Large Library Mess to clean up

[BigBadger]

Okay, I'm neglectful and I made many mistakes along the way while collecting, and 'organizing' my music library. I have 60k songs and because of the mess with regards to tags/metadata/whateveryouwanttocallit.... I hate using many of the features that make JRiver, Asset, etc. worth the extra $$

 

My question is toward whatever software you folk use  to tidy up your metadata..... I'm talking Genres, years, composer vs. artist, etc, etc, ....not even talking about the messes that the various artist CD's turned into when I ripped them.

 

I think of my NAS library as a record store.. I want to listen to Baroque music, I go to the Classical section and then the Baroque subsection then look for a specific album...(I know, with Classical it's even more of a pain because half the albums are by the composer and half are by the Conductor, or the featured musician.)... Let do Rock music then. I want to listen to Pearl Jam, Go to Rock, then maybe choose an album by year or album name. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

 

I love my music but the digitizing has been both a blessing and a curse overall. I have a thousand Genres and well you can guess the rest. I only really need a dozen or so Genres, right? Maybe sub-Genres?

 

I used dBPoweramp to rip much of it but not all. I've heard of MusicBrainz, Foobar, Discogs, TuneUp, Beets, Jriver, MP3Tag.

 

All of my music is on a Synology NAS and my experience with dBPoweramp is it is VERY, VERY SLOWWWWWWW... often just getting bogged down and stopping altogether. 

 

Recommendations?

[4est]

57 minutes ago, BigBadger said:

Recommendations?

Roon helped clean up my messy library. I know it isn't a "fix", but it did work!

[bibo01]

7 hours ago, BigBadger said:

Recommendations?

I think that the only way to fix your library, short of a lot of manual retagging, is Bliss.

https://www.blisshq.com/index.html

[jacobacci]

Hi BigBadger

I know how you feel, having gone through the same issues with a >100'000 track library. After 15 years and three re-ripping cycles (using dbpoweramp) I am afraid that there is no free lunch.

If you hate the functionality and associated complexity of jRiver, the only solution that I see is Roon. I have tried Roon on and off and if you have never modified the CD rips (joined tracks for example), Roon does a fairly good job of identifying your albums. The browsing experience is excellent. Roon does however have major issues with metadata (which it sources from Rovi). For example Karajan albums get listed under Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic and many others. If you can live with that, then Roon is for you.

If you want to really clean up your library (and i.e. add Subgenres), then I am afraid nothing will beat jRiver.

Fairly straightforward to use is the Tagging Pane mode:

• Go to Audio / Panes
• Your can select files by choosing i.e. a Genre in the panes at the top of the screen
• Select all the files
• Chose another Genre to re-tag the selected files

Tagging panes lets you find and select a large number of files and re tag them fairly easily. Tagging panes definitely saved the day for me.

There is an incredibly powerful (but also complex) scripting language in jRiver that lets you i.e. swap around parts of the filename.

In short you can do almost anything re. tagging with jRiver, but I have to admit, the learning curve is quite steep. The folks at the jRiver forum are incredibly helpful though.

 

 

[BigBadger]

6 hours ago, jacobacci said:

Hi BigBadger

I know how you feel, having gone through the same issues with a >100'000 track library. After 15 years and three re-ripping cycles (using dbpoweramp) I am afraid that there is no free lunch.

If you hate the functionality and associated complexity of jRiver, the only solution that I see is Roon...........

If you want to really clean up your library (and i.e. add Subgenres), then I am afraid nothing will beat jRiver.

Fairly straightforward to use is the Tagging Pane mode:

• Go to Audio / Panes
• Your can select files by choosing i.e. a Genre in the panes at the top of the screen
• Select all the files
• Chose another Genre to re-tag the selected files

Tagging panes lets you find and select a large number of files and re tag them fairly easily. Tagging panes definitely saved the day for me.

There is an incredibly powerful (but also complex) scripting language in jRiver that lets you i.e. swap around parts of the filename.

In short you can do almost anything re. tagging with jRiver, but I have to admit, the learning curve is quite steep. The folks at the jRiver forum are incredibly helpful though.

