What would be a good setup for still being able to manage metadata?
vicmortelmans
Member
Hi,
As many, I'm looking for a Google Play Music replacement. My shortlist now has Astiga and iBroadcast. The latter has its own storage, which seems convenient, but still I'd want a backup of my music, so I'd be syncing anyhow (and not automatedly), so this is not really an advantage compared to Astiga. iBroadcast does have its own metatag-editor, but again: since it's editing the online music files, my back-up would be out-of-sync, so again, not really an advantage.
The concept of Astiga to keep away from mastering the data storage is really appealing, when I think it through!
But perhaps some 'best practices' can be shared.
The ideal setup would seem to have a cloud storage, to Astiga can sync and to which I can sync on my PC. So if I would change metadata on my local files, it gets synced to the cloud storage and then to Astiga.
But I'm out of storage on my PC, so that would become a NAS on my local network... now it's getting complex, syncing a NAS to a cloud storage? Working with music files efficiently, even over the local network? I don't know... Well, it can't be rocket science, can it?
What software would be recommended to manage music files (metadata)? I always did this on Google Play Music... I've seen https://www.mediamonkey.com/, but not tried it yet. Are there many alternatives? Would it work when the files are on a NAS?
Just some thoughts, it will be fun!
Regards,
Vic
Comments
What NAS system/software are you using? And how large is your music collection?
There's another android app that plays music from the cloud but works differently from Astiga. You can edit tags within the app without making changes to the file. However, it doesn't have a web player like Astiga.
I migrated from Google Play too.
I have a physical NAS drive with my music on it as the master, I use Media Monkey as my ripping, tag editing & library management tool for that music. That is same as before. MediaMonkey is excellent for managing a music library, with excellent tagging, support for custom tags & your own fields. It rips CDs very well in a range of formats too. There are lots of programmes but I settled on that one.
I then use a sync programme (if a massive upload such as the whole library) or just copy new albums/songs to pcloud drive that is linked to Astiga. For the huge main upload of more than 1TB I did not use the pcloud Sync functionality, I just used my exisitng SyncBackSE programme as both my NAS and pcloud have drives set-up automatically on the computer.
Astiga and pcloud can be set-up together with a common login. Then I simply sync Astiga to the pcloud storage - which now only takes a tiny amount of time after the first major library scan (which can take a dayfor the 81K tracks I have.) I used to run this hourly, but now I have the full library established, I just run this when I add some music - perhaps once or twice a week.
This works brilliantly and is really easy. I'm not using Google Play anymore or needing to migrate to YouTube Music with all the problems that has. The monthly price of Astiga Premium & 2TB of pcloud storage is less than my Google Play cost.
If like me, migrating from Google Play - this is a great answer for you and I'm very happy indeed. Having been through this change over myself recently, do let me know if I can assist further. Astiga is different and evolving quickly (even with enhancements in the last month) - the freedom and control over your music is back again this way.
In terms of quick management of your music library, you could just use pcloud as a master cloud drive and manage the tags from there via MediaMonkey or another programme. Then you do not need a NAS at all. I like to have my own local physical copy that I can take further back-ups from. However because pcloud maps to your P: on the computer - you can then scan it as a drive and modify files directly on there too.
Hi,
My setup is now as follows, probably slightly over-complicated:
1/ music stored on USB-drive that is connected to a Raspberry Pi
2/ Raspberry Pi shares the drive using Samba
3/ Raspberry Pi has scripts to sync music files to S3 bucket
4/ Astiga syncs from the S3 bucket
5/ On my (linux) PC, I mount the network drive provided by the Raspberry Pi and I use Amarok to manage my library
This could be done much simpler by using a NAS and a cloud service that has proper syncing tools, like Google Drive or OneDrive, but I had the Raspberry Pi already running, and the USB drive sitting idle in a drawer, so why spend extra money. And as for my Drive, when I would add my music there, it would end up in a higher tier, again costing me $$.
Best regards,
Vic
I've always like sorting my music by folders by Artist, then a sub folder of each album, like this:
Artist \ Album (Year) \ 01. Track.flac
I have a music folder titled "My Music" in my lifetime 4 TB pCloud (I paid for premium lifetime twice), which syncs to Asiga. Besides playing my music in Astiga, I also like playing my music directly from the files and folders, which plays in Foobar2000 (free). I found that working with MediaMonkey was pretty tedious and buggy.
Instead, I use MP3tag (free) to edit my music tags. What I like the most about it is that I can just right click a folder with music and click on "MP3tag" and it automatically loads the music into MP3tag. It has a lot of advanced features and even 'macros', which they call "Action groups" which helps a lot with repetitive jobs.
Though, if you do like music managers, I have tried MusicBee (free) and it seems to work better for me than MM (MediaMonkey) even though I have a lifetime "Gold" license. I also don't like that MM has affiliate links to Amazon (they get a financial kick back when clicking on these links) even though I paid for their software.
Hi,
I think I might be smaller scale to you, but here's what I've done since leaving Google Play Music and not moving to YouTube Music (because of the lack of syncing, and because I still have an alternate YouTube account so that complicated things).
Number of artist folders (top level folders in my astiga-music folder): 183
Number of files: 4972
Amount of data: 25.5GB (includes a few videos I think)
Artist folders in an astiga-music folder on Windows PC. Paid subscription to Google for 100GB, 20€/yr (my only cost). Google's "Backup & Sync" installed on laptop and configured to sync ONLY my astiga-music folder with Google Drive. Astiga free version with one storage item, Google Drive.
So if I add new files to my laptop, Google syncs them up to Drive instantly, and then they appear in Astiga within a few days, or immediately if I run a manual sync (which I can do every 4 or 5 days with the free version).
Astiga installed on phone and tablet and loaded in a pinned tab in Chrome on laptop.
To update metadata I use Mp3tag - free and really easy, including for updating multiple files at once. I haven't checked if metadata updates on my laptop automatically update in Astiga yet. I'll find out after the next sync!
Did your metadata update after the sync? I'm currently in the process of cleaning a bunch of music that I dumped into dropbox after finding it on google play or uploading it and was curious if I could just put it all online now and deal with my tagging problems as they come.
Yeah since the original upload I've changed a few band names and album names and the next sync updates Astiga no problem.
The only thing that I'm missing is to be able to delete listened-to podcasts in Astiga and have it remove them from Google and my PC. They are episodes I downloaded ages ago to my PC.
Can't have everything I guess.