How I Organize My Digital Music Collection on Linux

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I enjoy listening to music and some time ago after cancelling my subscription to a music streaming service, I decided to go back to owning music again. I wanted to listen to my music across multiple devices, so I streamlined my setup until I was satisfied with it. This is how I organize my digital music collection on a Linux-based workflow. Details on some concepts might be left out, since this blog post is more of a notebook for myself to get this out of my head. Anyway, perhaps it can still help out someone.

Ripping CDs With whipper Link to heading

The albums I own are partly in a digital format while others are CDs. I want all my music to be in FLAC, a lossless format to have the best sound quality possible and even though this takes more storage space than a lossy format like MP3, I don’t care since storage is cheap nowadays.

I rely on whipper to accurately rip my CDs. To avoid needing to worry about the required dependencies for whipper, I use its Docker image provided by the developers themselves.

Here is an example of how I use whipper with Docker:

docker run -ti --rm --device=/dev/cdrom \
--mount type=bind,source=${HOME}/.config/whipper,target=/home/worker/.config/whipper \
--mount type=bind,source=${HOME}/music-to-import,target=/output \
whipperteam/whipper:0.10.0 cd rip --prompt

--device=/dev/cdrom refers to the CD drive in my computer.

The first --mount is to mount the whipper configuration into the Docker container. This configuration was generated with whipper drive analyze, so the same command as above, but by replacing cd rip for drive analyze.

The second --mount is where whipper will output the songs from CDs it ripped.

As for whipperteam/whipper:0.10.0, this is using the latest whipper version at the time of writing.

Finally, cd rip is the command passed to whipper. It would be the same as running whipper cd rip if whipper was installed as a package on my computer. As for the --prompt flag, this is for whipper to let me decide which CD release to pick if somehow multiple matches are available. This happens often for CDs with releases in multiple countries or with various editions like deluxe or what not.

Cataloging Music With beets Link to heading

I am using beets since I haven’t found another software as good to correctly catalog my music. It takes care of handling the metadata that it fetches from MusicBrainz. One cool thing about beets is how flexible it is with its various plugins.

Command example to import music into my music collection:

beet import path/to/music/album-1 path/to/music/album-2 (...)

For details on how I configured beets and some of its plugins, my configuration is in my dotfiles.

Backing Up My Music Collection Link to heading

There are many backup solutions available online. I had a few criteria to guide my decision:

  • Based in Europe, since this is where live.
  • Reliability
  • Resilience
  • Environmental impact
  • Pricing
  • Have a S3-compatible API to ease automation
  • Availability of cold storage for long term archival

With this in mind, this is why I went with Scaleway for their Scaleway Object Storage and Scaleway Glacier products.

Backing up my music involves two steps, first with rclone. It is configurable with rclone config. The configuration is encrypted with a password stored in my password manager. This is how the remote I use is configured in rclone:

Remote "scaleway-storage-fra"

- type: s3
- provider: Scaleway
- access_key_id: MY_ACCESS_KEY_ID
- secret_access_key: MY_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
- region: fr-par
- endpoint: s3.fr-par.scw.cloud
- acl: private
- storage_class: ONEZONE_IA

This remote is for buckets in the Paris region and by default, it will store files in a single data center. The redundancy from extra data centers isn’t needed since I also put everything on Scaleway Glacier.

Then it’s as easy as running this to copy my music to my bucket on Scaleway:

rclone copy -P ~/music scaleway-storage-fra:my-music-collection

~/music is the folder where my music is located, after it has been processed by beets. scaleway-storage-fra is the remote in rclone, then my-music-collection is the bucket name on Scaleway Object Storage.

Finally, I use aws-cli2 to sync my bucket from Scaleway Object Storage to another bucket from Scaleway Glacier.

I avoid storing credentials in plain text in ~/.aws/credentials, instead passing them inline in environment variables. I have an alias (scw) to achieve this without typing again and again those environment variables.

scw s3 sync s3://my-music-collection s3://my-music-collection-glacier --storage-class GLACIER

my-music-collection is the bucket on Scaleway Object Storage, while my-music-collection-glacier is the bucket on Scaleway Glacier. Do not forget to pass the GLACIER storage class, otherwise this is going to store everything in Scaleway Object Storage.

Getting My Music Collection To My Phone Link to heading

My phone’s storage can be expanded via a SD card, so this is what I went with. To get my music collection onto the SD card, I either take it out and put it in my computer. This is rather cumbersome as I need to take out the battery every time. I usually rely on the FolderSync app on Android to easily sync my bucket on Scaleway Object Storage to my phone. This is especially convenient when only transferring a few songs.

This is how I configure FolderSync to work with Scaleway.

On Scaleway Link to heading

I create an API key, then a policy for it. It can be restricted to only Scaleway Object Storage and Scaleway Glacier.

In FolderSync Link to heading

Create an account with the Access key ID and the Secret access key. Those fields refer to the API key on Scaleway. Afterwards, the Server address and Region refer to the bucket on Scaleway Object Storage, not on Scaleway Glacier since this would take much longer to download the files as they have to be restored. As an example for a bucket in the Paris region, the Server address would look like s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/my-bucket-name and the Region is EUParis.

Final Countdown Link to heading

That’s it, I hope this helped you. How do you setup your digital music collection? Let me know what you think through my Contact Me form.