Storage

The first thing to consider when organising your music files is how will you store them?

I'll add a few options below along with what I use

On_Device

The simplest solution is to store your music on the device you are listening to it on. This means just storing the files on your mp3 player or computer. This is the cheapest and easiest method but can be problematic when adding or removing music as some 2000s era mp3s want you to use specific software to add music. These softwares were buggy at the time and most of them are unusable on modern windows, let alone support on macos. Even if you do get them running using linux wine or windows compatability layer, they can be super tedious to use. Even without these issues, moving the files between devices is still tedious requiring a snake of wires or dongle hell and it's often easier to download a new copy altogether

Cloud_/_NAS

I'm combining these as there isn't much difference once all is up and running but to explain breifly: A cloud server is a storage device accessed via the internet. Think Google Drive or Apple iCloud A NAS is a cloud server you own and run locally on your own network. The differences to bear in mind is that a cloud server usually requires a monthly cost, whereas a NAS has a lengthy and difficult setup and will very slightly increase your energy bills. Personally I use a NAS running nextcloud These methods allow you to stream music with a reduced monthly fee vs music streaming or download and upload any of your music files from anywhere with an internet connection as and when. The downsides to this method is your mp3 player needs to have internet connection, and there is a risk of downtime (which you will also have to diagnose and fix with a NAS)

External_Storage

Probably the best of both worlds from the previous options, External storage (sd card, usb stick, etc.) Alllows you to have the ease of the cloud options without an internet access. The main issues with external storage is compatibility, your mp3 player and computer must both be able to connect to the card or stick and you can very easily end up in dongle hell, especially with recent macbooks, if this isn't possible. The second is size. Loosing an sd card is super easy, especially with spring loaded docks like both my mp3 players have. You will also have to weigh up cost or fragmentation. You can either buy an expensive card upfront and have a ton of storage on it, or buy a smaller affordable card and buy another cheap one when you fill it then have to keep track whats on what

Folder_ManageMent

This one depends on the size of your music collection and your idiosyncrasies. My music foldet tree looks something like ~/Music/label/artist/album with a dedicated subfolder in the music folder for singles and loose songs that are disconnected from their albums. I'm tempted to rework this folder as it's my DJing folder and want something morefit for that purpose. Potentially ~/Music/Singles/Initial_Key or ~/Music/Singles/BPM (in multiples of 10). Also for those wondering the ~ represents my home folder. The issues with my method is that bands can change record label or get signed if they started indie which means the catalogue for a certain artist can be split across different folders. I have two different folders for Dan Mason as an example. If I want to listen to Void I need to go to my Business Casual folder, if I want Forever Nothing I need my 100% ELECTRONICA folder. The same problem arises with using the more popular genre/artist/album which is how I sort my physical music. But you have the same issue, take Yeule's discography. Every album they make is a different genre, and although you could squeeze Serotonin II and Glitch Princess together into a Pop folder, Softscars is more deserving of a shoegaze / post punk classification and Evangelic Girl Is A Gun fits better with a trip hop playlist. The only solution I can think of to this is to start with your artists but then you're scrolling for forever to find someone like zovi if your file manager is alphabetically sorted. There must be some esoteric method I'm not thinking of though. Please let me know if you got any ideas here

Metadata_&_Artwork

Most of the time, unless you are using wav, Your music will have metadata already supplied. But what if it doesn't? Well if you are a mac user you're in luck bc Apple's auto metadata tool for disc ripping is insanely good and uses the same DB as car stereos do to identify your CD but with more user control. But if you aren't ripping a CD on Mac and your files don't have metadata, you may need to do it manually. There are tons of great tools for this. On MS Windows and Mac there's MusicBrainz Mp3tag which pulls from MusicBrainz online database. Alternatively, and my choice, is KDE Kid3 which works on GNU Linux, MS Windows, Mac, Theo De Raadt OpenBSD (according to wikipedia but I can't find this mentioned on the KDE website), & Google Android. Kid3 also allows access to MusicBrainz DB along with a few other DBs. Kid3 Is defo the better choice due to it pulling from more sources but it's designed for Linux first, KDE DE in particular, so can look out of place compared to your other apps on Windows and Mac, as well as non KDE DE's on linux. Personally I find myself using metadata editors to embed artwork manually as this seems to be where the auto tag struggles the most. I'll give a quick demo how to do that below.

