been so sick for a week, starting to feel better, grappling with being alive, i gotta get another album out, SEVERAL albums out

im taking this music thing too seriously, just make shit and kick it out the door

the "upside" of being nearly unable to do anything (cant talk, exhausted, sore, sore, sore) has been organising everything.

every single album is tagged (artist, album, genre, etc) and has artwork embedded, plex was annoying because it wants to ignore metadata but finally got that sorted as well (trying symfonium instead of plexamp on my phone, despite my love of foobar2000, it doesnt work w plex)
all my books are correctly tagged i n calibre and all my comics/manga are in komga

tools i used fwiw:

https://ww.advancedrenamer.com/

utterly essential to bulk rename files, regex (with training wheels) makes it soooo easy,

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

handles more than mp3's, can do *so much* with tagging (supports extended tags) + can embed covers etc, i went through ~7000 tracks in a day
FUN FACT! plex will not read embedded webp files, use png! (it also doesn't like large album art, stick under 3000x3000)

https://www.freac.org/

i download flac/wav and convert to .ogg for portability (vbr "7.0" quality, i cant hear the difference between this and lossless)

given that stuff goes missing online / deleted from streaming / spotify is just fucking over artists / bandcamp brings in more money on 1 bandcamp friday for an artist than a year of streaming (which costs some artists more than its worth) etc etc etc
i maintain my own media library

https://komga.org/

its like plex for manga/books/magazines etc

i got into searching archive.org for old gaming mags while me and my gf replay some ps2 games (the original resident evils, silent hill 1-3 and others). they can be weird and misogynistic and very 90's ("re****d" is used with wild abandon) theres something utterly vibrant and alive compared to non indie games journalism, it has a chaotic "seven guys, two called paul, let loose in an office with a playstation and jolt cola"

because i live with a technomancer they set it up so i can access everything with a secure login from anywhere in the world, so no more using syncthing to transfer a lot of files when at my computer (this is easier than self-hosting FTP or similar options)

even if you just want to have a library of your stuff laid out nice, its... nice

would recommend syncthing (with syncthing tray for windows users) to have a shared folder between computers / phone or whatever (good w keepassxc)

just going to rec https://www.voidtools.com/ "everything" again for windows users who like to search files, quite often i need to find a specific thing and its way faster than using a file manager, saved me a lot of time with re-org'ing all my "media" (idk a better term but im not calling it "content")

https://stacher.io/

i like to watch some vis at 2x + so having a way to download those files without being reliant on online tools is nice, can do conversions, supports different formats, embedding subtitles etc , you can give it your browser cookies to download from sites that need a login (like nebula), so far its handled everything ive thrown at it

got into downloading vids *in general* because you dont know if/when they will go away
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtYEgKE1tZs was removed for a long while

also, if you'd like a media player you can set up EXACTLY how you'd like (thats super light on system resources, v extendible etc) become friends with https://www.foobar2000.org/