 

 

 

Thanks for that well rounded reply. I am currently trying Bliss although I am somewhat less than hopeful already as there are nuances that make little sense.

 

I was using dBpoweramp Perfect tunes Tagger which can do whatever I seem to want... It's simple but also, manual, slow and lethargic. I also tried Musicbrainz-Picard but dropped that. I have a Moon MiND which doesn't currently support Roon... although for $700 I can upgrade my hardware to be able to use Roon.... Is it worth it?

 

JRiver has been a constant frustration for me as It is probably the least intuitive piece of software I have. I want to learn it... I'll let Bliss do it's thing for a few more days and see if I get anywhere......Buying records was so much simpler and more gratifying, LOL.

[BigBadger]

On 8/16/2018 at 10:06 PM, bibo01 said:

I think that the only way to fix your library, short of a lot of manual retagging, is Bliss.

https://www.blisshq.com/index.html

 

Thank you... Giving it a try... though already I see that it's slow and confused... It wants to categorize several of my Beatles albums as Latin Jazz, Adult Alternative and Comedy??

[jacobacci]

17 hours ago, BigBadger said:

for $700 I can upgrade my hardware to be able to use Roon.... Is it worth it?

Honestly, I don't think so. Why don't you try Roon on a PC to see how it works. As I said, at first sight it looks like paradise, but unfortunately that impression fades, if you use classical music. With pop, jazz etc. its quite ok, but it falls on its face with classical. But try extensively on a PC before investing into your hardware.

 

17 hours ago, BigBadger said:

JRiver has been a constant frustration for me as It is probably the least intuitive piece of software I have. I want to learn it...

 

It has taken me two to three years to be able to use some of the advanced features of jRiver. But it is by far the most powerful and flexible piece of audio management software I have seen. If you tell me what it is exactly that you want to do, I may be able to point you in the right direction. Most procedures are described on the jRiver forum somewhere, because most issues have been tackled by someone in the community.

 

You mentioned multiple times that programs are slow. What is your hardware setup?

It is hopeless to work on a Library that sits on a NAS. You definitely need it to be on the local PC, otherwise you will really go crazy, whatever you do.

[BigBadger]

10 hours ago, jacobacci said:

You mentioned multiple times that programs are slow. What is your hardware setup?

It is hopeless to work on a Library that sits on a NAS. You definitely need it to be on the local PC, otherwise you will really go crazy, whatever you do.

 

 

That is exactly what I'm doing. All on my NAS.....But then, it's the safest place for it. It's also very large so the PC is not a good location. 60,000 tracks. I have it divided up into 6 folders or for lack of a better way to explain 6 categories.

• Music - FLAC
• Music - Mp3
• Classical - FLAC
• Classical - Mp3
• Christmas - FLAC
• Christmas - Mp3

 

I tried Bliss over this weekend and I'll be honest, it's scared me! I tried it with one directory of music and it renamed all the files with underscores instead of spaces (I hate that). It also eliminated many of my Various Artist albums that I kept together. I now have a ton of directories (folders) with only 1 song in each.... (FU@#!!!!)... Though I'm disappointed, I will wait and see what the overall outcome is with respect to using some of the advance features of my play software. (Moon, JRiver, etc.)

 

I thought I could just pick an artist and set the entire catalog of that artist or group to a specific Genre. Seemed to be a simple thing, but no, it's not.

[jacobacci]

44 minutes ago, BigBadger said:

All on my NAS.....But then, it's the safest place for it

That is absolutely correct and that's the way you should have it. The library you stream from should be on the NAS. That way it is accessible to streaming devices if your PC is turned off. Also the NAS has redundancy in case a hard drive fails.

BUT - The NAS is too slow for any editing tasks originating from the PC. The way I have it set up is that I have a working copy of the library on my PC (on a 36TB RAID0 array). I can work on that library reasonably fast from jRiver (or any other library management program). I then sync this working library to the one on the NAS frequently using ViceVersa . This kills two birds with one stone:

• I have a working library that I can work on reasonably fast
• If I screw up (like Bliss did in your case), this happens on the working library and I can simply overwrite it from the NAS master library and start over

The largest desktop hard drives are 12TB , that might just hold your whole library. If this is too small you would need to use two HDDs. Your library is already split into several folders, so that should not be an issue.

