Music Tagging

Let’s talk about the thing that’ll make or break your music server experience: proper tagging. Seriously, this is where most people give up and go back to Spotify, but it’s also what separates a real music collection from a pile of randomly named files.

Why Tagging Actually Matters

Look, I get it. Tagging music sounds boring as hell. But here’s the reality: if your files aren’t properly tagged, your beautiful music server is going to look like garbage. No album covers, artists showing up as “Unknown Artist,” albums split across multiple entries because one track is missing a year - it’s a nightmare.

Well-tagged files aren’t just about looking pretty (though they do). It’s about being able to find what you want. When you’re searching for that specific album from 1982, you need your server to actually find it. Without proper tags, you’re basically playing a guessing game with your own collection.

Here’s what you absolutely need for a decent experience:

Album covers - Because staring at generic music note icons is depressing
Album names - So your collection doesn’t look like a bunch of random tracks
Artist names - Spelled consistently, please
Years - For sorting and that nostalgic feeling
Track numbers - So albums play in the right order

This isn’t perfectionist obsession - this is basic functionality.

Beets: Your New Best Friend

Beets is the tool that’s going to save your sanity. Think of it as having a music librarian who never gets tired, never makes mistakes, and has access to the world’s biggest music database.

I’m using Beets with two plugins that basically do all the heavy lifting:

MusicBrainz plugin - Taps into the biggest open music database on the planet
Discogs plugin - For those rare pressings and obscure releases that even MusicBrainz doesn’t know about

When Beets finds missing tags, it doesn’t just guess - it goes out and grabs the correct information from these massive databases. Album art, proper artist names, release years, track listings - everything you need for your collection to actually look professional.

And here’s the beautiful part: it saves you hours of manual work. Instead of sitting there typing in album names one by one like some kind of digital monk, Beets does it automatically. You point it at a folder of messy music files, and it comes back with a properly organized, beautifully tagged collection.

Metadata-Remote: For Everything Else

But let’s be real - sometimes you need to make manual edits. Maybe Beets got something wrong, maybe you’ve got some super obscure demo tape that doesn’t exist in any database, or maybe you just want to customize something specific.

That’s where metadata-remote comes in. It’s a self-hostable metadata editor that runs in your browser, and it’s exactly what it sounds like - a clean, simple interface for editing your music tags without having to install desktop software or mess around with command-line tools.

The best part? It’s easy to set up, runs on your server alongside everything else, and you can access it from any device. Need to fix some tags while you’re away from your main computer? Just open your browser and edit away.

The Reality Check

Here’s what nobody tells you about music tagging: it’s going to take some time upfront. If you’ve got thousands of tracks collected over decades, you’re not going to fix everything in one afternoon.

But here’s the thing - once it’s done, it’s done. And Beets makes the process so much faster than doing it manually that it’s actually kind of satisfying. You’ll start with a mess of files and end up with a collection that looks like it came from a professional music service.

What We’ll Cover in the Setup

In the detailed installation guides, I’ll show you exactly:

How to install and configure Beets with MusicBrainz and Discogs plugins
Setting up automatic tagging workflows that just work
Installing metadata-remote for those manual touch-ups
Best practices for organizing your files before and after tagging
How to handle edge cases and problem files

No shortcuts, no “figure it out yourself” moments - every command, every configuration file, explained step by step.

Because at the end of the day, the difference between a music server that’s a joy to use and one that makes you want to throw your laptop out the window comes down to this: proper tagging.