My music player doesn't pickup any artwork for Colonel Bagshot's Oh What a Lovely War

Navigate to the album folder, right click any song in the folder and select Open With > Kid3

Once Kid3 opens click the top entry, then shift click the botton, and ctrl click to remove any non music files from the selection

If you don't have a copy of the artwork on your computer, download it from a music DB site. My choice is RYM as it has very high quality images, Genius lyrics is a very good source for collaborators on a song if that's what you are looking for, but literally just any search engine would work.

save the image in the folder with your music files. I'd reccomend titling it cover.{filetype} as some music players look for this instead of the metadata. Unfortunately rmpc, my music player in the pictures, doesn't

return to Kid3 and double click where it says 'Drop album artwork here' which will show the menu pictured below. You can usually leave the options alone but the two I'd suggest knowing are 'Text Encoding' and 'Picture Type.' Picture type lets you indicate if you are using the front cover, insert, back cover etc. You can only have one image per song. I will use this when i rip my Evangelic Girl Is A Gun cd as I prefer the back cover to the front cover. Text encoding only really matters if you are using a TUI to view the metadata for the file. Since rmpc is a TUI music player I will need to change this. The best practice is to set this to your system's encoding. (you can check this with systemd by running `locale` in your terminal). After that click import and select your album art image

Save your changes with ctrl + S then refresh your music players library

Adding_Lyrics

Some music players can scrape lyrics from online, but for an mp3 player that might not always have internet connection you will have to use a '.lrc' file to add timed offline lyrics. For this you will need a computer witha basic text editor such as MS Notepad (I'll be using KDE Kate which is available on GNU Linux, MS Windows, & Apple Mac) & a Browser (the website I reccomend is supper buggy on my Mozzilla based browser so I'd reccomend a Chromium based or forked browser [in general don't use MS Edge, Google Chrome, or Mozzilla Firefox either unless you have a beefy browser that can tank the hit to your ram from the spyware in those browsers] I will be using Vivaldi Tecnologies Vivaldi which is available on GNU Linux, MS Windows, Apple Mac, Apple iOS, & Google Android). I will be adding lyrics to Nothing's The Great Dismal.

First will be to identify the files without lyrics
Open your browser and navigate to the website LRCLIB
Search for your album / song on the website. If you are struggling LRCLIB responds best to $Artist$ $Album$ $Song$ searches. e.g. the now playing song in the image above will be 'nothing the great dismal say less' but since I'm batch adding a whole album I will just search for that.
Look for the green box that says 'synced' next to your song and click the icon that looks like an eye
Click the icon at the bottom left that looks like two pieces of paper. This will copy all the text into your clipboard
Open your text Editor to a new blank file
use ctrl+v & ctrl+shift+s to paste your clipboard and enter the save as dialogue
Change the file type to 'All files', navigate to the song relating to the lyrics and click it so it appears in the file name bar. Replace the text after the . (usually mp3, flac, AAC, ogg, or ALAC) with lrc. so the below file will be '08 Blue Mecca.lrc' not '08 Blue Mecca.flac'
Refresh your music player and open the lyrics widget if needed. your lyrics should be there

if LRCLIB doesn't have synced lyrics for your song you can convert song lyrics to timed lyrics. Copy the non timed lyrics into your text editor as before. For each line add the time they appear in the song at the beginning of the line in square brackets [mm:ss.msms]. After the last line add an extra line that is the songs length in square brackets and save as shown above.