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.

  • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
    4·
    1 hour ago

    My man, I’ve been putting off sorting that shit for twenty years now. In the meantime I’ve circled back to CDs !

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    Yeah I’ve been in that same boat. My music collection is made up of stuff I stole off Limewire, ripped compilation CDs, soundtracks, stuff I recorded off the radio…most are mp3, I’ve only started using FLAC last year, ID3 or other metadata stuff is completely inconsistent or missing.

    There are services that will identify the track based on examining the audio and provide data for it. I used a piece of Linux software called EasyTag for that purpose.

  • toddestan@lemmy.world
    3·
    5 hours ago

    I’ve got a directory like that on my computer, nested under a couple of /old_computer directories. At some point in the early 2000’s I switched to a system of (still not so well named) full albums as hard drive sizes increased and internet connections got faster, leaving the old original directory of one-offs from the dialup days to wither.

    My favorite part is the New Music directory where I stick new stuff I obtain until I give it a listen to it make sure that 1) it’s something I actually want to keep and 2) whether there is any quality issues with the encoding. There’s stuff in there with timestamps from like 2002. Yeah, I’m still planning to check that out…someday…

    • wookiepedia@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 hours ago

      /media/zfspool1/music/new/new/frommurray2008/

      It’s half a terabyte and I’ve found all sorts of shit in there, but I doubt I’ll ever get it organized. I mocks me in defiance.

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
    9·
    7 hours 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
      21·
      2 hours ago

      no fucking commercials or streaming bullshit.

      ZERO FUCKING DOLLARS GOES TO JOE FUCKHEAD ROGAN.

      that’s enough justification for mp3 imho

  • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
    33·
    12 hours 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.

  • stoly@lemmy.world
    11·
    13 hours 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·
      7 hours 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.

  • thatradomguy@lemmy.world
    42·
    9 hours ago

    Also consider backing up to the cloud when you can. Never know when a rainy day will come by, or ICE for that matter.

    • PraiseTheSoup@midwest.social
      22·
      8 hours ago

      “the cloud” is not a legitimate backup solution, and you’re doing people a disservice by advertising it as such. The majority of service providers are just as untrustworthy as spotify.

      • tomcatt360@lemmy.zipEnglish
        10·
        7 hours ago

        Its still a valuable part of a 3-2-1 rule based backup plan: 3 different copies, on 2 different media types, with 1 copy offsite. I don’t think they were recommending storing your only copy in the cloud afaik

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    721·
    19 hours 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.

    • darkreader2636@lemmy.zip
      2·
      12 hours ago

      Picard sometimes falls short on cover arts and track names of some niche or non-english albums because of that mp3tag with discogs is sometimes needed

    • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      18 hours ago

      Oh I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. I wonder how this integrates into something like Jellyfin if I want to host my own personal music streaming for myself.

      • Quazatron@lemmy.world
        3·
        15 hours ago

        I use Jellyfin also.

        My workflow is like this: buy CDs from Discogs, rip them to FLAC, adjust filenames, covers and metadata with Picard, push the files to Jellyfin that promptly detects the new files.

        I also use Soundconverter in Linux to generate MP3s files for devices that don’t support FLAC.

        I’m very happy with this setup and my collection has never been so organized.

  • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
    20·
    16 hours ago

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

        • Wolf314159@startrek.website
          2·
          11 hours ago

          It’ll destroy all your painstakingly crafted and curated ID3 tags much faster than Picard. I’m not salty or anything. Anyway, the lesson for me was that music is simply too complicated from a library perspective to trust to highly-automated tools like beets. Picard kind of encourages you to go directory by directory and release by release, and that is a good thing. These days so are does most of the library stuff for newly added things, but I usually end up fixing it all basic to my standard with Picard later.

          • Noxy@pawb.socialEnglish
            1·
            11 hours ago

            Yeah, definitely agreed. There are so many edge cases. I tend to put new downloads/purchases in an “intake” dir and then run that through picard, which then saves it at the final local storage path with whatever tags I decide to use

  • LifeOfChance@lemmy.world
    4·
    12 hours ago

    I just found all my old burned CDs including the folder of them I made for my spouse. I can’t believe those songs won her over lol, but 20 years later here we are.