Do not use an external USB drive, it is too slow to make you happy. You need to connect the HD to a SATA port on your motherboard.

 

 

[BigBadger]

5 hours ago, jacobacci said:

This kills two birds with one stone:

• I have a working library that I can work on reasonably fast
• If I screw up (like Bliss did in your case), this happens on the working library and I can simply overwrite it from the NAS master library and start over

 

I like this. I know I should have worked from a copy. I do know better than my actions indicate. ?

 

I didn't realize I had a completely valid reason to upgrade my PC . I might need a new SSD as well. ?

Sure appreciate the input Jacobacci!

[Dan Gravell]

13 hours ago, BigBadger said:

I tried Bliss over this weekend and I'll be honest, it's scared me! I tried it with one directory of music and it renamed all the files with underscores instead of spaces (I hate that). It also eliminated many of my Various Artist albums that I kept together. I now have a ton of directories (folders) with only 1 song in each.... (FU@#!!!!)... Though I'm disappointed, I will wait and see what the overall outcome is with respect to using some of the advance features of my play software. (Moon, JRiver, etc.)

 

 

Thanks for notifying me of this @BigBadger - I replied to your comment on the site. You might also want to email us as per https://www.blisshq.com/support/reporting-problems.html to see if we can help with your setup.

 

The trouble is the file organisation rule is very powerful and, if set to full automation, will move files without you saying so - I recommend running in manual mode first of all so you can check all the suggestions.

 

That said - sounds like the miscalculation of artist name is a separate issue; emailing us will help us get to the bottom of that.

 

Thanks again!

[rando]

The first place to start when doing any full scale library work is file verification.  There is no need to devote time towards files with errors.  There may be better paid programs for doing this but the foobar File Integrity Verifier plugin is competent enough.  Point foobar at a folder on your NAS with an internet connection and let it churn away for as long as it takes.  Joy of joys, you now have a pile of albums that need to be ripped again... in a lossless format.  

 

For classical music many here rave about the full featured and powerful metadata tools inside musichi.  What you are after is the tagger and library organizer.  Chances are you have a player software you like and dBpoweramp for ripping.  

[DavidL]

18 hours ago, jacobacci said:

That is absolutely correct and that's the way you should have it. The library you stream from should be on the NAS. That way it is accessible to streaming devices if your PC is turned off. Also the NAS has redundancy in case a hard drive fails.

BUT - The NAS is too slow for any editing tasks originating from the PC. The way I have it set up is that I have a working copy of the library on my PC (on a 36TB RAID0 array). I can work on that library reasonably fast from jRiver (or any other library management program). I then sync this working library to the one on the NAS frequently using ViceVersa . This kills two birds with one stone:

• I have a working library that I can work on reasonably fast
• If I screw up (like Bliss did in your case), this happens on the working library and I can simply overwrite it from the NAS master library and start over

The largest desktop hard drives are 12TB , that might just hold your whole library. If this is too small you would need to use two HDDs. Your library is already split into several folders, so that should not be an issue.

Do not use an external USB drive, it is too slow to make you happy. You need to connect the HD to a SATA port on your motherboard.

 

 

A very interesting discussion. Here's a different viewpoint.

 

I agree on keeping the library and all its metadata on a NAS as the prime music source, rather than purely as a backup, however it is possible to edit metadata directly on the NAS files without any significant problem.

When I started transferring my library to a NAS 5 years ago I tried various software for editing metadata and serving the music. I, like many others, found jRiver to be very powerful but a total pig to learn. As a result I decided to keep things as simple as I could and chose to use Minimserver for serving and iTunes for editing music. By the time I got up to 90000 tracks last year I did find the delays in editing were very noticeable, however when I upgraded my iMac to High Sierra this delay disappeared, presumably because the new APFS file system buffers the transfers to disc in larger chunks. The only downside I find is that when I quit iTunes I need to allow a small time interval for the iTunes data to be written to the NAS, before I can re-scan the library with Minimserver to pick up the changes for playback.

I find editing metadata with iTunes meets my needs - 80% of my library is classical music and almost every album requires splitting and editing to fit in with the schema I use to aid search, inevitably a manual task.

