P00Pchute@lemmy.world
      51·
      21 days ago

      I really want to go this route. Had Spotify, tempted to get Tidal but I don’t want to deal with content coming and going anymore. I have about 300 gigs of random MP3s, and Flac files. I want to obtain more and move over fully to flac. Any recommendations on making the transition back to locally stored music.

      • remon@ani.social
        2·
        21 days ago

        I gave up on trying to sort my initial batch and just started replacing.

        First I try to find a full discography of an artist by a solid release group (for example "PEMEDIA or “88”). With those you can just copy the entire folder into the artist directory and plex/jellyfin etc will perfectly detect it. Then just add new albums as they are released.

      • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
        1·
        21 days ago

        You can probably find a converter that will rip those files from Youtube for you. I did mine a year and a half ago. If I open Spotify it’s just to see the playlists they made for me, because those are actually pretty good, but I rip those files and store them too.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      21 days ago

      File format has nothing to do with proper sorting. I’ve got 350k songs properly organized by artist, album, etc, but mp3. I’ve no need for flac.

      • remon@ani.social
        83·
        21 days ago

        File format has nothing to do with proper sorting.

        Correct, it doesn’t.

        Main difference to mp3 is that flac is “lossless” so the audio quality is a bit better, but it requires more space (though still pretty insignificant compared to video).

          • remon@ani.social
            34·
            21 days ago

            Right, I never said that it was?

            I just found it much easier to just download and replace my library with files that are already sorted instead of sorting it myself. And when you’re replacing them you might as well upgrade the quality.

            • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
              23·
              21 days ago

              Nah, it has very much been replaced with properly sorted .flac files. What ever is left is stuff I don’t listen to anymore.

              Bold portion above insinuates they have to be flac format. But same is true for mp3, ogg, wav, etc.

              • remon@ani.social
                33·
                21 days ago

                I don’t think it insinuates that. I’m just describing what I did to my library.

                When I say that I replaced bag full of apples with a neatly stacked box of pears that doesn’t insinuate that only pears can be stacked.

  • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
    22·
    21 days ago

    hey now, they’re flac files and painstakingly sorted with the help of musicbrainz picard

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
    13·
    21 days ago

    I still use mp3s because:

    1. No financial cost
    2. Not tied to any one app or service
    3. More customization: Can be played back at any speed or modified in some other way
    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      21 days ago

      no fucking commercials or streaming bullshit.

      ZERO FUCKING DOLLARS GOES TO JOE FUCKHEAD ROGAN.

      that’s enough justification for mp3 imho

  • stoly@lemmy.world
    10·
    21 days ago

    I can’t possibly calculate how many hours I spent curating my music library. I don’t use it anymore but you better bet that I still have it saved to the cloud and locally and it’s there in case I need it.

    Some of this stuff I downloaded off the original Napster.

    • PraiseTheSoup@midwest.social
      3·
      21 days ago

      I’m amazed you still have the old files. I was late for Napster but I downloaded loads of individual files from kazaa/limewire/frostwire and used them to burn CDs.

      Only a few years later though I would get into torrenting and replace pretty much all those shitty old low bitrate files with 320kbps mp3 discographies.

      Many years later after college when I finally had a little extra money I started buying all my favorite CDs I discovered from the previous meana and ripped them myself to ~1000 kbps FLAC and meticulously tagged and organized them into my current music collection.

      CDs are unfortunately getting harder and harder to find and I’ve only very recently started torrenting a little again, and I prefer everything be FLAC but if it’s not available I still do have some 320kbps mp3 left in the collection.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
        1·
        20 days ago

        Everything I could find that was of higher quality, I downloaded over time. I have some bootlegs though along with some music I’ve found from no other sources. I’ll never replace some of it, but that’s fine.

  • Rooty@lemmy.world
    10·
    21 days ago

    I find it funny how we’ve resorted to streaming services in an age where you can put 256 gigabytes ono a pinky nail sized storage solution. Ereaders are even better, my old Kindle with 4gb of storage can hold an entire library.

  • Ech@lemmy.ca
    8·
    21 days ago

    Not unless you keep up with migrating your files. Drives fail over time.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
      4·
      21 days ago

      Gotta have a good backup strategy for sure. I would’ve lost my collection a few times if I didn’t have one.