Comment by johntitorjr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johntitorjr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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 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.

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? 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/

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com