Tag Archives: MusicBrainz

BrainzMash ~ Musicbrainz & Lidarr Endpoint

Posted by tom2tec on

Brainzmash is a community Musicbrainz and Lidarr metadata endpoint backed by a community server pool.

For Lidarr, it’s the MusicBrainz metadata you know and love but it solves some issues experienced with the official Lidarr metadata with shorter lived cache and easy manual cache refresh to capture fresh MusicBrainz data.

The MusicBrainz endpoint is an alternitive to the Musicbrainz rate limited API or setting up a Musicbrainz server to serve various projects.

The data on each server is verified as correct and checked regularly to ensure it matches the other servers in the pool by way of running hashed data quorum checks against various endpoints, checking replication freshness and ensuring images are present where possible.

brainzmash.cc

Luminous ~ A Home For Music You Own

Posted by tom2tec on

Luminous is a fast, local-first player for your own audio library. Built for anyone who wants the convenience of a modern streaming app without giving up ownership of their music. Turn a folder of files into a library you’ll enjoy browsing and listening to.

esoltys.dev/luminous
github.com/esoltys/luminous

gonic ~ Self-hosted Music Server

Posted by tom2tec on

music streaming server / free-software subsonic server API implementation

Features:

  • browsing by folder (keeping your full tree intact) see here
  • browsing by tags (using taglib – supports mp3, opus, flac, ape, m4a, wav, etc.)
  • on-the-fly audio transcoding and caching (requires ffmpeg) (thank you spijet)
  • subsonic jukebox mode, for gapless server-side audio playback instead of streaming (thank you lxea)
  • support for podcasts (thank you lxea)
  • pretty fast scanning (with my library of ~50k tracks, initial scan takes about 10m, and about 6s after incrementally)
  • multiple users, each with their own transcoding preferences, playlists, top tracks, top artists, etc.
  • last.fm scrobbling
  • listenbrainz scrobbling (thank you spezifisch, lxea)
  • artist similarities and biographies from the last.fm api
  • support for multi valued tags like albumartists and genres (see more)
  • a web interface for configuration (set up last.fm, manage users, start scans, etc.)
  • support for the album-artist tag, to not clutter your artist list with compilation album appearances
  • written in go, so lightweight and suitable for a raspberry pi, etc. (see ARM images below)
  • newer salt and token auth
  • tested on airsonic-refix, amperfy, symfonium, dsub, jamstash, music-assistant, subsonic.el, sublime music, soundwaves, stmp, termsonic, tempus, strawberry, and ultrasonic

github.com/sentriz/gonic

PixelPlayerOSS ~ Android Music Player

Posted by tom2tec on

Free and open-source edition of PixelPlayer – a modern offline music player for Android built with Jetpack Compose, Media3 & Material 3. Available on F-Droid.

github.com/PixelPlayerHQ/PixelPlayerOSS

Carat ~ Concise Atmos Ripping Automation Tool

Posted by tom2tec on

Carat is a lightweight, automated GUI utility designed to accept Dolby Atmos music releases in practically any format, locate the primary title in the release, retrieve metadata and cover art from the internet, and incorporate the release directly into your digital music library in a single click.

From the moment a new Blu-ray arrives in your mailbox, Carat handles the entire pipeline—extraction, processing, metadata acquisition, and cover art—with zero friction. If your source files are already on your SSD, Carat will process an entire release in a minute or two (depending on the speed of your computer). If you are starting from a physical disc, the time is limited by the read speed of your optical drive (expect five to ten minutes).

carat user interface

github.com/jbloch/carat
quadraphonicquad.com/threads/announcing-carat-beta-one-click-atmos-ripping-for-gapless-playback

References:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos

Audex ~ KDE CD Ripper

Posted by tom2tec on

Audex is a CD ripper application. It lets you extract the audio from your CDs to let you listen to them on your computer and your other devices. It includes CDDB and MusicBrainz integrations to fetch the metadata and covers for your CDs if available.

apps.kde.org/audex
github.com/KDE/audex
invent.kde.org/multimedia/audex
userbase.kde.org/Audex
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Gear#Playback

VUPlayer ~ Freeware Windows Player

Posted by tom2tec on

VUPlayer is an open-source multi-format audio player for Windows 7 SP1 or later.

www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer
github.com/jfchapman/VUPlayer

GrooveKraft ~ Mac Music Collection Viewer

Posted by tom2tec on

GrooveKraft is a fast, lightweight music collection manager that uses Discogs and MusicBrainz to enrich your collection with detailed metadata and artwork.

