Organizing self-hosted classical music collection
I'm currently using Navidrome to self-host my music collection, while using DSub to listen on-the-go.
This works very well for most genres, except for the bulk of my music which is classical music. This presents its own host of problems pertaining to cataloguing and using metadata, since there are often multiple recordings of the same musical composition, recorded by multiple conductors with different orchestras and/or soloists. There may also be different instrumental arrangements of the same musical piece. Merely sorting by "Artist" is therefore quite unsatisfactory in this scenario.
Some streaming services have come up with quite satisfying solutions in my experience (notably Apple Music Classical and Idagio), but I am not sure how to go about listening to my own self-hosted classical music.
Is anybody here on Tildes familiar with this organizational problem? I would be very eager to hear how you have tackled this. Is there any self-hosted software more suitable to cataloguing musical collections with extensive metadata?
Fellow Navidrome user here as well with a decent amount of classical music (maybe 30-40% of my library). I have a system that works (well enough at least) for me. Rule 1 is the Artist tag is always the performer. Since Navidrome doesn't support multiple artists per track/album, I use the comma to join multiple artists, like "Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic". (Once multi artists are supported I will probably re-tag my library) Rule 2 the Composer tag is always set to the composer's full name - Navidrome currently doesn't index the Composer tag, but when it does (it's planned) my library will be ready. Rule 3 the Album Artist tag is either the performer or the composer. For older classical music, I use the performer as the album artist always. For contemporary, I will use either, largely depending on which is more prevalently featured on the cover art (composer or performer). Rule 4 if the album artist is set to the performer, the composer's (last) name is always part of the album title. (e.g. Album="Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos", Artist=Album Artist="Trevor Pinnock, The English Concert"). That way, searching the composer's name will pull up that album in the results set. Rule 5 Navidrome does support multiple genres (separated by ; ), so I tag any/all of the period (e.g. "Impressionist"), instrumentation (e.g. "Orchestral"), and "Classical" as a catch-all, so that the album will show under any of those classifications. The Subsonic API only allows returning one genre per album, though it will appear in the list for all of its genres, so put the most descriptive genre, the one you want to show in the UI, first.
Also wanted to give a quick plug for my desktop Subsonic client, Supersonic, which supports gapless playback, since gapless transitions between tracks are quite common in classical music.
Oh you're the Supersonic dev, thank you for your work, i'm using almost every day. I'm the guy who reported the app nor working on MacOS Mojave and you made a different version for old macos versions.
Glad you're enjoying it! The older Mac support is all thanks to someone else in the community who figured out how to compile MPV on older macs and build Supersonic against it - I just had to add their binaries to the repo and build against them. Definitely let me know if you encounter any other issues or have feature requests!
Have you tried musicbrainz Picard or beets? I use Picard but I don’t selfhost classical music so I don’t know about tagging it.
I don’t have much experience sorting classical but I’ve had a decent amount of luck sorting other genres with similar challenges using:
Like the other poster mentioned, musicbrainz picard is very helpful although I’ll confess to occasionally overriding the “official” tags to make my life easier
You may want to look into Roon. I don't actively use it but looked really interesting last time I gave it a try. Their main selling point is their extensive collection/management/handling of music metadata so it might fit your needs. A couple of things to keep in mind: it's not free (There's a trial), it's not subsonic compatible so you have to use their client and I was not able to get a reverse proxy to work with it.
I used to be a huge Roon fan, but they changed the software to require an active Internet connection, with processing happening in the cloud. Can't really call it "self hosted" anymore.