Advice / Suggestions on Tools / Techniques to manage NAS based music library

[schliden]

My music library consists of a mixture of FLAC and MP3 tracks.

The library is stored on my NAS, played via Kazoo from Minimserver (also installed on NAS) through Moode end-point.

I need a solution for the ongoing tagging and playlist management of the music library on the NAS.

I use MacOS on the desktop, so can use kid3 or (other mac taggers) to manage individual track tags, however, I need the ability to manage (create/edit) playlists.

I have experimented with 'Clementine' music player, which, can handle some of the tagging and playlist management, but it is a little slow, especially working with a NAS based library over the network.

I am open to the idea of using PHP or other web based tools that I can install on the NAS and manage via browser. (happy to hack/modify existing code as required)

Any suggestions, input, insights into how others manage their music libraries, greatly appreciated.

[zym1010]

i wonder how you define your playlists. are they manual or "smart". one way is you can define all your playlists as smart playlists where conditions for being in the list can be established by certain MinimServer filter conditions. These filter conditions can be physically from files, or added virtually by MinimServer via tagUpdate. This way you don't need to have a separate tool to maintain playlists.

[schliden]

(08-11-2022 16:35)zym1010 Wrote:  i wonder how you define your playlists. are they manual or "smart". one way is you can define all your playlists as smart playlists where conditions for being in the list can be established by certain MinimServer filter conditions. These filter conditions can be physically from files, or added virtually by MinimServer via tagUpdate. This way you don't need to have a separate tool to maintain playlists.

Both (manual and smart).

I can do alot with minimserver, but there are 2 issues:

1. I have many manual playlists that minimserver Intelligent Browsing cannot replicate.

2. I also need to export to a DAP. This requires the creation of all playlists, even those that minimserver can handle natively.

[zym1010]

I'm not sure about 2; but for 1, in the worst case you use tagUpdate to assign each track to the manual list you need, with the following results.

Code:

track1.flac
+PLAYLIST=my list 1
+PLAYLIST=my list 2

track2.flac
+PLAYLIST=my list 3

(09-11-2022 01:36)schliden Wrote:  

(08-11-2022 16:35)zym1010 Wrote:  i wonder how you define your playlists. are they manual or "smart". one way is you can define all your playlists as smart playlists where conditions for being in the list can be established by certain MinimServer filter conditions. These filter conditions can be physically from files, or added virtually by MinimServer via tagUpdate. This way you don't need to have a separate tool to maintain playlists.

Both (manual and smart).

I can do alot with minimserver, but there are 2 issues:

1. I have many manual playlists that minimserver Intelligent Browsing cannot replicate.

2. I also need to export to a DAP. This requires the creation of all playlists, even those that minimserver can handle natively.

[simoncn]

(09-11-2022 02:39)zym1010 Wrote:  track1.flac
+PLAYLIST=my list 1
+PLAYLIST=my list 2

track2.flac
+PLAYLIST=my list 3

This is an interesting idea. It is simple and needs no other tools. However, there are some potential disadvantages:

1) There is no .m3u playlist file that can be exported to a DAP

2) The user is unable to control the order in which files appear in the playlist

[zym1010]

i guess my idea has some chicken or egg issue -- being able to know which files belongs to file list presumes some library browser or playlist manager. In my case my MinimServer contentDir also contains a few iTunes libraries so I can generate playlists using iTunes and then dump the playlist information from iTunes into tagUpdate.

The file order probably can be controlled by having more virtual tags added.

(09-11-2022 10:25)simoncn Wrote:  

(09-11-2022 02:39)zym1010 Wrote:  track1.flac
+PLAYLIST=my list 1
+PLAYLIST=my list 2

track2.flac
+PLAYLIST=my list 3

This is an interesting idea. It is simple and needs no other tools. However, there are some potential disadvantages:

1) There is no .m3u playlist file that can be exported to a DAP

2) The user is unable to control the order in which files appear in the playlist

[simbun]

(09-11-2022 16:32)zym1010 Wrote:  The file order probably can be controlled by having more virtual tags added.

I tried to do something similar last year. My goal was to have playlists integrated into the standard AlbumArtist/Album indexes rather than simply as a flat list of names, by writing a script that parsed an m3u and generated the tagUpdate script from it.

One of the blockers I found was that although yes you can create another tag to order the tracks, the only way you can present your playlist (as a list of tracks) is by utilising the '[n] items' index. To utilise the '[n] items' index though you need to set listViewAlbums to 0 otherwise it will jump to album view too soon (assuming tracks are from a number of albums) - which obviously affects "normal" browsing - and whilst this does let you control the order through [items].sortTags={} it will still be incorrect if a track belongs to multiple playlists.

I gave up at that point, but if anyone knows another way (or if I've missed something).