I’ve been lurking here for a while, trying to learn and set up my own stuff. I’m starting off with music. I have a few thousand files in different formats and plenty of duplicates.
I already have an Emby server set up and it works very well.
However, is there a music manager that will help me find and eliminate duplicates?
I’m using Linux Mint and I’m still figuring out how to set up the various users and groups so that the software can access where my music is stored.
I’m thinking Lidarr but - as mentioned - something about setting up users and a media group and doing the permissions is not clicking.
For Emby to work, I’ve made the music directory a shared location and opened guest access.
Any pointers to step by step guides on any of this would be very helpful as well.
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Sorting a music library is a very manual process. Your best bet is MusicBrainz Picard to clean up your metadata then use something like Lidarr and Lidarr Extended to maintain and continue to add to your library.
I want to 2nd this. Lots of manual work because software (and you) can tag albums, folders, files incorrectly and have a mess on your hands.
I like software like “tagscanner” and even iTunes. Once the files have proper metadata then I use that data to rename the file/folder names.
Ah, okay. Someone else mentioned Picard so I’ll look into that. I’ve heard a little about it, do I’m excited for a new rabbit hole.
if youre using Emby/Jellyfin you would just need emby to access the folder with your music. users would be authenticated through emby.
i think you should groom your media before you drop it into a media broadcasting solution like emby. i use MediaElch for video, you could use picard for music management. im fairly certain picard has dup detection and rename abilities.
so you get all your music tagged, renamed and encoded the way ya want. then get them organized into files/folders… then drop that into your emby library.
lidarr is for obtaining media files and creating a process that automatically injects it into your library. you would want emby running correctly first.
Ah, thank you for the explanation. Fortunately most of my duplicates are entire albums, so I won’t need to comb through each folder/album.
I’ll check my permissions for emby
For duplicates dupeGuru’s Music Mode should suffice (don’t be overly aggressive when batch deleting files!)
Then tag and sort them with MusicBrainz Picard (again, take it slow. Picard is great and all but not every automated match is correct and I always check mine if they’re correct)
After doing that start taking notes while listening to your Music in case you detect something is wrong (missed duplicate, wrong/partial metadata, etc) which allows you to fix these errors later on
I’d also recommend you do backups along the way because dupeGurus and Picards changes can’t be undone and as a beginner you’re likely to do mistakes till your accustomed to the process
That’s what I did and will continue to do with my 1500 songs (for now)
I also prefer to sync my music from my PC to my phone via rsync (any sync application should suffice). But that’s just me, because imo offline playback is the way to go
Thank you very much for the response! I want to do offline on my phone as well. The Emby server is for me and a couple of friends plus I have been wanting to learn more about media servers and all the -arrs
There’s one additional problem with Picard and bands with a long history that have released the same song on multiple albums and compilations, it won’t make much of an effort to group them in as few albums as possible. You will end up with songs spread across many distinct albums. Sometimes it’s not even an album of the original artist but multi-artist compilations like “The sound of the 90s” and so on.
It will depend on “how duplicate” they are.
I’d use a file renamer that uses id3 tags, which will help find duplicates. It’ll ask you to rename/skip/delete dupes.
There are probably better methods tho 🤷♂️
