The problem I am trying to solve is that when I am in-person at work, there is a ton of talking going on around me, and I’d like to blot that out with music. But I’m usually wanting a genre of music. Also, I’d like to choose the option for the player to randomly pick which song to play and then work through the entire list.
I have my own Nextcloud server on the public Internet, and I can log in on my cell phone and go to the Music app page (or now the Audio Player app page) and play the music via Bluetooth to my headphones. This lets me not bother anyone, I’m blotting out the stuff I don’t care about, like baseball, how drunk my cubicle neighbor got with his friends over the weekend, etc.
I’d previously used Kid3 to change genres on files, but that was mostly a manual process. Purchasing MP3 files from Amazon is still something I do, but I don’t really want to have to then manually mess with every file. So I looked at MusicBrainz Picard. Actually, I’d heard about it from the Untitled Linux Show over on the TWiT.tv network.
At first, it did exactly what I wanted: replace all the tagging I’d done with whatever was in their database. That was fine. I went from probably 15 to 20 genres to 123, but that was to be expected. FWIW:
exiftool -p '$genre' -q . | sort -u | wc -l
One of the things that looks good in Picard is the plugin or scripting features. This looks promising. So I tried that, but… ooof.
Part of the problem is definitely my own fault: I’d like to have a song show up in multiple categories, and I’d like to use the genres tag, and I’d like to use the Nextcloud web page for playing. So this is my fault for wanting too much.
It appears that the multiple genre tags are not something the Nextcloud Music app can handle. Perplexity suggested I try the Nextcloud Audio Player app, but it didn’t appear to be any better. It appears that the Nextcloud apps don’t know how to do multiple genres, but I didn’t know that going in.
Back to MusicBrainz Picard: I had successfully gotten the genre tag of each file set to their Internet database default. Now to recategorize things. For example, the B-52’s Love Shack shows up as Alternative Rock, and I’d like to have it show up under both Rock and Fun.
On the one hand, it appears that Picard was able to mess with the genre tag and perhaps be able to add multiples. I couldn’t tell, though, because the Nextcloud apps did not play nice with that file after I’d touched it with Picard. It is entirely likely that I did something wrong with scripting.
But what was the real problem? Resetting back to normal. Thankfully, I’d only touched the one file. Wow, Picard was not willing to undo the tag update I’d told it to do.
I tried all the things I’d done during the first run, to reset the tags to only what the MusicBrainz database out on the Internet has. Picard would not let go. Ultimately, I had to exit Picard, crank up Kid3, delete the genre tag entirely, then crank up Picard and refresh from the Internet. Thank goodness I’d only messed with the one file.
Ultimately, I’ll go back to creating playlist files, either .3mu or .m3u8 files. These are a pain in the ass to deal with in Nextcloud, however. Every time I reset the music collection and rescan my files, it deletes the playlists from its database. Loading them from disk is a single-playlist-file-at-a-time operation. This may be heresy to say, but for this, I am more capable on Windows than on Linux, because I have WinBatch available: I’d be able to script driving the mouse and keystrokes to load the files each time.
I do already have my playlists down to about eight categories, which isn’t too bad. But loading the .m3u8 files into Nextcloud is a poor experience: it wants the name of the playlist before I can import the file, and then if I want to save the changes, it may create a new, different file name on export. I’m much happier with MPD (Music Player Demon) simply reading .m3u files. My whole-house audio is great. But that doesn’t help me with needing Nextcloud when I’m in-person in the office at work.