The concept™️
Mp3Tag (Mac rather than Win in my case) for managing metadata. Cover art is a weak point for something like Quod Libet that I would otherwise choose, and the Mac version is broken on modern systems, meaning I would have to break out my 17 year old ThinkPad to run the FlatPak, or suffer X Forwarding or similar grumbles with restoring my 12 year old Latitude to its Debian glory days. Thus indie software wins this scenario because MacBook Air.
Good ol’ ffmpeg for audio conversions. I’m really not a fan of hand-wrangling ffmpeg, and don’t want to mess with it for cover art purposes. It’s like a grizzly bear wielding a Swiss army knife when it comes to esoteric video muxing and complex encodes, which are a pain. But I’m content to use it for transcoding audio. The open question is whether I want to load ffmpeg on one of my Linux server’s virtual machines, or just brew install ffmpeg while drinking a root beer.
These both solve the problems that exist between my existing music collection, and what Apple Music can offer in the ways of managing a personal music library like it’s still two thousand ‘ought something.
Apple Music is still combat effective for ripping CDs, since I actually like the iTunes+ format of MP4 + AAC 256K and it does a passable job of fetching metadata. It’s just after the disc is ripped, we’re done.
The file server for warehousing data. I’ve mostly followed the pattern of collecting content in its various forms under Music, while backups exist imaginatively under Backups. Things will probably become divided either by format or purpose, such as FLAC, M4A or Library, Player directories in place of the existing “Artist – Album” structure. I might debate between the old media depot under Backups getting reorganized or moving to a dedicated “Originals” structure organized by source (CD, Steam, iTunes, Amazon, Google, yada, yada) on my Music share. One of the advancements over the past decade is its no longer just “Backups” and individual hosts that gets backed up regularly, but the entire file server’s shares where LAN data lives.
This path of insanity makes a good excuse to start normalizing my approach to dealing with cover art, lyrics, and readme files pertaining to music–but are a smaller problem than ensuring sane song metadata and library structure. Enforcing a tag editor centric data flow is also a good reason to make for easily saving/loading metadata from disk.
I’m also thinking that for a general approach to normalization, making MP4/AAC the standard lossy format with FLAC as the lossless where applicable. One of those things that has changed over the past decade and a half, is I’ve no real reason to prefer MP3/320K over AAC/256 or WAV over FLAC. Software compatibility for decoders (unless perhaps, you’re a damn iPod or the like) just isn’t a problem like it was in the early days of AAC, and there’s no real reason to treat the hax that ID3 evolved from and WAV is basically the software equal of a 3.5mm analog jack this side of FLAC.
Yup, let’s just say the iPod experiment finally drove me over the hill ^(o_o)^