Beets for importing, ascii only, lastgenre, fetchart, whatever other plugins I’m forgetting, /artist/yyyy_album_name/ directory structure, 01_title.ext for single disc, 01-01_title.ext for multi disc. I invoke beets manually just to keep an eye on how things get matched up and tagged during the process. I deal in full albums, LPs, compilations and such because it’s often easier to maintain and match metadata than with individual tracks. I guess it’s a data hoarder / archivist compulsion too, but it’s rare I can’t find at least one other track on an album appreciable so… why not?

A weekly rsync pushes the beets DB and library from my TrueNAS server to another server with a 8TB external dedicated to backing up my most important stuff (personal projects, password store, compose files, confs, etc). I’ve got an rsync alias set up on my laptop I invoke manually because I’m nearing the limit of what I want to allot to music. At least until I decide to get a larger drive.

That’s local in triplicate, with zraid on the NAS and a fourth copy on my phone, which leaves me feeling pretty good about not losing any music outside of a house fire or tornado. I was also rsync’ing all my media (music, movies, shows) to another TrueNAS setup at a relative’s but some things have changed with that so it’s on hold. Not fond of missing my off-site backup but hopefully can resolve it soon.

Everything is local only right now. The library is mounted read-only in Jellyfin so can play music from pretty much any phone, TV, computer, my Steam Deck, etc throughout the house. If I ever decide to open things up, reverse proxy or whatever, I might look into Finamp but I buy a flagship phone every six to ten years for the storage space so I can just take my music with me. Might eventually switch that to a dedicated music device.

A mishmash of beets and the old ways got me to where I am, navidrome with a bit of mpv & kodi.

I’m currently trying to ignore it and plan to return with a new workflow over the next year or so. Beets will be part of this but also need some python, shell glue and other tools working together, and things are changing at little faster than they once were.

I spent a little time a few months back grabbing NPR and KEXP audio at scale with yt-dlp and having them land with decent tags as navidrome compliant albums and now feel a little more confident incorporating oddities into sacred realm of jazz flacs.

But the one folder to rule them all is still in the planning stages.

I just use lidarr to rewrite the tags to be consistent and that seems to be enough for navidrome to put the correct cover art 90% of the time.

My music is on my PC hard drive and synced to my server. Last year I spent a few weeks tagging my old stuff and i tried beets, kid3, and picard but ended up liking picard the most just since it was a lot better at grouping albums together and finding the best matches ime. Any new music is tagged with picard. Then i run a navidrome docker container with the music library mounted. And i use feishin for desktop and symfonium for mobile use.

If you’re interested, i wrote about my experience migrating from iTunes to navidrome and tagging my music here (no ads, monetization, or tracking)

Lidarr manages my large library easily

What methods do you use for managing a large music library?

I have a physical collection I have been accumulating for decades now, that goes as far back as 1937. I have converted everything to flac and it resides on a NAS drive. I have used Beets and Picard, and back in the day MP3Tag for tagging, and surprisingly, MusicBee (Windows) is great for embedding lyrics. It takes a while to embed lyrics in a large collection. Currently I have everything tagged, in their respective artists/albums, and embedded lyrics for about 75-80% of them. I run Navidrome and stream via Feishin locally, and Substreamer on my mobile.

ETAL I have also used czkawka_gui in the past to clean out duplicates.

My experience is similar to a lot of people here. I see that we’ve all had our hurdles over the decades while moving OS’s and I’ve used many of the apps mentioned here (Windows/Linux). I couple of years ago i decide to stream my music because i was already into self-hosting and i really needed to properly tag my music for whatever server app I would use.
I always had my music structured by folder, i was using desktop apps for playback so it kinda worked for me. But i wanted to have better tagging. I had already used kid3 and picard but it lacked automation so I used beets for the albums on my collection (about 12K of songs). It wasn’t perfect but the software is not blame and it was a great way to tag automatically and move files for a consistent folder structure to match my needs.
Right now, since i don’t add music all the time ( a couple per week) i mainly stick to picard to tag new albums. it has 3 actions to manage the files on disk (move, rename, tag), I have script rules for naming files (if required) and i use the ReplayGain plugin. But I also have to point out that the learning curve of picard is rather high, the UI is a mess and it took me a really long time to understand how it works or where the options are.
After trying airsonic for a while i moved to Navidrome and have been using symfonium (android) and Feishin (desktop). It’s the best experience I’ve had since i started listening to music on my pc (199…6/7).
Regarding the source files, it lives on a disk and is backed up to another disk, managed on openmediavault.

Big beets fan here. Only thing I don’t like, other than the odd album missing from their index, is the weak genre naming. I acknowledge this is murky territory, I’m wondering how other users handle the genres.

I use self hosted nextcloud for backup, synchronization is so fast, I got a cron job that synchronizes every 15 mins.

Before that I was using rclone for backups in idrive (super cheap s3 equivalent)

I have a bunch of actions setup in mp3tag which strips out all but the absolute necessary tags, and uses the cover from the directory to add the cover to the files… once tagging is correct, you can use any library.

“unsorted” folder contains input. “Music” folder has full library; any imports must go through beets. rsync to remote backups; one scripted/automatic, one manual & password-protected. Restores (needed once or twice) are done with beets import, but whatever flag that does “just import, don’t tag”

NFS / Shares - over complicated. Just syncthing it around (and snapshot on backup server), for nearly static data as music it is perfect.

I just manually clean up the tags/directory structure and use rsync. I have tried a few other things, but they always end up being more trouble than it is worth for me.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #56 for this comm, first seen 19th Jul 2026, 03:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I actually made a copy of my library (for safety) and had hermes agent scan it and fix it so that it would register well with navidrome and be named coherently. It was very impressive what local AI could do. If you have a gpu with 12+ GB VRAM, you can do it local with an uncensored model. Cloud providers can probably do it too, but might throw safety warning.