I see you're settling in beets and if that works for you, that is excellent. Just this week, I started running it on copies of some albums in my collection to see how it did.

Over the last year, I've ripped (or cleaned up existing) about 25,000 songs. My process has really been rip them with whatever tags I can find, put them all through MP3tag to retrieve and clean up metadata, then run a script to backup the FLAC off-site, convert to MP3 locally, and copy to my NAS in my preferred directory structure.

I was thinking maybe I don't want to deal with the tagging, hence my trials with beets. But you know, I don't necessarily trust everything in Musicbrainz or like how they handle some things, so I'm probably going to stick with the semi-manual tagging. I am looking at still using beets to handle lyrics, replaygain, and fleshing out less important metadata.

NFS / Shares - over complicated. Just syncthing it around (and snapshot on backup server), for nearly static data as music it is perfect.

I just use lidarr to rewrite the tags to be consistent and that seems to be enough for navidrome to put the correct cover art 90% of the time.

Lidarr manages my large library easily

I personally use a music tagging/renaming program called Picard. Point it at a relatively unorganized music folder, it tries to identify each track based on the existing metadata or acoustic signature, adds/modifies the track metadata based on the Music Brainz database, and runs a custom renaming script that moves it into place per my preferences.

Its not as automated as I would like, and takes some hand holding, but keeps my collection clean and standardized.

I have a bunch of actions setup in mp3tag which strips out all but the absolute necessary tags, and uses the cover from the directory to add the cover to the files.. once tagging is correct, you can use any library.

My music is on my PC hard drive and synced to my server. Last year I spent a few weeks tagging my old stuff and i tried beets, kid3, and picard but ended up liking picard the most just since it was a lot better at grouping albums together and finding the best matches ime. Any new music is tagged with picard. Then i run a navidrome docker container with the music library mounted. And i use feishin for desktop and symfonium for mobile use.

If you're interested, i wrote about my experience migrating from iTunes to navidrome and tagging my music here (no ads, monetization, or tracking)

Beets for importing, ascii only, lastgenre, fetchart, whatever other plugins I'm forgetting, /artist/yyyy_album_name/ directory structure, 01_title.ext for single disc, 01-01_title.ext for multi disc. I invoke beets manually just to keep an eye on how things get matched up and tagged during the process. I deal in full albums, LPs, compilations and such because it's often easier to maintain and match metadata than with individual tracks. I guess it's a data hoarder / archivist compulsion too, but it's rare I can't find at least one other track on an album appreciable so... why not?

A weekly rsync pushes the beets DB and library from my TrueNAS server to another server with a 8TB external dedicated to backing up my most important stuff (personal projects, password store, compose files, confs, etc). I've got an rsync alias set up on my laptop I invoke manually because I'm nearing the limit of what I want to allot to music. At least until I decide to get a larger drive.

That's local in triplicate, with zraid on the NAS and a fourth copy on my phone, which leaves me feeling pretty good about not losing any music outside of a house fire or tornado. I was also rsync'ing all my media (music, movies, shows) to another TrueNAS setup at a relative's but some things have changed with that so it's on hold. Not fond of missing my off-site backup but hopefully can resolve it soon.

Everything is local only right now. The library is mounted read-only in Jellyfin so can play music from pretty much any phone, TV, computer, my Steam Deck, etc throughout the house. If I ever decide to open things up, reverse proxy or whatever, I might look into Finamp but I buy a flagship phone every six to ten years for the storage space so I can just take my music with me. Might eventually switch that to a dedicated music device.

Definitely more advanced than what I do! I've also been collecting for a long time, and I've just been storing the media. I went from Windows/x86-64 to Mac/ARM64 a few years back, and I have kinda limited options that way. I would have just gone to Linux if my computers didn't die, but at the time, Apple made sense.

I do Apple Music, but, that doesn't answer the question. I also self-host my music via a Plex server. I got Plex Pass for well under $100 on sale years and years ago. Much harder to recommend now. Plexamp is awesome for music, and I also use Prologue (iOS app) for audiobooks hosted on Plex.

For tagging, I use Mp3Tag and tag manually. It was free on Windows, but the guy wants $30 for it on Mac. It's a long story as to why, but after he was kind enough to explain it to me... I paid the man. (For my part, I'd used it for free for many years and I got a lot of miles out of it, and still do, and it's a good, well maintained app from a solo developer.) There are free alternatives. Not so many good ones on Mac (part of why I paid). For album art, I get them from Apple using this handy site (not mine): https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/ — you can use 600px or you can use either 2000px or 3000px, I forget which. I'm good with 600px. I think Apple uses the smaller size for phones and the bigger one for TVs and Macs (especially as iMacs have 5K screens now).

My library might also not be as big as yours is. Plex says I have 14,462 tracks indexed. Maybe those are rookie numbers, I dunno. I pretty much have everything I want. All I'd really want now is to take my Apple Music playlists and download them to m4a 192k or similar. I have a few decade playlists that are like 500-600 songs each (80s, 90s, and 00s).

A mishmash of beets and the old ways got me to where I am, navidrome with a bit of mpv & kodi.

I'm currently trying to ignore it and plan to return with a new workflow over the next year or so. Beets will be part of this but also need some python, shell glue and other tools working together, and things are changing at little faster than they once were.

I spent a little time a few months back grabbing NPR and KEXP audio at scale with yt-dlp and having them land with decent tags as navidrome compliant albums and now feel a little more confident incorporating oddities into sacred realm of jazz flacs.

But the one folder to rule them all is still in the planning stages.

What methods do you use for managing a large music library?

I have a physical collection I have been accumulating for decades now, that goes as far back as 1937. I have converted everything to flac and it resides on a NAS drive. I have used Beets and Picard, and back in the day MP3Tag for tagging, and surprisingly, MusicBee (Windows) is great for embedding lyrics. It takes a while to embed lyrics in a large collection. Currently I have everything tagged, in their respective artists/albums, and embedded lyrics for about 75-80% of them. I run Navidrome and stream via Feishin locally, and Substreamer on my mobile.

ETAL I have also used czkawka_gui in the past to clean out duplicates.

"unsorted" folder contains input. "Music" folder has full library; any imports must go through beets. rsync to remote backups; one scripted/automatic, one manual & password-protected. Restores (needed once or twice) are done with beets import, but whatever flag that does "just import, don't tag"