I'm looking for something to organise a collection of music (mostly mp3s). Rather than just pick a genre, I'd like to sort / filter by any number of tags and either play from within or send to another app's queue. Eg I might want all the 1990s power ballads with female singers.
Can anyone recommend a Win and / or Android app to accomplish this? (Could possibly use a spreadsheet but hoping for something a bit more elegant).
To people who run plex, every problem has a server based streaming solution.
Seems like that would be like owning a Humvee to go check the letterbox.
While scrimshaw's response is most in line with what OP wants, Plex or similar is a decent solution to this problem for many people.
You're analogy isn't that great, IMO. A server is after all is just a computer and they come in a large variety of sizes. Running a server isn't all that hard. I've run Plex on my computer, services on a raspberry PI. Many people just repurpose a old machine.
While I primarily use streaming services now, I would likely use Plex if I stopped. Plex hosts my music collection from prior to streaming and my lossless collection.
Plex provides many features and also includes some niceties of streaming services:
Spotify. Mp3s are just not worth the time and effort anymore.
You'll still want to hang onto the mp3s to upload to Spotify, lots of albums or even just random songs from albums missing from Spotify. Same with Apple Music, you'll want to upload some of your old collection.
Used to use Songbird and Foobar2000 back in my high school days, but yeah, I haven't had the need to organise my music collection when everything is on the cloud now. Ripping CD's and tagging everything is just a boring chore.
You might want to try Music Bee but it only runs on Windows OS's.
Media Monkey has an Android app on top of it's usual Windows desktop app.
The only reply that came close to answering OP's question.
To develop the point further, if your MP3s are tagged properly, and decent media player will let you sort or filter based on tags. Usually this is done by creating a smart playlist, or whatever the app calls it. Here's a list of music players, some of which may have tagging capabilities https://alternativeto.net/software/strawberry/ At the moment I am using Strawberry but am considering a switch to Foobar2000
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/ is my favorite for fixing MP3 Tags, but https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ is good to. Or even iTunes if you can stand it (Apple are doing their best to destroy this once great app). Apple will 'correct' certain tags automatically and there is nothing you can do about it. If you are picky about your genre categories, I'd suggest using the notes tag for stuff like that, it's what I do.
I'd also recommend renaming all your files with a consistent scheme, MP3Tag and Picard will both do that. I'd recommend Artist, Album, Song. Then if something goes horribly wrong with the tags, you can at least know what the file is from the name.
Thanks. I'm already using mp3tag and have the folder and filenames well organized. I know I can add extra tags but I'm not sure what player / organiser will handle them nicely. My example in the op - 1990s power ballads by female singers - this would include stuff from rock, heavy metal, pop, new wave, etc. - not normally commonly grouped by genre but definitely have something in common. Might even be songs with a political twist (Prince's "1999" and Exodus's "Fabulous disaster" - way different musically but about the game thing), etc.
Well year of publication should be in the metadata, but how are you tagging things like 'power ballad'. Female singer could probably be assumed from the artist name, but maybe not always… I can't think of any examples but I'm sure there are bands that have both male and female singers and some songs feature only on exclusively…
It's going to be down to how they are tagged. And then how good the music player is at filtering by tags. Most of them are pretty limited in the logic operations you can do. iTunes was better than most because you could make a playlists based on other playlists, so there was a lot of scope there for filtering things down.
@CascadeHush: This is my exact question. I want to be able to add these extra tags and process by them. The tags don't need to be contained within the music files themselves - I'm happy for the right app to have it's own data (preferably in an open file format but not essential) linked to the music files - this is why I mentioned a basic spreadsheet in the OP, I'm just hoping for something a little nicer.
@afoveht: Well then everybody else gave you the right answer. What you want doesn't exist, except where online services have that information, probably mostly in playlists somebody else created or generated by algorithms to generate add revenue and clicks.
It would be nice to think that some AI could just categorize everything for you, and in theory that is possible, but we will never get tools like that we can use yourself outside of online services.
For 15 years I've been wanting AI I can use to organize my photos and documents. The technology exists. But the only way I can access it is to upload everything to google, adobe, apple, microsoft… which I'm not going to do. Basically, they are holding the technology hostage and the only way to access it is to give up your privacy. Likewise you aren't going to get anything that can organise your music the way you want. You'll have to do it yourself or not bother.
What you are asking for is a futuristic solution to a irrelevant problem. Nobody maintains and organizes their own MP3 collection anymore, except you and me and half a dozen other people. Nobody is going to provide the solution you are looking for because everybody else is listening to YouTube or Spotify. The reason iTunes has become irrelevant is because not even Apple care about it anymore and I doubt anybody that works there even remembers what it was for. On top of that, music is increasingly disposable.
@CascadeHush: I don't want AI to do anything - I'm happy to tag everything myself. Often I'll listen to someone new and think "that's so X" and I'd like to tag it as that.
The streaming services do not address what I'm after in the OP.
TY. I will take a look.
Personally I like using personal YouTube playlists, I've never needed to download any of it but if I ever find myself in a situation where I do there are plenty of tools that download entire playlists in mp3 format.
This tool looks interesting as well: https://funkwhale.audio/
Plex