Mastodawn

Spent the day fighting with metadata in my music library. Now I remember why I pay for Deezer.

I cannot get Jellyfin to actually do what I want it to do. I edit the metadata to what I want, and the damn artist just disappears! I find the music just fine, do their "Identify" thing, which I don't trust, and artist is still gone. I rescan the library, and the music is there, but the artist isn't listed in the artist list.

I want to self host my music so badly, but this is a pain in my ass, and I'm not sure it is actually worth the savings.

Chrono Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast doesn't Jellyfin rely on folder structure? or are you only using metadata?

@joel Apparently not. I have the folder named correctly, and the folder is still there. But Jellyfin isn't seeing it anymore. One of the songs is in a playlist, and i can still play it in jellyfin, but if I click on the artist, there's no music underneath it.

tootbrute Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast yeah, i use spotdl to make 'backups' of my music from spotify for this reason. it tags it soooo well.

@tootbrute doesn't that just download the songs from YouTube?

tootbrute Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast it takes metadata from spotify

@tootbrute Doesn't it, though, have the normal YouTube problem where a lot of songs are skits and have extra stuff in them beyond just the song? I've tried to get stuff off of YT before, and always end up with a lot of cruftx

tootbrute Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast no it's very good if the album is English. Try it.

I've only had problems with Greek albums.

Majid Iqbal Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast @tootbrute it’s called spotdl because it downloads the song from Spotify, not from YouTube. You literally paste the Spotify song link and it’ll download it for you

@akinzekeel @tootbrute it literally says otherwise. https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader

GitHub - spotDL/spotify-downloader: Download your Spotify playlists and songs along with album art and metadata (from YouTube if a match is found).

Download your Spotify playlists and songs along with album art and metadata (from YouTube if a match is found). - spotDL/spotify-downloader

GitHub

Majid Iqbal Sep 12, 2025

@thelinuxcast @tootbrute what the hell. My whole life is a lie. Pardon me, seems I was wrong

Majid Iqbal Sep 12, 2025

@thelinuxcast @tootbrute if it just downloads it from YouTube though, then why is it so much worse than yt-dlp?

@akinzekeel @tootbrute Supposedly it does metadata better, IDK. I don't use it. I don't care to download my stuff from YT, simply because a lot of artists upload skits music videos, which means you get more than the song.

tootbrute Sep 12, 2025

@thelinuxcast @akinzekeel you won't.

it checks spotify album page

searches youtube for the tracks that spotify lists

you do sometimes get LIVE versions. i found that happened more frequently if I downloaded a random playlist from spotify. if i downloaded a canonical full album, it was rock solid.

YMMV of course. i don't know what music you're downloading.

@tootbrute @akinzekeel when it downloads stuff does it put it in proper directories, is it all done in one big directory per playlist?

tootbrute Sep 12, 2025

@thelinuxcast @akinzekeel sadly not. kinda manual process (maybe someone has better process?!?!)

the way i use it.

find spotify album link

make directory /artist/album_name

cd into that directory

run spodl LINK, downloads music

run a script to send it to Jellyfin server

done

@tootbrute @akinzekeel How long does it usually take you to download an album? My first one took almost an hour and never actually finished.

tootbrute Sep 12, 2025

@thelinuxcast @akinzekeel some are 30 seconds and some like yours are super slow.

Think it depends on rarity of the music. If it fails, run again. I think there are some time out settings you could play with. I just keep running it until it downloads

@tootbrute I had this big plan to just redownload all the artists/albums in my library. Instant fix for my metadata, but after some errors and the slowness on some albums on mainstream artists, I think I'll just use it to replace the artists that have the worst metadata problems.

tootbrute Sep 13, 2025

@thelinuxcast yeah, there isn't a way to just fire hose everything in there. I wish there was a way I could feed it a list of URLs and it could make the folders and everything, but that doesn't exist as far as I know.

@tootbrute I made a script. It's still requires you to name everything but it's a little bit more automated.

tootbrute Sep 13, 2025

@thelinuxcast oh re-he-he-ally?

