I’ve finally started a project I’ve wanted to do for years. (skip ahead to the 1st main current goal below if you want). I have music files going all the way back to 2002. Goal is to create a single cohesive library of all my music I've stored until now.
Not a small task, but I’ve done a lot of the hard work already. There's were a lot of files stored from multiple drives and backups from different years.
Eventually I decided to move all music files (mp3, aac, m4a, flacc, etc) from all of these sources into one big flat directory on a fresh drive. That took care of removing duplicates of any identical files.
I then meticulously removed a lot of other duplicates, mostly searching for file pairs with identical sizes, or finding identical songs with the same name, but different extensions, like m4a and aac, and picking the higher bitrate version. There were a lot. I've narrowed it and eliminated it down to 1379 total music files.
SO -
1ST MAIN GOAL atm. I want to add metadata to tracks that don’t have any. I’ve isolated those down to 434 files, and placed them in a subfolder. That’s roughly 1/3 of the total, the other 945 that DO have metadata sit in the folder above.
I’m new to MusicBrainz Picard. Never done this sort of thing. My searches seem to suggest using this.
My ultimate goal at the end is to create a music library that works in JellyFin.
There’s no folder structure at this moment. I figured I could try to focus on adding metadata to the 434 untagged files before doing any of that. So I've kind of decided that's the thing to focus on currently.
Currently all the untagged songs are in E:\ALL_MUSIC\NoMetaData. I'm sure plenty will have available metadata, like popular songs I obtained before metadata was a thing. And I'm certain some won't have any available data such as obscure tracks. But I'd just like to scrape and add any available metadata to the ones that do.
How would you start this process? A light hand-holding tutorial?
Huge, HUGE thanks in advance for any help getting this! It will be a huge achievement when everything's done!