Advice on import of large music collection

[DavidHB]

Firstly, the advice from the author of MinimServer, simoncn, is clear: files need to be tagged for most of MinimServer's core features to work. That much I think you knew, but it bears repeating.

Secondly, file format preferences do tend to spark controversy, but my view is that, of all the lossless formats to which you could convert your WAV files, FLAC will give as good a sound result as any and its tagging system (Vorbis) is relatively straightforward. Using MinimStreamer, you can also natively transcode FLAC files back to WAV (ideally WAV24). So, if you could still do it without too much hassle, I would generate a set of FLAC files to use in MinimServer.

Thirdly, you are going to need a grid-based tagging program so that you can tag multiple files in one go. If you were using Windows, my strong recommendation would be for MP3Tag, which I use. The Mac program which is most often mentioned in this forum is Metadatics, which has fairly similar capabilities. It is unfortunately not free, but $9.99 is not a huge cost. It would be nice if you could copy your file names containing track titles to your title tags, but I don't know whether Metadatics does this; MP3Tag certainly does.

Fourthly, I'd strongly recommend that you work on your files outside the music folder(s) normally used by MinimServer, and move them to their working location only when tagging is complete. That way, you can do the tagging job progressively and test your work without confusing MinimServer or getting thousands of errors in the log. I always rip and tag on my PC, and only move files to my NAS when I am confident that they are ready for use in the streaming system. You need to tell MinimServer (via MinimWatch if you are running Minim on a NAS) to do a rescan every time you add files to the library.

Unfortunately, I don't think that the format of your files will be such that metadata can be automatically loaded from the online libraries (it would be nice if I were wrong about this). But there is still a lot of usable information out there, and even if you cannot automate the process it is possible to copy and paste data from Wikipedia articles and the like. This may save time; it will certainly reduce the number of transcription errors.

I hope these thoughts help.

David