If you share it, let us know. 😆

@tootbrute Here you go: https://gitlab.com/thelinuxcast/scripts/-/blob/master/spotty.sh?ref_type=heads

It's not anything special.

spotty.sh · master · Matthew Weber / scripts · GitLab

These are my scripts

GitLab

tootbrute Sep 13, 2025

@thelinuxcast still useful. painful to make directories.

tootbrute Sep 13, 2025

@thelinuxcast using your script with some modifications

i also killed my fedora distrobox, reinstalled, installed pipx, and reinstalled spotdl. working much better now.

i think my install was borked.

tootbrute Sep 13, 2025

#!/usr/bin/env bash

MUSIC="/home/myname/Music"

read -rp "Artist name? " ARTIST
read -rp "Album name? " ALBUM
read -rp "Link? " LINK
mkdir -p "$MUSIC"/"$ARTIST"/"$ALBUM"
cd "$MUSIC"/"$ARTIST"/"$ALBUM"|| exit

spotdl --bitrate 192k --threads 8 $LINK
echo "Album Downloaded"

tootbrute Sep 12, 2025

@thelinuxcast @akinzekeel oh yeah i run this in distrobox because don't want to dirty up my system with all this python stuff i don't understand.

Majid Iqbal Sep 12, 2025

@tootbrute @thelinuxcast you may want to take a look at pipx. It creates a virtual environment for python applications. That’s how I run spotdl

tootbrute Sep 12, 2025

@akinzekeel @thelinuxcast pip was weird so just had to install spotdl with pipx

Magitian Sep 12, 2025

@tootbrute @thelinuxcast does it function better than the website spotidownloader.com?=

tootbrute Sep 12, 2025

@magitian @thelinuxcast never heard of this but just tried it.

better than this website because it's in the terminal. i don't want a zip file. adds more steps. oh gawd there's an ad to.

nope. nope. nope.

Chris Goss Sep 11, 2025

JEMM

https://github.com/CesarBianchi/JellyfinEasyMetadataManager

mediaelch

https://hub.docker.com/r/masonxx/mediaelch

Another suggestion : use Sonarr/Radarr

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/

https://deepwiki.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/2.1-metadata-management

GitHub - CesarBianchi/JellyfinEasyMetadataManager: Jellyfin Easy Metadata Manager (Also called as "JEMM") is a free and open-source tool created to help heavy users of Jellyfin Project to manage their instances. The main purpose of JEMM is to make it easier to fill in the metadata fields of library items and folders.

Jellyfin Easy Metadata Manager (Also called as "JEMM") is a free and open-source tool created to help heavy users of Jellyfin Project to manage their instances. The main purpose of JEMM i...

GitHub

__hetz Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast
I use beets, which pulls from MusicBrainz, for importing and tagging. It's rather hands-on and, if you've got a large library, it's going to take a while importing and tagging everything the first time. Picard is MusicBrainz' GUI option which works well too.

Anyway, beets keeps my music library tagged and organized. From there I mount it read-only for Jellyfin, turning off any auto tagging and such, because I'd have a conniption if it immediately undid what I'd already done.

__hetz Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast
Caveat: I deal in full albums even when I only maybe wanted a specific track from them. Unless the release itself is a Single, I don't think MusicBrainz is geared toward tagging loose/individual tracks.

But , I've got the space for it and I usually end up finding more songs I like by having the full albums. Especially with odd compilation albums or the sort.

@__hetz Jellyfin pulls from MusicBrainz too, so IDK if I'd get better results

__hetz Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast
You may not in that case. I've got a couple odd albums that won't match because they just don't have any entries for them. More than a few times beets/MusicBrainz just completely failed to match with a release that was actually present in their database. Not sure of the reason but, with beets (or Picard), I was at least able to manually provide the release ID - triggering a match and proper tagging.

Things have gotten better but music library curation is still such a headache.

Crandel 🇺🇦

@thelinuxcast I'm using Picard for music metadata and #mdp for playing. Works fine for me.
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Picard_Linux_Install

Picard Linux Install - MusicBrainz

Nit Sep 11, 2025

@thelinuxcast I passed my library through MusicBrainz and never had an issue*. Moved to Spotify for a while then came back to my own library. That’s when I organised in MB, to ensure consistency before adding to JF

Then I signed up for Apple One. So I have Apple Music and life is easier. But I have things not available on streaming so I use both

Navidrome is another music specific alternative worth trying too

* partly a lie, I have way too much music to actually check it all