2025-05-05 [Mon] 19:00 UTC
#tech
Are you overwhelmed about the state of your media directories -- particularly
your music and videos? I was for a long time, too. But we are in the 2020s and
going through the effort of manually organizing personal media collections
should be a thing of the past.
Organizing audio
I suggest the use of two tools to accumulate and organize audio.
The first is yt-dlp. Youtube is absolutely full of music albums in playlists
and using yt-dlp to grab albums is the fastest and easiest way I know of to
grab music.
To this end I use a simple command in a directory ~/Music/inbox :
cat get-music.sh
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 $1
Then if I execute ./get-music.sh youtube.com/playlisturl it grabs all the
tracks as MP3 players to my inbox directory. We're halfway done.
Next, I use MusicBrainz Picard to lookup the tracks and (a) assign them
metadatas, (b) rename and move tracks. I do this by opening Picard,
adding the inbox folder, and scanning/looking up tracks before saving them.
My recommended way to refer to a song is in the format /music /Artist /[Year] Album /num. Song Name.mp3. This makes it really easy to find
albums or specific tracks. For more advanced lookups, playlist creations etc
I leave that work to media software. More on that later.
Organizing video
For Western TV and film especially, but also anime to some degree, I find
that tinyMediaManager is the easiest way to organize and tag videos. Prepare
by creating two subdirectories in your ~/Videos directory called "tv" and
"movies". Put directories of shows or movie files in their respective places.
Just like Picard, tinyMediaManager tries to use as many clues as it can to
match files with metadata, and then reorganizes ~/Videos/tv and ~/Videos/film
based on that data. You may have to use a special tool to rename files if it's
confused, but that's pretty easy.
Consuming content
In the same way that we shouldn't have to manually rename and organize our
media files in the 2020s, we also shouldn't resort to manually digging through
our filesystems to consume content.
Kodi and Jellyfin are two amazing ways to work through media libraries. Kodi is
good on media PCs plugged into a TV set and jellyfin makes it so you can watch
stuff in your browser, on your phone, or on tablets, especially in your home
wifi network.
Setting up Kodi and Jellyfin is beyond the scope of this blog article, but I'll
say that some perks are they track watch progress, share info about movies/shows
before you watch them, and let you go through your media library by different
metadata sorting options like date or genre. They look and act a lot like
netflix, but run privately on your own media collection, so there's no having to
pay subscription fees or wait for things to buffer on slower networks.
Download links