Hello everyone!

I have been having a hard time finding a solution to my problem of sorting music from both Youtube music and Bandcamp. I have tried Picard and while it is good I have had problems with it. For example it has made songs shorter (they now end to soon.). So far the only solution I have found is to use Picard and manually review every song I own, and since I have thousands of songs It would take quite long.

I’m using Jellyfin with Finamp to play my music, and sometimes add lyrics via the Jellyfin app when they are missing.

How have you people solved this or similar issues? Does someone have a automated setup that works well?

  • Tiritibambix@lemmy.ml
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    14 hours ago

    Different angle on this, and it may or may not fit your setup, but it changed things for me.

    I’ve been accumulating audio since the early 2000s. Twenty-some years of ripped CDs, vinyl rips from release groups, random downloads. Several thousand albums. At some point I accepted that tags were never going to be consistent across that pile, because the sources never agreed on anything in the first place: a 1979 vinyl rip tagged by whoever released it, a CD rip from 2004, and a modern FLAC have nothing in common metadata-wise, and no tagger reconciles that without me babysitting it.

    So I stopped trying to fix the tags and leaned on the folder structure instead. My tree already carried everything I cared about: genre at the top, then artist, then Artist - Year - Album, with subfolders for live, compilations and singles. That structure took years to build and it’s reliable in a way my tags never were.

    I run Velvet (mStream fork) as the server for it. It serves the library by folder structure rather than by tag database, so there’s nothing to scan, nothing to match, nothing to get wrong. And I vibe-coded Sharesonic, an Android client for it, because I wanted to browse my library the way it’s actually organized and share a track, a playlist or an entire folder as a public link without exporting anything. Personal project, it’s on GitHub if anyone wants it.

    To be clear about what this does and doesn’t solve: it doesn’t repair your files. If Picard truncated audio on you, that’s a real problem and it needs fixing at the file level, not at the player level. Worth checking whether the audio itself is actually shorter or whether it’s just the duration metadata disagreeing with the stream, because both look identical from the player side and only one of them is destructive.

    The trade-off is real. You lose cross-cutting queries: no “everything from 1977 across all artists”, no proper album artist handling for compilations. If that matters, stay on Jellyfin and keep grinding through Picard. If you mostly navigate by “I want to hear that specific album”, folders are faster than any tag database.