Picard is a very fine application but which falls short of my needs. Is there something like what I want?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I’m interested in having a music collection manager which would do the following:

  • Be a crossplatform GUI app (EDIT: or a SELF-HOSTED webapp)
  • Let me add albums/tracks to my collection from the MusicBrainz DB even if the release is not on the computer. The idea is, it’s not just what I have, but also a repository of my reviews about music releases. I might get the album later, or simply give write a low rating to music I don’t want to keep on my computer.
  • Let me easily assign custom rating categories to a track or album. For example, a track could have Rating_Beat=10, Rating_Lyrics=4.
  • Be able to query by a given rating. For example, “show all tracks sorted by Rating_Lyrics score descending”.
  • Let me assign multiple custom genres to a track. For example, DarkCinematic+Atmospheric. Let me search “show me all tracks that are Atmospheric, sorted by Rating_Beat first”.
  • Provide a way to find all tracks for which I added custom metadata. This is just so I don’t lose track of custom data. I’m happy with naming every single tag MYNAME_tag, and search for anything that begins with MYNAME.
  • Save all this metadata to a local DB, not on the Internet

Having spent an hour trying Picard just now, I know I’m going beyond what Picard is meant for here, but I’m wondering:

  1. Is there a tool like this already out there?
  2. If not, can Picard become this if I learn Python to write my own plugin?
2

beets seems like it ticks most of those boxes of yours, except points 2 and maybe 1 (not sure what the status is of its web interface, but definitely not a GUI). Another option could maybe be Kodi. Both have native/built-in media libraries as part of their core functionality and are extensible via plugins to add in any things you’re missing. (beets and Kodi plugins are also Python, like Picard, so picking up Python doesn’t seem like a bad move regardless of which one you go with, and might even allow you to switch between them. :slight_smile: )

2 Likes
3

Probably Beets and Lidarr

Lidarr is very user friendly.

1 Like