Do people use starring system for filtering through music?
My concern is that, from looking around online, the starring system should really be a great personal categorisation tool but it's not universal, not easy to copy across to other programs, not easy to write to metadata or backup. I don't want to put in a significant effort and potentially lose the star ratings in future or be tied to navidrome/subsonic, especially if I really need to rely on 1 star ratings to remember what I would have otherwise deleted.
So my workflow so far for music has been:
- obtain music (bandcamp, amazon etc)
- musicbrainz picard to tag
- listen offline (usually on my phone) and delete songs I don't want to keep
- copy across what remains into my regular music library and a backup in the cloud.
Now that I have a NAS and have setup Navidrome in docker, and also using lidarr more, I'm thinking of a few changes to the workflow:
- add music in lidarr (either download or copy into directory if purchased elsewhere)
- musicbrainz picard to tag (but this time the files are on the NAS rather than my phone or PC)
- listen and filter by star rating (in symfonium if on my phone, in navidrome on web or in feishin on desktop but all the star rating syncs across anyway)
- keep all files but 1 star means "rejected" (rather than deleted), 2-5 star for meh/good/great/all-timer
Essentially with my NAS storage isn't an issue since I've got 5TB available and my current music library is only 1.5k songs (about 20gb). This would also remove some decision fatigue when a song to me is 2 star (meh) but currently have to decide "delete - yes or no". It also makes lidarr easier to integrate into my workflow since right now I have to be really careful how I set artist or album monitoring.