How I manage my MP3 collections in 2022

Or how to live without Streaming services.

Yes I don’t have Spotify or Netflix (the last one yes but for my family). Also this article is not about piracy, I still buy CDs album when I like it so much but my first opinion is to be able to live without internet.

For many reasons, one is that streaming services are very pollutants (you can search on internet to find various articles that can explain better than me), less data about me to specific companies and I have locally so my devices consume less energy that can is helpful sometimes.

So I am using MP3 since I had mp3 readers (I still have 2 working) but let’s see how I manage them and update my Gigabytes of music.

Compress the music as I don’t care of High quality

Yes I have my music in 128kb/s and is good enough to me. For this task any converter is valid, in my case on Linux and KDE I use SoundKonverter.

Cleaning the ID3 data

MP3 files saves their data like album, authors and so on in metadta in the file usually in 2 formats idv2 and idv3 so it is time now for 2 other tools.

MusicBrainz is an (open) online database about music and can detect the song from the filenames and other data and check if it is exist in his database. So with clients like MusicBrainz Picard after choosing the path of the file will start scanning them and check the data saved inside or fix them in case they are wrong.

Next step is to use a ID3 metadata editor that can rename files based on the data itself. In this case Kid3 from KDE it is very handy because apart change the data let you to rename the filename based on the data. Honestly I like the way “Author – Song name”.

Download from Youtube

Another source of music is youtube so I use youtube-dl locally to save the song I like (and I don’t find elsewhere).

In combination also with another script in cron that download some songs from some channels every day.

Track when an artist release a new album

Now to choose when an artist is worth it to follow I am not using social media but my file itself.

With MishMash I create a database of the MP3 extracting info from the metadata already cleaned (so players like VLC show right the data itself everywhere).

So with an help of a tiny python script I read the sqlite database generated to extract the artists with more songs.

Now it is time to use the service Muspy that emails me everytime one of the artists I follow release a new album.

Play the music

The last step is to select a folder and play the file inside with VLC from my computer or from my phone.

Or I use Nextcloud with the Music player when I am not at home or for other needs (the only streaming solution I accept).

Remove MP3 during listening

As I have a lot of MP3 I remove them during the listening if I don’t like but I have a script that will use VLC and Dbus to do this magic.

I have also a script that remove MP3 with duration of less of 2 minutes and one that shows the music I am listening on Discord.

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