Do you tag your music? What's your method?
I started the monumental task of tagging all my music for the purpose of organising but also autoplaylist generation. I decided to tag only by genre because it suits my listening behaviour (e.g. I feel like reggae, so I pull up my reggae category and scan through album art till I find something that fits my mood).
I've started tagging and retagging a few times now. I haven't quite figured out a method that works. I started off too specific (many subgenres with few artists in each), then too broad (hundreds of artists per genre). The sweet spot is elusive. I've been doing this work manually, but I've also had the idea of scrapping RYM because I've found this source to be fairly similar to my own judgment. The idea of automated tagging is appealing so I can "let the gods decide" and reduce the mental tax.
Anyways, please share your methods! Im sure someone has "solved" this delimma. TIA
I used to use stuff like Musicbrainz Picard (and sometimes still do if I want to know where a song came from and Shazam or Google Assistant can't figure it out), and I would recommend Picard for automated tagging, but in the last few years I've shifted into a weird mode: there is really a lot of music out there and I realized that tags, album covers, or audio quality (beyond a certain threshold)--doesn't really matter.
If you have a lot of music then listen to the music and enjoy the music for what it is. Music is not audio tags. Music is not album art. Music is not an expensive DAC or a listening room. Although all those things can contribute to the accessibility or enjoyment of music listening--if you never heard a song before then you've never experienced it at all.
So my advice is... try not to worry about it? Only fix audio tags if that brings you pleasure. There is value in doing a multi-source metadata deep-dive for your favorite albums or artists and ensuring their tags are pristine and accurate.
Automated tagging can do more harm than good--if the computer can correctly guess the track today then why not just leave the metadata as-is? The computer will only get better at guessing (it is possible that MusicBrainz/AcoustID will one day disappear but when it does, I'm sure it will either be replaced with something even better OR it won't matter anymore because the world is ending).
If you haven't created an emotional connection with the music AND if organizing things is a burden then there is almost no reason to curate it
beets, "the music geek’s media organizer", is what I use and would recommend. extremely flexible/configurable to do nearly anything you would want with respect to autotagging.
Musicbrainz Picard. Not only does it grab data from Musicbrainz's database, it's the only one that I'm aware of that lets you select the actual release that it's from, which means that you can prevent errors that other organizers tend to do and you can make sure that your music has the correct album artwork.
There are tons of options for renaming and moving files, but for that I just use the tools built into Foobar2000.
When I was doing this, I also tried to layer in Music Genome (Pandora) tags so I could go back and find songs with similar qualities—genre wasn't always granular enough for that.
Unfortunately, Pandora is only accessible from the US (or maybe North America?) so I couldn't keep it up through different moves.
As far as automated tagging or not—you just have to be careful because the fingerprinting isn't always accurate (we're talking about Picard, right?)
My solution to not get overwhelmed with tagging is to take a very critical look to what I actually want from it. Specifying genres, for instance, is a very hard thing to do and I never use it. I never ask my player to play some 90's east coast rap inspired songs with a female vocalist, so why would I add that information? Either I play a song or an album on purpose, or I use it as a background radio and then I want it to randomly play tracks from my whole collection.
The only thing I really want from tags is a clear and consistent overview in de library of my player. For that I need:
The rest is irrelevant to me. But even if it weren't, there is no system that can cater every piece music out there. Rather than trying to invent the perfect system I just make do with the four fields above. I collect live performances and technically a performance is not an album. But you would still want to group the songs and preserve the order. How would you do that? By stating that it is an album anyway. Problem solved.
My process is:
The tool I use for that is EasyTag.
I'm similar, though I use Kid3 instead (I rip my CDs to ogg and at some point EasyTag had an ogg-related bug that actually corrupted a bunch of my library, which I had to re-rip from CD to fix). I also tag date with the release year of the song, not because I use it for anything playlist related but because I usually find that interesting to know while I'm listening to stuff.
I do use genre, but not in the traditional sense. I use it as more of a way to cheese permanent playlists that transcend whatever music player I happen to be using. For example all my Christmas-specific music is tagged with the genre "Christmas," and I have a large collection of 80s pop singles tagged with the genre "80s," and a ton of a cappella albums across multiple genres tagged "A Cappella."
That way at Christmas I can just shuffle the Christmas genre, or if I'm in the mood for some 80s banger radio I can shuffle my 80s genre. Other music is similarly categorized based on my personal playlist preferences. For example I have a dozen different metal genres--black, melodic death, doom, power, symphonic, progressive, and so on because that's the majority of my collection and I often am in the mood for a particular subgenre. Everything non-metal is pretty much grouped into the "Pop" genre even though that doesn't really describe well over half of it, because that's my generic don't-care genre.
I just go with whatever tags they came with when I got them off of Soulseek. Those people tag them well, so all I needed to do was removing shit in metadata that's like "check out cringecoins ($CRINGE)" or random URLs.
To put that simply, the name, artist, genre, album, track number, and album art combo is all I need. Hell, probably don't even need the album art.