Features:

  • Import your Discogs collection into a local database
  • View and filter your Discogs collection locally, with artwork
  • Matches releases with MusicBrainz automatically to get release dates
  • “On this day” function shows anniversaries in your collection
  • Randomizer to help you pick something to listen to
  • Missing or incorrect release dates can be manually entered
  • Match quality shown with traffic-light icons (Red, Amber, Yellow, Green)

github.com/v8oholic/groovekraft

Bitfake2 ~ Audio Tool Handler & Manipulator

Posted by tom2tec on

Bitfake was originally created to detect fake .FLAC files through spectral analysis. It has since grown into a multipurpose CLI tool for handling music more easily and efficiently.

One common problem was that getting a track’s metadata required long ffprobe commands with messy output. Converting music with ffmpeg was also repetitive. The command itself is easy to remember, but writing scripts to convert entire directories felt inefficient and slow. This project now performs metadata and conversion tasks directly through linked libraries (TagLib/libsndfile/libav*).

Features:

  • Get metadata
  • Get ReplayGain info (useful for music players)
  • Spectral analysis on 44.1 kHz .FLAC files (higher sample rates may be misrepresented, so be careful)
  • Lossy diagnosis (banding score)
  • File Conversion + VBR Support (Works for outputs like .wav, .flac, .ogg, .mp3, .aac, .opus)
  • Tagging metadata (Works for single files, but not directories yet)
  • Calculating ReplayGain and applying it to files (Works for track replay gain iterating through directories, album replay gain is a bit funky?)
  • Directory Conversion (works for all previously mentioned formats!)
  • CoverArt+ (Brings along cover art among all conversions!)
  • Organizing Files by album! (Give a dir of random music, and bitfake will organize it – ty to uncognic)
  • Directory Tagging (YAY!)
  • Album folder renaming from tags (Artist – Album (Year))
  • Spectrogram generation (in .png)
  • Version info (WOW! BEST YET!)
  • MusicBrainz Syncing data.

github.com/Ray17x/bitfake2
gpo.zugaina.org/app-misc/bitfake2
repology.org/maintainer/ray%40atl.tools/feed-for-repo/gentoo_ovl_guru

Splitting A Single Album File Into Tracks

Posted by tom2tec on

Convert an album from a single media file with a .cue file to individual tracks instead.

Option 1: foobar2000 (easy, very reliable)

If you already use foobar2000, this is usually the best choice.

Steps

  1. Open foobar2000
  2. Drag either the .cue file or the .flac file into foobar
    • If the CUE is correct, you’ll see the album broken into tracks.
  3. Select all the tracks
  4. Right-click → Convert → …
  5. Choose:
    • Output format: FLAC
    • Processing: none needed
  6. Click Destination
    • Output path: your album folder
    • File name pattern (example): %tracknumber% - %title%
  7. Convert

Result

  • Individual FLAC tracks
  • No quality loss (bit-perfect split)
  • Metadata pulled from the CUE

💡 Note: If the cue has gaps or pre-emphasis flags, foobar2000 handles them correctly.

Option 2: CUETools (best for archival accuracy)

If you care about log verification, AccurateRip, or preserving exact offsets, this is the gold standard.

Steps

  1. Download CUETools
  2. Open it and load the .cue file
  3. Set:
    • Action: Encode
    • Audio Output: FLAC
    • Mode: Tracks
  4. Start

Result

  • Sample-accurate track splits
  • Excellent for archival rips
  • Strong metadata handling

This is especially good if the album originated from a CD rip.

Option 3: FLAC + shntool (command line, Linux-friendly)

If you’re on Linux, shntool works well.

Example

shnsplit -f album.cue -o flac album.flac

Then tag the files:

cuetag album.cue *.flac

Result

  • Clean, lossless splits
  • Metadata from CUE applied
  • More manual, but very transparent

Option 4: MusicBrainz Picard (semi-automatic)

Useful if:

  • The CUE has weak or missing metadata
  • You want MusicBrainz tags

Workflow:

  • Load the CUE
  • Let Picard identify the release
  • Use Tools → Split files

Not as precise as foobar or CUETools for offsets, but fine for most albums.

Picard Barcode Scanner ~ Android App

Posted by tom2tec on

Picard Barcode Scanner helps you to tag your physical releases with MusicBrainz Picard. It allows you to scan the barcode of e.g. a CD and have the corresponding metadata from MusicBrainz automatically loaded into Picard on your desktop.

This is especially useful if you have your physical music collection already digitalized and want to tag the files using the correct album.

github.com/phw/PicardBarcodeScanner

DiscoDOS ~ Discogs Command Line

Posted by tom2tec on

github.com/JOJ0/discodos
discodos.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index
www.discogs.com/forum/thread/1112957