Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks

One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design of tags for music, and the way we apply tags. This doesn’t just make exploring music harder, it leaves a lot of possibilities on the table that will be very hard to implement without significant changes to our approach.

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Music: What It Means to Me

Music has been a part of my life one way or another for most of it, from playing to making to listening.

When I was young, my grandparents were trying to find hobbies and stuff for me to do. I am low-vision, asthmatic, and somewhat frail in other manners so sports and outdoor activities were generally out. They started introducing me to indoor youth gymnastics but my grandparents ended up pulling me out of that as the instructor wasn’t accommodating my vision issues (I don’t feel this was the case, but I was rather young so just deferred to my family). At least the little pies at a small shop across the street were good, so that wasn’t all bad.

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Compilation tags and you

I’m trying out Navidrome, a lightweight alternative to Airsonic, and I had difficulty with my music seemingly being tagged various artists when it shouldn’t (sometimes with different tracks), and albums with various artists being considered separate albums. Obviously, this is pretty annoying since I haven’t seen other music library software do it.

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