thelinuxcast Sep 11, 2025

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.

Show thread__hetz

@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.

Sep 11, 2025 at 4:02amWeb
Show thread__hetzSep 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.

Show threadthelinuxcast Sep 11, 2025
@__hetz Jellyfin pulls from MusicBrainz too, so IDK if I'd get better results
Show thread__hetzSep 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.