My apologies in advance as this question does not pertain directly to the development of Volumio 4 but more a question of usage into the future and adoption by newer users like myself. I’ve searched a bit and couldn’t find any recent answers and I feel a bit ignorant having never done this prior to seeing and actually using a music streamer like Volumio.
What is the best practice with organizing my music library to work with Volumio 4? Right now, Volumio sorts my individual albums in a “root” directory fine [ie. /Music/Fugees - The Score] but for compilations and discography [ie. /Music/The Fugees/The Score or /Music/The Chemical Brothers Discography/Albums], Volumio sometimes pick up the whole album but also sometimes just picks the CUE file and plays that…and within that, sometimes I can skip forward, sometimes I can’t.
I suppose an extension of this question should start with…What music management software do you guys use/recommend to oraganize a library for importing into and sorted properly for Volumio 4 ?
I’ve explored Bliss for organizing my collection, licensed it some time ago, but it never quite resonated with me. While it offers automation and rule-based tagging, I found it lacked the intuitive control I prefer.
JRiver has been my long-time companion. It’s a powerful tool for managing large libraries. However, its bulk editing capabilities leave much to be desired, tedious and not as streamlined as I’d like.
Monkey Audio remains my favorite. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and handles tagging with minimal fuss. For quick edits and reliable performance, it’s hard to beat.
Metadata Best Practices
To ensure proper handling of multi-artist compilations:
Use the ALBUMARTIST tag consistently across all tracks.
Set the Compilation Metafields Fields correctly for albums featuring various artists.
Avoid relying solely on track-level artist tags, which can fragment albums in many players.
Volumio & CUE File Support
Volumio has officially dropped support for CUE files, primarily due to MPD’s sensitivity. Improperly formatted CUE sheets can crash MPD, and the risk outweighed the benefits. If you rely on CUE for gapless playback or track indexing, consider converting them into properly tagged individual files instead.
File structure
I’ve organized my collection is the following folder structure:
I agree with the tedious nature of jRiver’s bulk tagging, but in my opinion jRiver is by far the most capable bulk tagging tool out there. The best of the easy to use features is pane tagging which allows you to see at a glance what spellings of different artists have been used and cleaning them up
.
A far steeper learning curve comes with using regex in tagging scripts. I have successfully done quite complex changes across my huge library. The folks in the forum are quite helpful, but one does need to demonstrate a minimum conviction to the task.
For smaller tasks I use MP3Tag, which is also excellent. It also has certain macro capabilities.
Geez…it’s been like almost a decade now, if not more, since I last used Monkey Audio to clean up my MP3’s for Plex. Thanks for the tips…I’m totally open to using the kung fu combo of a couple of tools clean things up again.
EDIT: Jogging my memory…I’ve also used this before as well to add metadata to obscure albums.
I used to use CD-Tag in the late 2000s etc unfortunately it’s no longer supported. It was by far the simplest interface that just worked. Back then it was EAC for ripping and verifying - CD-Tag and then apply replaygain using Footbar or a separate little tool (Flac Frontend is worth having too).
I think I’m using Mp3tag but it’s not that intuitive half the time.
Volumio never used to recognise Album Artist CDs (various artists) by searching but will have to check if it’s been fixed.
Hello,
I have a big library on a NAS that runs a LMS server in Docker. Volumio can also run this server via a plugin I didn’t tested.
I use the the Squeezelite MC plugin on Volumio to stream the music over wifi with no audio quality concerns.
I browse my music with the built-in web interface of the Lyrion Music Server or with the Squeezer free app on Android. There is a lot of options for browsing and organizing the library.
For tagging purposes, the free Metatogger application is an excellent tool, allowing for example to retrieve the covers and resize them. You have to understand its uncommon interface in the first times but this done it’s alright.
Have fun and experiment !
