Beets Radbox

Yesterday, I spent some hours exporting my roughly 45.000 photos in my iPhoto library to a folder structure sorted by year and event. The tool I used is called Phoshare (https://code.google.com/p/phoshare/). The site says its no longer supported, but even with the latest OSX and iPhoto versions it seems to do the trick. I was able to convert faces to exif meta tags containing the persons name. Otherwise I did not have a lot of metadata in iPhoto. Now I'm heading over to digiKam or maybe some other tool outside the walled garden.

For my iTunes library, I first used beets (http://beets.radbox.org/) to fix the metadata of my music files, and now cmus (https://cmus.github.io/) as a music player. As an alternative music player I'm considering EMMS (https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/).

I don't know about alternatives to iPhone syncing. My iPhone died last week, and I'm waiting for my Fairphone to arrive in a couple of weeks.

Here's what I did to promote beets (http://beets.radbox.org) over a long period of time (3ish years) before it became "popular":

- Post to domain-specific forums where I thought people would be interested. That includes stuff like /r/python on and /r/music in my case, as well as the user forums for music-streaming systems.

- Build community. IRC, mailing lists, close collaborations on GitHub. Encourage people to become GitHub collaborators early to solidify their commitment to the project.

- Keep trying to delight the users I have. Other people's endorsements on Twitter, HN, etc. consistently work better than my own.

- Screencast. On YouTube so it's easily shareable.

- Patience. Relentlessly make the project better. This is far away the best thing you can do; over the months and years, people will notice.

> Ideally, I'd like to be able to run queries on my music library and have an interesting playlist returned to me.

You want Beets.[1] Anything you could possibly want is doable with the smart playlist feature[2] and the redonkulous power of the queries and metadata (chromaprint/musicbrainz/echonest). There is a plugin for last.fm genres but I have not used it. I am not sure how you got similarities from last.fm but you can definitely use the echonest data to find similar music. There was a good discussion of beets here not so long ago.

[1]: http://beets.radbox.org/

[2]: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/v1.3.5/plugins/smartplaylist.html

you should check out subsonic

http://subsonic.org/

I like the isub app for iphone, but there are android apps too: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/apps.jsp

I find subsonic works best with a friend or two participating. A miniature music club if you will.

If you already have a large library, you can use beets to organize it in a separate database (this is our current project)
http://beets.radbox.org/