[mrmekon]

I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over.

This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.

Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:

* brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

* commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

* non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)

* fan-recorded concerts

* fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)

* fan edits/remixes of commercial releases

* playlists & mix tapes

* mixed media releases

Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will still take thought.

This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.

[mrzool]

> * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

> * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

I fixed those two by adding the missing releases to the database beets uses as its data source (musicbrainz.org), and importing the album in Beets afterwards. I still get notifications for edits to entries I contributed over a decade ago!

[hamdingers]

Everyone else is telling you to go update musicbrainz, and that's a sensible course of action for the first two bullets, but the much easier path is to import all these files with whatever metadata they have.

There is no canonical metadata for a fan recording of a concert or DIY CD-R, so you lose out on nothing by importing the files as they are today.

Once you're over the hump of the first import, beets is a fabulous tool for ingesting new music. It's well worth it.

[nimih]

This is the answer I arrived at myself a few hours into importing my own music library. Cleaning up metadata for commercial releases is a nice feature beets offers, but the real value (IMO) of beets is it's a powerful toolbox for managing a large music library, and that's true even if you were to eschew musicbrainz integration for all your music.

I do think it's a pretty fair complaint that it really feels like the software is fighting against you when you first encounter something absent from the musicbrainz database (especially if it's something fundamentally unsuited to be added to the database), but I'm not sure if there's an easy solution other than telling people "just hit the `import with existing metadata' button, it's totally fine" when they complain about it.

[squigz]

Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz just gets imported as-is, with maybe some metadata additions/tweaks.

> * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

> * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

This is a great opportunity to fill in those blanks for those services :) I didn't have much to contribute to MB but did have a few albums to add.

[Hamuko]

>Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz

Those should be on MusicBrainz. There's even a bootleg release type for fan recordings/illegal copies, and official style guides for live bootlegs.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases...

[squigz]

That's really surprising! I would think they'd want some kind of "official" source for such things, otherwise you'd end up with numerous entries for random live recordings of varying quality.

[Hamuko]

I think the only thing I've seen is that there should be at least some notoriety to the bootlegs. Like that it's a bootleg that's been circulating around in fan communities or a batch of fake CDs sold in some shady market or a leaked version of an upcoming album shared on P2P. Something that makes it beyond just a thing between a couple of people.

I think if you read through the MusicBrainz about page, it makes a lot more sense:

>As an encyclopedia and as a community, MusicBrainz exists only to collect as much information about music as we can. We do not discriminate or prefer one "type" of music over another, and we try to collect information about as many different types of music as possible. Whether it is published or unpublished, popular or fringe, western or non-western, human or non-human — we want it all in MusicBrainz.

[yawnr]

Can I ask what you choose to manage your library with today? I feel like streaming has made me stray so far from the joy (and pain) of library curation, and I’d really like to get back to it, I just don’t know what folks are using these days.

[jmathai]

I have all of my mp3s on a NAS and point plex at it to index. I’ve also set it up as a source for Sonos (which I’m growing less fond of as each day passes).

I guess my point is that I like having a directory of music (organized by artist/album) and make the discovery applications I use do the work of finding and playing the music I want.

[horrorente]

There is a Bandcamp auto-tagging plugin for beets which should at least help with the first point: https://github.com/snejus/beetcamp

[criddell]

I've always struggled to get my classical CDs tagged in a way that makes sense to me. Apple has figured it out in their classical music app and I should probably see if I can copy what they did in my personal library.

[iamacyborg]

Maybe worth looking at Roon for that? It’s not free but they handle classical music very well.

[Ntrails]

> fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)

I've long enjoyed extracted audio from eg Glastonbury sets. I've only got a few that I particularly enjoyed and where the specific track was on youtube - is it that sort of thing? Is there a community of such reprobates?

[snthd]

Musicbrainz can do events

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=glastonbury&type=event&...

[tasuki]

> Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder.

Thanks for saving me time, I guess? I just maintain very spartan id3 tags on my music, artist, album, song name, track id, and that's about it.

What more would beets give me? How would it improve my experience?

[nimih]

It provides a nice interface for managing and editing tags that integrates well with other command-line tools and keeps your file system well-organized/up-to-date as you edit the tag contents. The batteries-included integration with datasources like musicbrains and discogs is nice, but, at least for me, beets is mainly a better tool for accomplishing the same tag and file janitoring I was doing with things like foobar2000 and eyeD3 a decade ago.