I’m finally making a real effort to add beets to my life. I’ve been hesitant because I like what I like and I (mostly) know what I’m doing, you know? I also have a lot of local independent albums that are just not likely to get tagged anyway.
But here I am. Yesterday I was able to work through:
- Implementing my preferred directory structure and naming conventions
- Adding album art (embedded and in the folder)
- Embedding lyrics
- Adding ReplyGain information
I use Navidrome as my server and have a collection of about 2000 albums.
What are some of your tips for using beets?
What cool things are you doing?
What should I be thinking about as I go about this?
I feel your pain. I have a lot of Indie stuff from where I used to run a legit, licensed, internet radio station back in the pre-Napster days. A lot coming from the now defunct MP3.com and Bandcamp. Some of which is a bit obscure. For those, I had to tag them manually.
Now you have me downloading 10GB of MP3.com pages so I can go searching for old albums. :D
Do you keep those releases separated from your main library (file-wise)? I’m trying to decide if it makes sense to segregate them and manage them completely outside of beets.
I keep everything in the main library Artist/Album/etc. Reason being, the software we used at the time was playlist and script driven. So you’d have something like: 'play 5 songs from the top 50 set list - play 3 songs from the commercial set list - play bumper and station id - play shoutout from random Indie band - play 5 from secondary set list - etc. So, at the time it didn’t make sense for me to segregate the Indie from the commercial. We played commercial cuts obviously for those familiar with them, but introduced Indie bands and promoted them for the most part. It was a shit load of fun really. Then the RIAA screwed everything up levying fees on internet radio that weren’t even required for terra radio. We had to pay $.5 per song, per listener, which doesn’t seem like a lot but when you figure up how many 3:00 minute songs fit into an hour and you have several thousand people tuned in daily from all over the world, it started to become some real money. Then we went to Washington to plead our case in front of a commission headed up by Senator Leahy. In the end a lot of us disbanded because we were doing this as a work of love for music and the Indie bands, and just couldn’t cut the fees on top of ASCAP/SESAC/SOCAN/BMI licensing. It was fun for a while tho. I’ve had a lifelong love affair with music.
ETA: At one point I really got into it with my postal carrier because he was toting sacks of CDs. I had to put a special box at the mailbox so he could dump all the CDs in. LOL
My mail carrier gave me a talking to when I started getting a lot of records in the mail during covid. He didn’t like them sitting in the mailbox in the heat. Haha. I mean, good looking out, guy, but I think we’re good.
Well, that was super cool of him. You don’t get a lot of mail carriers that really give a shit.
I am really sorry for what happened ,
I don’t live in the US so idk what RIAA is but they sound like they are not a good group.
If i may ask, the members (your friends who also liked working in the radio station) what happened to them ?
Do you still meet up and enjoy music sometimes?
RIAA: Recording Industry Association of America
All you really need to know is they are a bunch of self serving pricks.
Our lives went separate ways and I got caught up in other things. That was 28+ years ago. Lots of water under the bridge.