Dany Marcoux

How I Organize My Digital Music Collection on Linux

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I enjoy listening to music and some time ago after cancelling my subscription to a music streaming service, I decided to go back to owning music again. I wanted to listen to my music across multiple devices, so I streamlined my setup until I was satisfied with it. This is how I organize my digital music collection on a Linux-based workflow. Details on some concepts might be left out, since this blog post is more of a notebook for myself to get this out of my head. Anyway, perhaps it can still help out someone.

Ripping CDs With whipper

The albums I own are partly in a digital format while others are CDs. I want all my music to be in FLAC, a lossless format to have the best sound quality possible and even though this takes more storage space than a lossy format like MP3, I don't care since storage is cheap nowadays.

I rely on whipper to accurately rip my CDs. To avoid needing to worry about the required dependencies for whipper, I use its Docker image provided by the developers themselves.

Here is an example of how I use whipper with Docker:

docker run -ti --rm --device=/dev/cdrom \
--mount type=bind,source=${HOME}/.config/whipper,target=/home/worker/.config/whipper \
--mount type=bind,source=${HOME}/music-to-import,target=/output \
whipperteam/whipper:0.10.0 cd rip --prompt

--device=/dev/cdrom refers to the CD drive in my computer.

Both --mount options are bound to directories which must exist, otherwise the command won't work. It's as simple as running mkdir -p "${HOME}/.config/whipper" "${HOME}/music-to-import" to address this.

The first --mount is to mount the whipper configuration into the Docker container. This configuration was generated with whipper drive analyze, so the same command as above, but by replacing cd rip for drive analyze. After executing drive analyze, it is also needed to run drive offset.

The second --mount is where whipper will output the songs from CDs it ripped.

As for whipperteam/whipper:0.10.0, this is using the latest whipper version at the time of writing.

Finally, cd rip is the command passed to whipper. It would be the same as running whipper cd rip if whipper was installed as a package on my computer. As for the --prompt flag, this is for whipper to let me decide which CD release to pick if somehow multiple matches are available. This happens often for CDs with releases in multiple countries or with various editions like deluxe or what not.

Cataloging Music With beets

I am using beets since I haven't found another software as good to correctly catalog my music. It takes care of handling the metadata that it fetches from MusicBrainz. One cool thing about beets is how flexible it is with its various plugins.

Command example to import music into my music collection:

beet import path/to/music/album-1 path/to/music/album-2 (...)

For details on how I configured beets and some of its plugins, my configuration is in my dotfiles.

Backing Up My Music Collection

Beside having my music both on my computer and my phone, I also back it up on my home server and a cloud provider.

There are many cloud providers available. I had a few criteria to guide my decision:

  • Based in Europe, since this is where live.
  • Reliability
  • Resilience
  • Environmental impact
  • Pricing
  • Have a S3-compatible API to ease automation
  • Availability of cold storage for long-term archival

With this in mind, this is why I went with the cloud provider Scaleway for Scaleway Glacier, a subset of their Scaleway Object Storage product. It offers a cold storage solution for long-term archival in the Paris region. This is perfect for my needs.

Backing up my music involves two steps, first with rclone. It is configurable with rclone config. The configuration is encrypted with a password stored in my password manager. This is how the remotes I use are configured in rclone:

[homeserver]
type = sftp
host = MY_HOMESERVER_IP
user = MY_USER

[scaleway-storage-fra-GLACIER]
type = s3
provider = Scaleway
access_key_id = MY_ACCESS_KEY_ID
secret_access_key = MY_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
region = fr-par
endpoint = s3.fr-par.scw.cloud
acl = private
storage_class = GLACIER

Here's how I upload my music to my home server:

rclone copy --progress --checksum ~/music homeserver:/path/to/music/directory

~/music is the folder where my music is located on my computer, after it has been processed by beets. homeserver is the remote in rclone, followed by the path to the music directory on my home server.

As for uploading my music to Scaleway Glacier, my home server does it daily with a script containing this:

rclone copy --progress --checksum ~/music scaleway-storage-fra-GLACIER:my-music-collection

This time, rclone uploads to the scaleway-storage-fra-GLACIER remote which stores files in Scaleway Glacier. my-music-collection is the bucket name on Scaleway Glacier.

Getting My Music Collection To My Phone

My phone's storage can be expanded via a SD card, so this is what I went with. To get my music collection onto the SD card, I could take it out and put it in my computer. This is rather cumbersome as I need to take out the battery every time. Instead, I usually rely on the FolderSync app on Android to easily sync my music from my home server to my phone while I'm in my local network. This is especially convenient when only transferring a few songs.

And yes, I did give a try to the good old USB cable, but it's not reliable on Linux. Somehow, my phone isn't always detected by the OS and when it does, it sometimes gets disconnected for no apparent reason. Oh well... FolderSync it is then!

How To Configure FolderSync

On my home server, I have a user with read-only access. In FolderSync, create an account for SMB with this user's username and password. Enter the IP address of my home server, then the SMB share name where my music collection is stored. Pick SMB3 and enable Require encryption.

Afterwards, create a folder pair with the sync type To local folder. Set the remote folder to the folder where my music collection is stored on my home server. As for the local folder, it is where I want to have my music collection on my phone, so as long as it's on the SD card, it's all good.

Now for the Sync options of the folder pair, choose Never for the option Overwrite old files and choose Use remote file for the option If both local and remote file have been modified.

Finally, under Advanced, enable Use MD5 checksums.

Final Countdown

That's it, I hope this helped you. How do you setup your digital music collection?