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How to fix genres for thousands of songs? And where to download giant catalogs of music?

I'm working on building a personal alternative to Spotify and YouTube Music and I've hit two roadblocks.

  1. Genre labeling in my library is inconsistent and manually updating 2500+ MP3s isn't feasible. I've tried using beets with the LastFM plugin in quiet mode but no luck. Any ideas?

  2. Where can I bulk download diverse music catalogs? I've snagged some 'top 90s/80s/hiphop/etc' collections, but 2500 songs don't go far.

What I miss about Spotify and YouTube Music is their ability to auto-play similar tunes based on my current selection. Any advice would be appreciated.

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  • If you're on linux you can use id3tool

    I did this a while ago for incorrect tags on my Plex and it worked well.

    https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lunar/en/man1/id3tool.1.html

    If I understand correctly you would just need to put all of the files you want into one folder, navigate to the folder in your command line and then run id3tool -G Jazz *.mp3.

    It operates off a list of predetermined genres which you can identify by running id3tool -l

    Furthermore the *.mp3 will apply it to only mp3 files, if you have other formats and would like to capture all files simply remove make it just * instead.

    Sorry I can't be more specific as I can't fully remember, but I thought I'd comment in case it helps.

    For downloading a bunch of music, especially more obscure stuff, soulseek might be worth a try - if you search a genre you like you can then explore the libraries of the posters - some are very extensive. Just make sure you follow whatever guidelines they set out on their profile before you download a bunch of stuff, definitely make sure you're sharing some music yourself on the platform and that your listening port is set up otherwise you might get blocked.

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