I'm up to the M's.

• I used to do a lot of hand-editing of metadata as I scanned things in over the years, but that's not realistic when migrating this much stuff at once
• There's a lot that I prefer about my own previous style in certain respects, but a lesson I've learned in my professional life is that "perfect for me" gets beat by "good enough and automatic and interoperable" most days
• beets is powerful, but slow to do its work and really not intuitive to me at disambiguating things when it inevitably can't decide between 48 different versions of the same frigging album
• I wanted a CLI tool for reasons but sometimes it's just not the right tool for the job; I switched to Picard after learning it could also move and rename files during its scan
• I learned how to contribute my own metadata to MusicBrainz for whatever arcana I have that nobody has recorded yet
• I'm now swimming in dark waters where people are insisting on spelling Live as Līve in the actual metadata, but beats me how one decides which to use when
• Both beets and Picard are insistent that ever other album I scan is probably a vinyl rip from a promo release in Great Britain whose album art of course has to be a blurry and washed out photo of some radio sleeve
• I have the patience to manually keep my good album art (despite my rule above re: good/auto/interop) but I do not give two shits whether the various MusicBrainz GUIDs line up with reality or not
• The tags 'album artist' and 'Album Artist' are not the same thing and boy does Navidrome get confused in weird ways if they disagree
• There are a lot of solo artists (hence sorted by their last name) whose first name starts with 'J'
• It never occurred to me before, but of course Les Hôtesses d’Hilaire would be filed under 'H', duh
• Similarly, Los Thuthanaka, 'T', sure. But Los Campesinos!? Bunch of nerdy Brits? And the exclamation mark? Fine, I guess. Hm.
• Boy is it incredibly annoying when you have an album that isn't in the MusicBrainz database but coincidentally overlaps with an album by an exact track count and actually has a track with the same name as the conflict and that track has got the same track number in both releases, let me tell you
• Boy is it incredibly annoying when you have some weird Japanese imported version of an album that differs slightly in track list and also has some extra tracks that don't match with anything and also has an extra disc and you sure don't feel like entering all this data into MusicBrainz because unlike something you can just link to a Bandcamp page you basically have no evidence to support it without going and grabbing UPC codes and crap and even though you are probably sure your edit would go through automatically anyway and basically nobody would notice or care to contradict you, you are also a man of principles and also it's 2:00 AM and you need to work tomorrow and do you really want to do all this just to make a more graceful match in Picard or do you just want to save your local copy as-is and move on but then Navidrome decides that because you don't have the same 'Album Artist Sort Order' or some bullshit it decides this is two different artists even though they both have the exact same 'Artist' and 'Album Artist' names (and 'album artist'!) and none of these are at all any different than the sort order would be and why can't this thing just make some sensible deductions you wonder even though you know from your own job that there's probably twenty different edge cases you aren't thinking of that would explain why it has to make the decisions the way it does, but honestly, really, boy, let me tell you