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Comment by kretaceous | Hacker News Reader

I self-host a couple of things including an Emby server to watch movies. Self-hosting a music library seems interesting. But I discover and listen to music far more than I watch movies.

This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?

I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.

I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?

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I've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.

My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.

>credit card gets charged a bunch of times

I avoid this by buying the virtual gift cards and redeeming them on my own account

I imagine that this also avoids any credit card foreign currency fees?

It does, yes.

I did not know they offered this. Thanks for the heads up

I am a heavy user of bandcamp, but I find their notifications...lacking. I ended up taking their emails, categorizing them, and putting them in RSS [1]. This has cleaned up my notifications and makes it much easier to follow artists and to easily separate new releases vs news/merch/...

Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.

So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.

I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.

[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...

[2] https://flathub.org/apps/net.line72.campcounselor

[3] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/

I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes with digital downloads too. When I'm at home, physical media is fucking rad. I mean, I can unplug the turntable, spin it by hand, and hear the music directly from the needle. No software, no gadgets. It's so primal, like the artist is whispering to me. I hadn't realized how much I lost switching to Pandora until I switched back to physical media.

Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.

I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.

I can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?

This^.

There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.

The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.

Somehow we did it before spotify :). Browse forums. See what people are talking about. Follow local venues and see who is coming to town. Read about different artists. Different producers. Different record companies. Fall down the rabbit hole. You don’t need an algorithm to tell you what to listen to. Take the reigns. It’s a hobby right? Lean in.

I do not know what you are listening to, but for my kind od music I have few webpages that I can visit for new and old releases. I can filter for example by genre and see few yt videos with to see if this is something I would like. Then you can download it or buy it. This is a lot od work but I would never discover few bands 'the spotify way'. Like i.e. Austrian Death Machine.

> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything?

MusicBrainz Picard ... one album at a time until you get the hang of it.

MP3Tag for manual cleanups and out of normal oddities, etc.

I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.

> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.

I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.

[1]: https://beets.io/

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