Do I use a website to download songs off of YouTube or Spotify?
Where should I store the music? I haven't any clue about self-hosting. I'm running GrapheneOS, is it enough to save the songs in Files and play in an app like Auxio? Maybe sync with SyncThing?
What's the best way to compress mp3 files but still retain the quality (even possible)?
Could really use some help as I'm very inexperienced. :)
Is it okay to skip the tagging steps in your guide? My school computer won't allow me to download the mp3tag application, and I wonder if these tagging steps are necessary or will mess anything up if skipped? I downloaded some songs to my phone and most metadata and lyrics are there, and that's fine with me. Does not completing the guide make me miss out on anything important (such as metadata or syncing the files)?
Deemix fetches a lot of metadata and they are kinda accurate. If the tags appear properly on your devices you probably dont have to care much more. Besides, you can do it in the future if your needs change. Thus, I think you can skip it.
As to why I do it:
Deezer and any platform may have lacking info, so what I try to do is kinda merge tags from various sources in a way that I get ~the most and best info. Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is no standard way of tagging or at least ~noone uses it (I think flac and opus have some general tagging guidances, but many times they are ignored), so I tried to make my way of organizing the mess.
Another reason is that if you have proper tags, you (almost) no longer need to create playlists (which are hard to move across devices). I also came up with the idea of adding a custom genre to the genre tags of songs. For example, I add the [F@vourites] genre tag to my favourite songs and I can simply select to play all songs under the [F@vourites] genre, bypassing the need of playlists.
I just find it neat (but probably breaks the standard even more), lol. (And it's a good way to unconsciously distract myself from my responsibilities.)
Do you think it would be fine for me to download all songs and then wait until I'm able to download the tagging applications, or does everything need to happen in one go for everything to sync? I'm thinking waiting about a year (when I buy a new computer) and then use the apps to tag my songs, or will I still need the data from deemix?
Do you think it would be fine for me to download all songs and then wait until I'm able to download the tagging applications
Yes, I think that's what I would do. Downloading from deemix and tagging in other programs are separate processes, so you can do them separately at different times.
I'd probably even encourage to download them now, because as you can see, deemix doesnt get updated anymore and things start to break.
It also gives you time to revise your methods of downloading and tagging. (For example, I started downloading my songs from a website, one by one, until I found deemix (that website got shut down soon after, rip).)
So, no need to do them simultaneously. Download them now and tag them next year or whenever you can. You can afterwards simply sync the ("properly") tagged files to your other devices and have the metadata everywhere.
Thank you so much for your help! So excited to finally begin the journey of owning my music.
owning my music
Thats the spirit! Lets goo
Just to be clear, because some metadata is missing such as year released, tagging and such can all be solved in the other applications? Deemix is solely used for download?
In the tags section in settings you can tell deemix to download tags along with the songs. It does a rather good job as it fetches data from deezer. Is the year missing from every song? On my setup, it automatically downloads the date (or only the year) of almost all the songs I download with deemix (some obscure songs may not have a proper date). Deemix should do a good job and download around 70% (this is an abstract percentage) of the tags you may need.
Once you download the songs from deemix, you should probably not need to use deemix again.
Tagging afterwards should fix many of the missing or incorrect metadata (obsucre songs may have lower success rates). In my guide, I even have the code for a python script I made, which I use to download the dates of songs from genius (the site with the lyrics). (I think it was my first time coding in python, lol.)
PS. It's getting late, so I'll probably be off for some time.
Hm, unfortunately all songs are listed as Unknown Year, and the genres are very scattered and inaccurate. I've ticked all the tag boxes already. So long as I can solve this with the tagging applications, I shouldn't have to redownload everything, or?
So long as I can solve this with the tagging applications, I shouldn't have to redownload everything, or?
Yes. As long as the title and the artists tags (not the filename) of the song are correct (in many cases not even these have to be correct, because there's an option to auto-scan songs with Shazam in my process), my process should be able to work without redownloading anything.
songs are listed as Unknown Year
Thats a bit weird, may I ask:
How do you view the metadata? Some apps may have trouble reading metadata.
Do you download them in flac or mp3?
Could you share a song so that I try to download it myself to check if this only happens to you?
I just downloaded a random song and I can see the date under the YEAR tag. Also if I right-click it on file explorer and go to details, I can see under the "date released" the date of the song.
(Btw, the genious script I use, as I have told you somewhere, fixes the dates, high very high accuracy. Im pulling the dates from genius, because deezer, spotify etc. for some reason seem to use the date they were added to the platform as the date of release and it bothered me a lot.)
genres are very scattered and inaccurate
Yeah.. Genres is probably the hardest to get it right, even after all the automation in my process, there have been times I manually edited the genres. Bandcamp is a good source of genres, so I try to draw genres from there, but still the automation fails some times and have to manually edit them with mp3tag (genious is a good source too).
I can't view the metadata on my phone, just on my computer. As an example I'm viewing the song "Crown of Thorns" by Black Veil Brides. It is a FLAC file (as per the settings), and on my computer I can see the date released, artist, album, genre, track number, file size... so I don't know why this info doesn't translate to the music player on my phone (Gramophone). Maybe it's because I haven't gone through with the tagging process yet? In which case that's understandable.
Also, some songs failed to download from deemix, but their .lrc files still downloaded. Can I transfer these .lrc files to my phone (along with the other downloaded songs), or must the FLAC and LRC files be downloaded as a pair for the metadata to be synced with the right song?