Tab sweep on music tagging
Have been adding music to my Plex server this weekend. Part of that is cleaning up metadata before adding to Plex. Curating my music collection is one of those things that’s relaxing but also frustrating.Relaxing because I get a weird enjoyment out of using Picard and Kid3 to clean up tags before putting things into Plex. Frustrating because there’s lots of corner cases and things that Plex and other music players aren’t well designed to handle. For example, I’d like to be able to make mixtapes (playlists) more easily and have them be portable. (e.g., I’d like to make mixtapes that I can load onto my phone and Plex.)
Found myself going down the proverbial rabbit hole on reading about other peoples’ complaints around music tagging:
- Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks
- Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music
- Tag systems
- A Spec-tacular failure
- Genres suck
Things get even more complicated when trying to wrangle something well outside standard album formats, like “bonus” songs via Patreon, music moved from other sources (like a live TV performance) to audio, or radio airchecks or radio bumpers. (I’ve been known to sprinkle a few classic radio bumpers into my playlists for a little nostalgic feel.)
It’s not terribly reassuring that id3.org, where the primary specs are housed, is returning an “internal server error” today.
Do you curate your own local music collection? Any tips, tricks, suggestions, or tools to recommend to work around the weakness of the music tagging schemas and such?
id3.org has been down for a bit longer than just today. I was writing some code a week ago and trying to look up some stuff. It was down then too.
Well… that’s not good. I wonder what the deal is.