Remember you can always check out CDs from the library and rip them to your collection.

MusicBrainz Picard https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

I've used this to fix all my fucked up MP3 mess and it really helped a lot. Just make sure you change the input and output folders and let er rip!

It's free

You'll find that MusicBrainz Picard is a heaven sent tool to properly tag your files, with optional proper renaming.

It takes some getting used to, and I find it works best in whole albums, but produces a much more professional library.

I find music on YouTube and autoconvert it to MP3 with yt-dlp and ffmpeg. It fetches new music from my personal "Favorite Music" playlist, downloads the highest quality audio source, converts it to MP3, embeds the metadata and cover art and tries to parse the artist and title as best as possible.

yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" --playlist-start 1 --playlist-end 999 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=123abc -o "./files/%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" --cookies-from-browser

Needs minimal adjustment sometimes if the title format is weird, but works 95% automatic. What I like most about this is the fact that music vanishes all the time from YouTube, but it doesn't affect me. No one deletes the files from my harddrive but me.

I don't really do the folder of MP3s thing any more.

I am much more into the Jellyfin full of FLACs thing these days!

I bet up in the attic next to one of my sweet old Abit motherboards I have a dusty old hard drive with a folder full of music from the 90s and early 2000s.

That reminds me that I should definitely plug my phone into my desktop and do a ton of music folder creation and reorganizing. I've got over 500 files and I really need to fully organize every single one and reorganize the ones that are organized already. Same with my much smaller set on my desktop. Luckily that one isn't nearly as bad.

We've evolved towards a software-managed autotagged library of lossless audio now, but yeah, pretty much.

I just had a chat with my friends about how the family plan price went up 30% while the basic functionality doesnt fucking work half the time

immaculately sorted. IMMACULATELY!

left spotify and started downloading all my music from [COMPLETELY LEGAL AVENUES] and bandcamp. It's good to have music that Spotify cannot take away from me.

I actually got rid of all my old MP3s years ago. Not because I regret acquiring them, but because the quality sucked. Even 320kbps. You can't tell CD from MP3 through my stereo, or in the car. But it is really obvious through my headphones, and ruins my critical listening experience. Had to re-rip all of my CDs to lossless, and lost all the ones I didn't have CDs for.

hey now, they're flac files and painstakingly sorted with the help of musicbrainz picard

I still use mp3s because:

1. No financial cost
2. Not tied to any one app or service
3. More customization: Can be played back at any speed or modified in some other way

That can be fixed easily* with programs like beets

* = the program itself is easy to use, but installing and configuring it, requires a PhD in Linux-Arch-ology

I'm old enough to be one of Napster's early adopters. Unfortunately most of my collection has been lost to either malfunction or negligence but due to most of the major streamers being fucking evil I'm back sailing the musical seven seas. And plus my internet is about 100x faster now so yohoho mehearties.

I've been sorting my MP3 files since 2003. It's a Sisyphian task. Every few years I'm like "ok, let's sort those songs with the new, improved sorting method I just came up with" and after a few hours or days of intense sorting I just quit and let them be.

Maybe this will be the year I finally sort them out! 🤣

Nah, it has very much been replaced with properly sorted .flac files. What ever is left is stuff I don't listen to anymore.

Well surely you can just use a program to rename the files based on their properly maintained ID3 info?

Unless you're like me and your 25 years worth of mp3s was lost in a hard drive failure a couple of years back... 😢

My man, I've been putting off sorting that shit for twenty years now. In the meantime I've circled back to CDs !

I can't possibly calculate how many hours I spent curating my music library. I don't use it anymore but you better bet that I still have it saved to the cloud and locally and it's there in case I need it.

Some of this stuff I downloaded off the original Napster.

And a long list of WIERDA~1.MP3 that could contain anything.

Plexamp is my favorite music player. I miss it when trying out services. It’s so buttery smooth and quick.

My library is better organized than Spotify's database at this point.

Just another person recommending Musicbrainz Picard.

I had about 600 sketchy music files. I had started using Kodi and I wanted my music library to look nice. So I cleaned up all the art and metatags. It was a bit of an undertaking. I actually added a few of my albums to their database. I'm happy with the result. MBP is a really cool project.

Yeah I've been in that same boat. My music collection is made up of stuff I stole off Limewire, ripped compilation CDs, soundtracks, stuff I recorded off the radio...most are mp3, I've only started using FLAC last year, ID3 or other metadata stuff is completely inconsistent or missing.

There are services that will identify the track based on examining the audio and provide data for it. I used a piece of Linux software called EasyTag for that purpose.

No need to change the names, they are too legendary. Well, seriously, these strange names and the like can be left simply as nostalgia.