I would’ve suggested MusicBrainz as a metadata library to pull genre tags from, but I’m pretty sure beets uses that as it’s source too. I tried beets on my collection, but ended up just using MusicBrainz Picard and tagging things manually because beets would basically pick the first match it found a lot of the time, and there was usually a more correct option in the database.

As far as bulk downloading diverse music catalogs, I don’t really know of any good sources, but there probably are music-focused trackers out there that could provide that. I’ve just slowly build my collection up album by album as I found things that interested me. Maybe check the likes of last.fm and ListenBrainz for most played music in their stats, and start collecting those?

How do you intend to access your music collection? Navidrome? or are you just building up folders of music?

damn I just bit the bullet and am manually updating the metadata for my library of 5000 thousand songs, mostly cause I’m old enough that this was the way I did it before Spotify, so now I’m just going back to my old ways… hope you find a solution though, it’d be mighty helpful

Honestly, i understand this isn’t what you’re looking for but apps like spotube, vimusic, nuclear and others provide different interfaces without ads. Spotube is what I use and it’s available on both desktop and mobile.

Mp3Tag https://www.mp3tag.de/en/, My tool for downloading playlists loooks to still be working https://archive.org/details/ytop_v1.0_202305

EDIT: Actually, my tool seems to need an update, just tried a playlist, didn’t finish any files. Overlord google is actively sabotaging anything “free”

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.

Soul seek to download files (works all the time) and musicbrains Picard to edit metadata en made (works most of the time, some manual editing will be necessary).

As for listening, I use musicbee on pc. It looks and feels like the itunes pc application used to. If I’m out and about, I have a usb stick with music plugged into my car console and a micro sd card with music in my psp.

This is what works for me and may not be ideal for you. Let me know what works :)

@deezertogdrivebot

You can you this bot on telegram to download Spotify playlist (source is deezer) So you can even get in different formats (FLAC,320,128)