An info storage concept for albums that were removed

[Zerow]

I used to have a list of all albums / singles / EPs that I had occasion to listen too. If liked any piece of music from them, then I would add something from them to my set of audio files. And so I had information about being acquainted with a given release both in a simple TXT file and in the audio files themselves [and by extension also in Mp3tag]. But keeping track of all of that in aforementioned TXT file was consuming my time; and I also started to spot differences [errors]. So I kind of stopped updating it, keeping order in files only; because they matter the most

But the problem was and still is this: when I am doing like a discography of one of the favorite artists, I might completely disregard existence of a given release. In that I simply do not find anything interesting for me on it [a very common thing with singles]. And as it is a favorite artist and some schmuck of YouTube fame, I would like after all to know to the day I die, what already have I listened to that was released by such artist liked by me. So in the past I used to write down in the TXT file such not-liked albums annotations- but now I know for good that I will not use that system anymore: because that is what Mp3tag I want to use for, as I use it practically every day


And so: How to keep "in Mp3tag" such information; that is not suppose to be there? Create a 1 second files with silence and tag them? But only with ALBUM, YEAR and ARTIST / ALBUMARTIST data? What about FILENAME / TITLE then? There could be multiple files [notes with info] like that in one folder [representing a given ARTIST], so they would have to be somehow unique. So to counter any issues arising from that: put the ALBUM in TITLE? And store all of such notes in a special folder and in a format that I do not use; so that they would stand out from normal / legit files?


Any ideas / comments? I practically have described here a ready to use system- but maybe someone already does something like this I can share some thoughts, that come from empiricism? Some do's and don'ts?

[Etz]

I have similar system in use myself, but not in mp3tag.

Basically it is self-written php web interface (still work in progress) with MySQL backend, where data is stored.
I basically keep all my library data there + some extra metadata, not related to the actual files.
Beauty is, if I need quickly know if I have some album in my library, I can just search and if it is not in library, it shows either the reason why it is not there or reason to buy it

Mp3tag in this case is primarily used to generate csv (after tagging), to easily import album(s) to my DB.

[Zerow]

[...]
self-written php web interface (still work in progress) with MySQL backend, where data is stored.
I basically keep all my library data there + some extra metadata, not related to the actual files.
Beauty is, if I need quickly know if I have some album in my library, I can just search and if it is not in library, it shows either the reason why it is not there or reason to buy it
[...]

And you do not run into discrepancies between database and reality [the files themselves]?


This also gives me some ideas:

Create a Master Tag file

Hi Good work BTW this is a great tool, I have sent a donation. I need to crate a 'Master' tag that has album, artist, album artist, genre, comment and front cover graphic stored as a file somewhere so that I can use it to tag new files. We generate new files daily and the method I use at the moment is to copy an existing tag and paste to the new file, this involves jumping around directories etc. Is this possible Regards Huw Peters

[Etz]

Sometimes it does, if I remember sync up changes.

Problem is, that currently I don't have auto update mechanism, to check Tag/File changes.
As I said, it is work in progress and far from perfection.

[Zerow]

Recently, with the still never ending work, I am leaning towards simply not caring about those "not present anymore" or "simply not present" albums / singles


Because for this to be a valid / accurate system, it would require for every album / single that I already have [or had at some point] to bear the information concerning the exact release; its individual ID. And there are three problems with that:

A] I do not have time machine and cannot start doing it from the get go in around 1997. I still have a lot of such old tracks

B] Services like GOG do not notice the changes they make to the music. Like for example only after a buyer of the game "Planescape: Torment" pointed in the comments the lack of the track for endgame credits, did the GOG realized the omission and added it to the additional content of that game; which was not only the OST from it. But on top of that they do not mention anywhere that this OST has been remastered- and it is both profoundly audible different from the music that can be easily ripped from the game files and has higher frequencies on the spectrogram. [But the endgame credits they did not remaster- yeah, more chaos please]

C] If the overall idea behind this was to keep a thorough track of discography of a given artist, then practically looking at it, it is possible for few of them. As there are constantly coming up new editions / re-releases of already existing albums, but not always are they noted by MusicBrainz, Discogs or Wikipedia. So a music buff would have to spend a lot of time on finding about that


All in all, what is better: spending time on the enjoyment of what you already have or on the work concerning what you do not want to have in the first place?