Tech Snippets

#music #radio #tipp #tools #software

I’ve been asked which tools and software I use to handle a large, well-tagged music library. Well, here’s the answer, with some links.

Note: This may appear a bit Linux-biased, but I use almost only Linux systems. Many, if not most, of the mentioned tools are also usable on MacOS or Windows.

Getting the music

• Buy CDs. Yes, still! You even sometimes find mixed lots cheaply and in good condition. Tip: When looking for older albums, the originals are often much better than the so-called “Re-Masters” that are mostly damaged by today’s “Loudness Wars”.
• If you are a known or at least serious DJ or web radio, you often get promo material (FLAC or CD) directly from contact with the bands (or their agents) and membership in promo portals.
• I also like Bandcamp for buying FLAC albums, since they pay the artists a much higher commission than Amazon & Co., and you can find rare pearls of music there.
• Fortunately, over the years a bunch of good music shops have appeared that sell albums in FLAC format. Always prefer lossless FLAC over MP3. If there’s no other choice, buy MP3s only in 320 kbit/s format.
• Don’t trust any “converters” or so-called “legal YouTube downloaders”. It might be tempting, but you’ll only get one thing: Junk!
• Never upscale music into a “better format”, like 128 kbit/s MP3 to 320 kbit/s, or MP3 to FLAC. It just makes garbage larger and doesn’t improve quality in any way. You can convert Apple’s ALAC .m4a, WAVE .wav, WavPak .wv, Monkey’s Audio .ape and OptimFROG .ofr files to FLAC, though—these are lossless conversions.

Ripping CDs

You need a PC with a CD drive. Most modern PCs don’t have one anymore, but a USB drive is fine. Get a good one. Some models have odd drive offsets, can’t switch off error correction, can’t read CD Text, etc., all resulting in possibly bad rips.

The CD Drive Offsets Table on the AccurateRip website can help deciding which drive to get. A low Correction Offset and a high number of Submitted By is preferable.

If you also plan to play or rip movies or music videos, a DVD or Blu-ray drive also usually works.

Regarding software, there are really only two choices here:

• On Linux, use Whipper. You must calibrate your drive once, and you’ll get perfect rips, matched up with MusicBrainz and the AccurateRip database.
• On Windows, use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and set up a FLAC profile. Almost always perfect rips, also verifies with AccurateRip.

Pre-processing & organizing

This more or less also reflects my workflow, although I prefer FLAC over MP3.

• Become a member of MusicBrainz, the world’s best and largest open music encyclopedia, so you can add and edit album and song data. We all profit from that.
• MP3 Diags — Repair bad MP3 audio files.
• rmlyrics3 — Lyrics3 remover for MP3.
• loudgain — ReplayGain everything, correctly.
• Do not use mp3gain. Never. Period. It is outdated, and can—contrary to popular belief—damage files. It also uses APEv2 tags which nobody wants in their MP3 files.
• MusicBrainz Picard — Tagging, auto-organizing into folders; using enhanced script and extra tags (available). The only tagging software I really trust, and my last step before the audio file never gets touched again. Tip: Connect your Picard to your MusicBrainz account and get your own AcoustId API key.
• Clementine on Debian-based, Strawberry on Arch-based systems — Organize/find music.
• Quod Libet — Organize/find music, ultra-complex searches, preparation of radio playlists using my tools ql-playlists and pl-copyfiles. Very slow importing large amounts of music (like 160,000 songs), but the functionality outweighs that disadvantage.
• Notable mention: For Windows and MacOS users, foobar2000 (not FOSS) can also be a useful tool to organize/find/tag music. Highly customizable, many file formats and add-ons.
• Notable mention: cue_file, part of autocue — Analyses and optionally tags an audio file for cue-in, cue-out and “start next song” points and other loudness-related data, using the EBU R128 algorithms. Can also detect in-song silence (“hidden tracks”) and provide corresponding “early” cue-out and “start next song” points.

Backup!

Now that you have organized and tagged your valuable music, it’s time to set up a good backup strategy. Backup often—you don’t want to lose any of your music!

• Unfortunately, for Windows, I never found a 100% working incremental backup. You could maybe use rsync in WSL2.
• On Linux, anything that uses rsync is perfect for local or remote copies. If you want a GUI, grsync is quite nice, because you can have profiles for different tasks. Incremental backups can save enormous amounts of time and bandwidth!
• For synchronizing your collection between different machines, also remotely, Syncthing has proven to be a reliable tool. I use it to sync more than 240,000 files in 35,000 folders between 14 machines since about 12 years, and not one corruption or lost file since. Impressive.

Playout at home

• Logitech Media Server, now Lyrion, best for hi-end audio, especially when you still own the Slim Devices/Logitech hardware (Transporter, Receiver, Radio, …). Also great with the lightweight squeezelite software player. Squeezer is a good Android remote control for LMS.
• Jellyfin, also for video and eBooks. Apps (recommended) for almost all platforms, even smartphones, tablets, TVs.
• Almost any other audio player should work fine. On some, you have to manually enable the use of “ReplayGain Track Gain” to achieve a consistent loudness.

Radio Station Playout

• AzuraCast — A “radio station in a box”, very well done.
• Liquidsoap — The underlying audio & video streaming language in nearly all web radio server applications.

Live DJ-ing, Broadcasting

• Mixxx — DJ-ing software, also for live transmission. DJ controller support, vinyl record control and much more.
• IDJC — The Internet DJ Console, great for hosted live shows. Uses the JACK audio system, multiple inputs (guest microphones!), phone line support (VoIP/SIP). 3 players, playlist commands, cartwall, MIDI support (I use a Korg nanoPAD2 with it) and much more.
• Studio Display — Studio monitoring, telemetry and signal tower handling; works great with IDJC.
• Notable mention: mAirList (not FOSS, Windows only) — Fantastic radio automation by Torben Weibert, for more professional stations, supports hardware mixers.

That’s about it. Enjoy checking these out, and don’t forget to support the authors of these great Free and Open Source Software programs!