saturns

🌲☕️🪩🐟

the real actual Kato. Plausibly deniably DJ.

 
This user is melanated.
Store in a cool, dry place. Refrigerate after opening

I love gifs of fish.

 
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current avi: ME!!!!!

Pinball Game Smart And Funny


e-mail
evergreen@silvercruiser.vip
The Other Other Blue Website (not recommended)
saturnunder.tumblr.com/
Unfortunately, I'm music fans
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hkr
@hkr

I've always been anal retentive about my media collection and associated metadata, much to the chagrin of my entire household. Even back during the napster days I was carefully retagging all my downloads in winamp to have proper casing, track numbers, artist names etc. To this day I scowl if a freshly torrented CD has the words "Disc 1" in the album title (There is literally a disc number tag STOP DOING THIS).

Music tagging and organizing has been an especially persistent ongoing project of mine. I've got 99.9% of my collection exactly where I want it now, and that involves some unconventional sorting:

a screenshot of a file sorting menu in Foobar

But nothing too serious. For a while I sorted my music exclusively by folder, so I could break out live albums, singles, bootlegs etc into their own folder for easier sorting:

A screenshot of file sorting in foobar, showing the artist Phish sorted into studio and live albums, with further live album granular sorting by year

But now that I'm going out of the house more and refuse to pay for spotify, I needed a way to access my music remotely. Since my music collection is over 1tb, I needed a way to stream it, hopefully at lossless quality. Luckily Plex has this covered with their music app Plexamp.

I had always been weary of adding my collection to a system that claims to manage things for you. In the early days of MP3 downloading I had entire collections "ruined" because I let a scanner loose and it decided to "correct" things in a very wrong fashion. For this reason I actually maintain two copies of my music library; one on my desktop that serves as the "master" and the other on our household server that plex and other such apps can access (BlueOS, which I will write about later as it has changed my life). I dug through plex's music settings to make sure it would not tarnish my "perfect" collection, and was happy to discover the following setting:

A plex setting that says "Prefer Local Metadata. When scanning this library, prefer embedded tags and local files if present."

I enabled that and disabled what I thought were settings I didn't want, scanned my library (which takes over an hour at this point) and started happily using plexamp to listen to music while on the go. It was as flexable as a I wanted: it doesn't downcovert flacs if I don't want it to, doesn't attempt to "correct" my metadata, and would even let me dig down into my folders to find specific albums/songs, which helps with my brain where I might not necessarily remember the name of the artist or album, but I know where it's located.

But I noticed some cool advanced features weren't working either. Where were my artist bios and pictures, album reviews, smart "radio" options, etc.

Well it turns out all those extraneous settings I thought I didn't want were core to how those features functioned. Fair enough, I started turning them on to see what happened, and it was a whole lot of nothing. I tried rescanning metadata at various "levels" (artist, album, song etc) but nothing was populating. Sighing, I decided to rip the molly cover off and turned off "Prefer Local Metadata."

This mostly had the predicted effect; it started not knowing what things were, despite the local metadata being correct. The worst part was that turning the option back off didn't revert the changes, so I had to delete the library entirely and reimport the whole thing. I turned "Prefer Local Metadata" back on and lo and behold, with everything else checked at time of import, all that cool bonus metadata started downloading, and spot checks confirmed it was all correct!

A picture of Plex showing a selection of music artists in my collection. Many of the listed artists have pictures showing the artist, while some do not

But then I realized it was doing something that, on paper, seems cool. It was attempting to sort albums into categories like "Albums, Live, Singles etc." For your normal band that has a couple live albums and isn't really worth collecting bootlegs for, this works about as well as you'd expect:

A picture of the artist view of Rush in Plex, showing albums, singles and EPs, and live albums sorted appropriately

For bands where half the culture around them is listening to bootleg concert recordings, this doesn't work nearly as well:

A picture of the artist view of Phish in Plex, showing live recordings mixed in with albums

Now normally this isn't that bad; I've had some small issues with Plex's metadata matcher, and usually just had to go in and manually edit entries. I more than willing to do this for a few small problems. But for some reason, none of these fields are editable in plex.

Instead, you are supposed to go to Plex's metadata provider, musicbrainz, and fix/add the entry in their database

This is where it breaks down for me; I'm not willing to sit and learn yet another metadata website's culture to properly fix things or readopt my collection yet again. At least I can disable the feature.

This is just yet the latest chapter in my love/hate relationship with plex. The last time it had me pulling my hair out was when it was reading metadata put into a MKV file by a ripper for a movie title instead of the filename. That wasn't a thing I even knew existed until I ran into this problem.

It's still an infinitely better experience than Kodi, except for the times where it isn't


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in reply to @hkr's post:

I can relate to this post on a spiritual level, everytime I get a new CD and rip it to FLAC with Exact Audio Copy (the only correct software for CD ripping), I agonize over what should and shouldn't be capitalized. The general rule is of course to uncapitalize minor words like "the, it, or" etc. but there are definitely some titles where it just looks wrong... I drive myself crazy over it lol.

My current solution for local music on the go is having all my FLACs copied to a microSD card in my phone (one of the reasons I'm resistant to buying a phone without a microSD slot), but that's only about 70GB of music. If you're dealing with a TB or more, yeah... Accessing it remotely is the only viable option for now - check back in a decade when you can nab a 4TB microSD card for $50.

Ripping with my own exact system for a decade, then running into media centers wanting an exact different system ended with me just setting up Kodi to use the file browser view broken down by category->show->season folders like I had it as my main interface into it so I didn't have to retag everything in a way I didn't want to. lol

Reminds me of the countless hours I spent clicking "fix match" and merging entries and then manually having to re-tag entries anyway to get my music library into a comfy state with Plexamp. Don't even get me started on Various Artists compilations.