I've been trying to categorise my digital music properly for years now. The best solution for me is writing a number of scripts and cataloguing rules to suit my needs and tastes. I usually use mp3tag which is a very powerful utility on windows or just shellscripts/linux utilities to do so
All my classical music is tagged meticulously with additional non-standard/custom tags with all the appropriate info (opus number, orchestra, composition year, conductor etc where appropriate). A lot of it required a lot of my own time and research to manually tag a lot of these.
Everything else is processed by checking against multiple tag databases, parsed multiple times to fix things like white spacing, minor punctuation/grammar gripes (The Beatles => Beatles, The), and superfluous/subjective tags like genre are removed completely. I tend to be nitpicky about things like original album release dates which I will always use, even for reissues, and then using alternative tags and/or comment to specify reissue date or other pertinent information. The comments will also have label and catalogue info for that particular release where appropriate and other notes. I also do things like standardise track number to two+ characters with a leading zero where necessary (01, 02, 11, etc - helps with ordering the file structure). After all that is done automatically for every album, I manually give it a visual check and change the album artist tag to my preference as that is how I prefer to navigate my music (for example, the dozens of Miles Davis band name albums are just tagged as Miles Davis for album artist, although the artist tag will still be correct and have "Miles Davis Sextet" or "Miles Davis And His Orchestra").
Once that is done, everything is processed again to change the file name to an easily readable format using the tag data, and the folder is also renamed using tag data which also helps me keep track of what album release/master I have and my higher bitrate/HQ releases. This way my library is not only navigable via any software, but file structure too if for whatever reason I want to share part of my library or retrieve certain files. I go even further and run a script that searches a few search engines for the highest res album cover of that release it can find online, lets me choose which one I want, downloads it to the folder, and also embeds it in the header of every file, and saves any other album art/jacket to a subfolder if I don't already have it. Finally, all my cue files are automatically updated with the new file names as necessary, and any changes/additions to my music library is backed up on my unlimited google cloud storage and an additional local drive.
It took me a long while to do thousands of albums even with most of the process automated. Luckily I started with most of them already ripped. I never ever want to do that again. Now, I make a habit of doing it every time I obtain a new album right away, and will not allow myself to listen to it before doing this process and adding it to my collection.
A good alternative to emby is jellyfin, which is a fully open source fork of the project without all the added premium payment requirement. Most of the paid features of emby are included in jellyfin last time I checked. It functions almost identically too, although it may be a bit harder to access your library remotely if the user isn't as technically inclined since it is lacking that 'cloud' feature of emby out of the box (doesn't matter if you only access from home). But its easy enough to sort that by running a vpn or forwarding the appropriate ports and setting up dynamic dns for a home connection if one prefers that and wants to access it from anywhere.
Personally, I don't ever see me using anything but foobar or mpd as far as a player goes. I've yet to try roon but don't see me spending $700 USD for a piece of software anytime soon, although having streaming services and local/remote files all in the same UI is very appealing. I'll stick to using my phone/dlna for streaming for now. To be honest, these days I find myself just using 3rd party apps or other scripts to rip the albums I want to listen to from the HQ streaming service if in the rare chance they have a release I don't have a CD rip of.
All my classical music is tagged meticulously with additional non-standard/custom tags with all the appropriate info (opus number, orchestra, composition year, conductor etc where appropriate). A lot of it required a lot of my own time and research to manually tag a lot of these.
Everything else is processed by checking against multiple tag databases, parsed multiple times to fix things like white spacing, minor punctuation/grammar gripes (The Beatles => Beatles, The), and superfluous/subjective tags like genre are removed completely. I tend to be nitpicky about things like original album release dates which I will always use, even for reissues, and then using alternative tags and/or comment to specify reissue date or other pertinent information. The comments will also have label and catalogue info for that particular release where appropriate and other notes. I also do things like standardise track number to two+ characters with a leading zero where necessary (01, 02, 11, etc - helps with ordering the file structure). After all that is done automatically for every album, I manually give it a visual check and change the album artist tag to my preference as that is how I prefer to navigate my music (for example, the dozens of Miles Davis band name albums are just tagged as Miles Davis for album artist, although the artist tag will still be correct and have "Miles Davis Sextet" or "Miles Davis And His Orchestra").
Once that is done, everything is processed again to change the file name to an easily readable format using the tag data, and the folder is also renamed using tag data which also helps me keep track of what album release/master I have and my higher bitrate/HQ releases. This way my library is not only navigable via any software, but file structure too if for whatever reason I want to share part of my library or retrieve certain files. I go even further and run a script that searches a few search engines for the highest res album cover of that release it can find online, lets me choose which one I want, downloads it to the folder, and also embeds it in the header of every file, and saves any other album art/jacket to a subfolder if I don't already have it. Finally, all my cue files are automatically updated with the new file names as necessary, and any changes/additions to my music library is backed up on my unlimited google cloud storage and an additional local drive.
It took me a long while to do thousands of albums even with most of the process automated. Luckily I started with most of them already ripped. I never ever want to do that again. Now, I make a habit of doing it every time I obtain a new album right away, and will not allow myself to listen to it before doing this process and adding it to my collection.
A good alternative to emby is jellyfin, which is a fully open source fork of the project without all the added premium payment requirement. Most of the paid features of emby are included in jellyfin last time I checked. It functions almost identically too, although it may be a bit harder to access your library remotely if the user isn't as technically inclined since it is lacking that 'cloud' feature of emby out of the box (doesn't matter if you only access from home). But its easy enough to sort that by running a vpn or forwarding the appropriate ports and setting up dynamic dns for a home connection if one prefers that and wants to access it from anywhere.
Personally, I don't ever see me using anything but foobar or mpd as far as a player goes. I've yet to try roon but don't see me spending $700 USD for a piece of software anytime soon, although having streaming services and local/remote files all in the same UI is very appealing. I'll stick to using my phone/dlna for streaming for now. To be honest, these days I find myself just using 3rd party apps or other scripts to rip the albums I want to listen to from the HQ streaming service if in the rare chance they have a release I don't have a CD rip of.
