I've got a large, local library in Apple Music—the application, not the service, they need a naming czar—amassed over decades of purchases. The auto-lookup from iTunes/Music is fine, but I find a real joy in having correct metadata. All those mix CDs from high school!
I care less about high-quality album art than Apple execs do, I think, and I likewise don't bother too much with all the meta tags, but it's surprising how often the CDDB or Gracenotes or whatever Music.app uses are wrong, have typos, miss information, etc. I scrobble listens, so it's a natural progression for anything new or clearly wrong.
I think of it like tending a garden, and find it quite peaceful. It's clearly not for Regular People™ like so much else here. Every other person in my life is happy with "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Track 2" or just using a streaming service.
There was one UX papercut that ended up messing some data on tracks that I had to correct later: fields with multiple values, like "Artists", show the multiple values like "Beats and Styles; Toni W.". But the field in the UI is also editable as a text field, and if you manually write that with the semicolon, it stores one artist with the semicolon included! It took me a while to realise that I can right click to open an editor where multiple values can be entered and edited separately.
The plugins/extensions have also been proving quite useful, there are now quite a lot more available and useful ones. I've managed to incorporate some into my workflow.
1. Tagging doesn't work if you don't import every song in an album at once (see https://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder/comments/1j0wnbz/need_... and dev comments on https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/5014)
2. Even when you do import a full album, it often struggles to match tracks. Here's part of a transcript I saved:
Match (29.3%):
StarSystems - Lift
≠ artist, album, tracks, unmatched tracks
MusicBrainz, CD-R, 2019, GB, None, None, None
https://musicbrainz.org/release/7c68b7ff-27c0-4da7-8430-d4228c6f6ff8
≠ Artist: -> StarSystems
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Arrival [2238026155].mp3 (1:08) -> (#1) Arrival (1:08)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Slipstream [1268364723].mp3 (6:23) -> (#2) Flower (6:25)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Trigger Fish [1805252711].mp3 (5:06) -> (#3) Party Time (5:03)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Moth [857985311].mp3 (4:51) -> (#4) Moth (4:51)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Vortex [1717930774].mp3 (5:38) -> (#5) Vortex (5:38)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Flower [3129604796].mp3 (6:25) -> (#6) Slipstream (6:23)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Party Time [545976708].mp3 (5:03) -> (#7) Trigger Fish (5:06)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Lift (feat. Jordan Rudess) [3330158657].mp3 (8:09) -> (#8) Lift (feat. Jordan Rudess) (8:09)
≠ (#0) StarSystems - Disengage [526901544].mp3 (2:01) -> (#9) Disengage (2:01)
Unmatched tracks (1):
! (#0) (5:06)
Apply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,
Rescan directory, Enter search, enter Id, aBort?
Look at tracks #2, #3, #6, #7. Why is it trying to switch the names around, even though the original name + length is right, and the new name + length is wrong?Picard has worked flawlessly for me so far, it's just a shame it can't be automated.