For as long as I’ve had a shared Zotero collection with some industry friends, I’ve talked about a “Metadata Day” holiday, on which we all sit down in a coffee shop and clean up our sloppy imports, making sure all untagged PDFs get tagged and filed properly.

It’s been a little more than a year, and metadata day hasn’t happened yet. Luckily, Zotero is pretty forgiving, with full text search being pretty quick. Plex, on the other hand, is not.

I run a Plex server, mostly for music, made up of songs from my parents’ collections and mine. Close to a century of cumulative being alive and listening to music-time between the three of us has resulted in a pretty big collection.

find /Volumes/music -type f | wc -l
	18100

More than 18 thousand songs!

Record scratch, freeze frame

You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation. The majority of our music was purchased digitally on iTunes or ripped from my mom’s substantial CD collection using XLD on our laptops. Another chunk comes from my father’s days as a hard drive trading Deadhead (he’s still a deadhead, but doesn’t trade hard drives anymore).

A bunch of this stuff is old, or came from best of or hits CDs, or has unhelpful filenames or messy (or no) directory structure (looking at you, Deadheads). As a result, Plex and its primitive metadata tooling has a hard time identifying it, resulting in a bunch of duplicates, incorrectly tagged songs, erroneous album groupings, and other general unpleasantness. Having bad metadata makes Plex pretty unusable, and duplicated albums are really annoying when using the app on a tiny phone screen.

The bell tolls

So I have declared a second metadata day, ironically to be undertaken before the first, in which I do something about all the messy malformed music metadata.

That day was today. I started by manually sorting things into four new Plex libraries, one for music I brought, one for my mother, and one for my father, plus a miscellaneous library for unclaimed/unsorted stuff. My 11 year old brother brings zero music, slacker! (How it weird it must be to only know streaming).

After doing my best at sorting, I decided I’d start by cleaning up my side of the house (6700 songs). I found a program called Picard that uses the MusicBrainz database to match and find metadata for songs, and then allows them to be rewritten back to disc with correct metadata and file paths (the schema of which is customizable).

You can more or less point Picard at a set of folders and let it run, and it’ll start working. It’s pretty conservative, and I haven’t caught it doing anything wrong yet. For things it has trouble matching, you can “scan” the song, which generates a fingerprint of the song audio and compares it against ListenBrainz. I found that resolves around 80% of the 10% of songs that required some extra work. The remaining 20% I fixed mostly manually, clustering them (telling it that they form an album, after which it can usually figure it out), inputting metadata (and submitting that to MusicBrainz–share the wealth!), or picking through partial matches.

Once I’d matched everything, I hit save and waited about an hour as it rewrote everything back onto my network share where the music lives.

Picard is a little clunky, but it’s pretty powerful, and I’ve been figuring it out as I go. We’ll see how it handles my father’s Dead recordings. If it can’t, then at least they’re semi quarantined (but still accessible) in a secondary Plex library now!

Here’s what I’ve been enjoying recently, in the form of recommendations I typed up for a pal

• Rebecca Black, SALVATION ~ bubblegummy hyperpop edm
• underscores, U ~ delicious nutritious banger hyperpop you will find yourself shimmying to and fro to this
• gabby start, Stem ~ slightly more chill electronic dancey type beat
• Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer ~ janelle monae tells stories through her albums and is a computer lady
• Altamira, How To Get Off The Ground ~ trans woman with a pretty voice, indie rock type situation
• Carly Rae Jepsen, EMOTION ~ imo the best pop album ever made
• Snow Strippers, The Snow Strippers ~ pumping beat house vibe, i listen to it when im locking in really hard at work
• CMAT, Euro-Country ~ pretty album by one of my favorite artists in the last couple years, more of a chill vibe but you can still groove to it