Hi all :)
I’ve been using MediaMonkey on Windows 10 and Android to organise my music, playlists, audiobooks, and podcasts, including syncing them to my phone. MediaMonkey has let me down again, so I’m looking to switch, and as I’m trying to switch to Linux too, now would be a good time to get a Linux media manager.
One of the main ways that I use MM is by either building a playlist and transferring the whole thing, or adding to a playlist and just syncing the new tracks. I prefer the tracks to be placed in their artist / album directory though, rather than a directory for the playlist.
I also use MM on Windows to organise my tracks with online metadata, usually from Discogs, so that it matches the entry for the album. I store my media under music\sorted\album artist\album name\track no - artist - title, with a similar setup for audiobooks and podcasts, and would prefer to do the same with the new software.
Does anyone know of anything that can do this please?
I’ve looked at Strawberry and Cinnamon, but development seems to have stopped, and I don’t know enough about things like flaws and bugs to know if they’re still safe to use.
Thanks in advance for your help :)
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Music organization: Musicbrainz Picard, also available for windows if you want try it before migrating to linux: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
For mobile sync I use Navidrome+Ultrasonic via Subsonic API. Navidrome is a music streaming server, but you can predownload songs, not just livestream them, so it’s possible to use it fully offline. https://www.navidrome.org/
Strawberry is still active. But I think you need Beets or Picard, as others have mentioned.
There are a handful of other tools that can help with sorting as well. I think Quod Libet and Ex Falso are available on may distros, I used to use Ex Falso for quick manual tagging and pulling in data from other sources.
As for the syncing, I couldn’t help you there. I have used Strawberry for this, for sure, but I tend to drag and drop to my DAP.
I was in your position a few years back. I missed MediaMonkey when shifting to Linux.
I found Tauon media player was a pretty solid replacement for playing local and network files, but ultimately settled on running Navidrome server and Feishin as a desktop client. I haven’t looked back.
For organising your collection, I’d look at using either Musicbrainz Picard (GUI based) or Beets (CLI, and it’s a little complicated at first). I generally use Beets with Musicbrainz database, and the Discog plugin for anything not found by MB.
I haven’t found anything that is a complete package like MediaMonkey, but with a bit of effort and once the parts are set up, it’s so much better.
Is there any particular reason you don’t like using Spotify?
I own a few hundred albums, so I begrudge paying for the ability to listen to them, or have ads, and I’m not always somewhere with a decent internet connection.
