I’m using MusicBrainz Picard for tagging my music library and I’m not unhappy with it. Yet, sometimes it feels a bit clunky and I’m wondering if there are other good tools out there. What do people use? What are the major pros of these tools? Let’s collect some recommendations here. I’m Linux based, but for the benefit of others don’t restrict yourself!
Most people use Lidarr so I just use it as well. Out of the box it needed some tweaking but other than that, it works quite well. Pulls tags from MusicBrainz and that’s enough for me. I have been thinking of trying out beets (or a web wrapper of beets), but haven’t gotten the time to do that.
Ah, so that’s a torrent setup, right?
(Not OP but) it can be used to actually download the music itself via torrents, but can also just ingest your existing library and automatically (re-)tag everything as it’s added.
You can use a torrent indexer with it, sure. I use soulseek, which doesn’t integrate so I just let it ingest from a folder. But if you connect it with an indexer, then you can sort of automate downloading music. Request album, and it will request download, organize and tag it for you.
I use beets in my setup and I am pleased with the results, keeps my library nice and clean. It is very capable by default and you can extend it even further with plugins. It will do fine importing well sorted albums and if you have a mess there’s also tag by filename and acoustic fingerprinting. You can use multiple metadata providers and adjust their weights for preference. It’s well documented and multiplatform (it can also be deployed as a container on a NAS system and manage of your imports). The biggest drawback is that you have to read a few pages of the docs before running it or do some dry runs.
That looks really powerful. Thanks for the tip, that’s a tool I’ll definitely check out!