 

[fragoulisnaval]

I have a music library with almost 200,000 tracks and i have spent to years to manage the tags manually. Still haven't finished though BUT the pleasure of rediscovering your music library with stuff you did not know existed is priceless.

 

I use MUSIChi suite for tagging and library management.

 

Maybe i use Roon in the far distant future, once i find a way to incorporate it to my system without having to spent a small fortune on a dedicated computer to have it running...

[paultaylor]

Would you like to try my own SongKong tagger. This is designed to work unattended on large number of files , it uses various methods to get good matches to both MusicBrainz and Discogs data and adds extensive amount of metadata. I have also worked closely with MInimServer and Melco to properly tag Classical music, with movements, works, performers ectera -

 

SongKong Lite is free, you can generate a report of your current metadata and manually edit your metadata at no cost. You can run the automated matching as a preview and see exactly the results before considering paid version. Here is an example of a 15,000 songs testset without metadata, matching took 90 minutes -

 

thanks Paul

[BigBadger]

I sure appreciate all the help, folks! I did learn a few things and hope this topic goes on for a while longer.

 

What I learned starts immediately with what I already knew but was too hot under the collar to heed. And that was work from a copy!

 

This week I'll be upgrading my computer with a new SSD and a 4TB Barracuda so that I may take sections of my collection and truly work on it, at local speeds rather than via the home network. I think I'll give SONGKONG a go once that is done.

 

It's funny, all the software I currently use has been recommended through Computer Audiophile... Some is pretty good, some I wonder if anyone can tell the difference and some has been crap (IMHO).

 

Keep the suggestions coming. I know I'm not the only one with a mess to tackle!

[jacobacci]

On ‎8‎/‎23‎/‎2018 at 3:43 PM, BigBadger said:

This week I'll be upgrading my computer with a new SSD and a 4TB Barracuda so that I may take sections of my collection and truly work on it, at local speeds rather than via the home network

What makes jRiver unique as a tagging environment, is that it knows what tags you have used in your library. This information is accessible through the tagging panes view. This view will tell you how you in which ways you have written the composer Johann Sebastian Bach in your library (Bach, Johann Sebastian / Johann Sebastian Bach / Bach / Johan Sebastian Bach etc.). It will then let you select all the relevant files and change the tags of all those files to what you want the composer tag to read. This is done in less than a minute. And this works for any tag field.

A precondition to be able to do this is that your complete library is local and indexed by jRiver. You will need enough HD space to hold your complete library. By editing it in parts, you do not have access to this feature (which I consider the most useful in cleaning up a large library) .

So I suggest you think again about the size HD space you want to get.

You could get several smaller harddisks (4-6TB is a price / space sweetspot). jRiver does not mind if the library is in several different folders.

Good luck.

 

 

[paultaylor]

8 hours ago, jacobacci said:

What makes jRiver unique as a tagging environment, is that it knows what tags you have used in your library. This information is accessible through the tagging panes view. This view will tell you how you in which ways you have written the composer Johann Sebastian Bach in your library (Bach, Johann Sebastian / Johann Sebastian Bach / Bach / Johan Sebastian Bach etc.)

Does JRiver realize that these are the same composer or is it up to the user to know that ?

 

When tagging with SongKong it knows the artist/composer entity etc that is being match to, this has big advantages since you choose between using the artist name exactly how it appears on the CD or using the artists standard name ensuring that the all releases will be listed under the same name rather than variations. i.e  it means that when the artist name on the CD is written using a different language/script such as  Пётр Ильич Чайковский  you can always use the English translation of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky if you wish. And because the artistId is also stored in the tags it is very easy to convert back and forth between the artist variations.

[jacobacci]

@paultaylor No, jRiver does not realize it's the same (it's not Songkong), it's up to the user to select what he wants the tags to be. For me this is preferable. I am in Europe, and I would tag Tchaikovsky as "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich". I seem to be at odds with the rest of the world regarding this, but that's just me.
The main point I wanted to get across was that doing library management in pieces on a relatively small HD is maybe not the best idea. That would probably hold true independent of the program used.