Navidrome

navidrome is a subsonic compatible musing streaming service that relies on metadata to catalog a music library

Manage metadata

In order to work properly navidrome needs that tracks have metadata populated, to compile them there are a pletora of software, one of them being picard

Collection file structure

To keep things ordered and clean files inside the collection folder are organized as follows

collection/
├── artist 1
│   └── album 1
│       └── track 1
│   └── album 2
│       ├── track 1
│       ├── track 2
│       └── .....
├── artist 2
│   └── album 1
│       ├── track 1
│       └── .....
├── playlists
│   ├── ....nsp
│   ├── ....nsp
│   └── ....nsp
.....

In order to divide tracks in album folder run the following oneliners

✔️ Tip

picard can move files based on metadata values inside folders so this 2 snippets aren’t needed

this will create folder based on ALBUM metadata

find . -type f | parallel 'ffmpeg -i {} -f ffmetadata' 2>&1 | grep 'ALBUM ' |awk -F':' '{$1=""; print $0}' | while read dir; do
    if [[ -d "$dir" ]]; then
        echo "$dir already exists"
    else
        mkdir -p "$dir";
    fi
done

this will move tracks in ALBUM folder according to metadata

find . -type f | while read f; do ALBUM="$(ffmpeg -i "$f" -f ffmetadata 2>&1 | grep 'ALBUM ' | awk -F':' '{$1="";print $0}' | awk '{$1=$1;print}')";
if [[ -f "$ALBUM/$f" ]]; then
    echo "$ALBUM/$f already exists";
else
    mv "$f" "$ALBUM/";
fi
done

Creating smart playlists

Smart playlists are ways of grouping tracks together based on metadata values, they are defined inside json files with the .nsp extension

file last_played.nsp

{
  "name": "Recently Played",
  "comment": "Recently played tracks",
  "all": [
    {"inTheLast": {"lastPlayed": 30}}
  ],
  "sort": "lastPlayed",
  "order": "desc",
  "limit": 100
}

This json files are composed by a sequence of statements in the form

    {"operator": {"field": "value"}}

The tracks with metadata that matches the statement are included inside the smart playlist, here a complete list of fields and operators

Backup physical collection

To backup the physical collection the process requires to acquire the audio tracks of a cd in a file format (typically wav) and then edit metadata, under archlinux the utility cdda2wav can do the job

from the arch wiki

cdda2wav -vall cddb=-1 speed=4 -paranoia paraopts=proof -B -D /dev/sr0

⚠️ Warning

Notes that paranoia parameters make the process slower, for cd that are in good conditions they can be omitted

An handy alias to avoid memorizing parameters

alias ripCD='mkdir temp && cd temp && cdda2wav -vall cddb=-1 speed=4 -paranoia paraopts=proof -B -D /dev/sr0'

Retrieving lyrics for tracks

In order to retrieve lyrics for tracks a useful resource is lrclib, which is an online index of lyrics that can be queried using the LRCGET program.