User-facing documentation

[sbor23]

Hi

I would be interested to to try this music manager but I can't get information about it's usage, features etc. without reading the code.

• How does it compare to something like Beets?
• How do do you perform a common task like importing, editing music?
• Is it focused on songs or on albums?

Would love to see some information in the wiki or on readthedocs.io or similar.

Cheers

[antlarr]

Hi, thanks for your interest in bard.

I planned to write some documentation once I consider bard is ready for regular users and I make a proper release of a first version. The "problem" (if we can call that a problem) is bard got a lot more attention than I expected from the blog post I wrote some weeks ago, so it caught me unprepared.

How does it compare to something like Beets?

If you're currently using beets, you probably won't win anything by using the current version of bard. The main feature which I don't think beets does is the ability to compare songs. Currently you can find song duplicates on your collection by running bard info foo.flac and it'll list (together with the metadata information about that song) the list of similar songs in your collection (based on the audio, not using metadata at all). Also, you can compare full directories and bard will tell you if one of them can be removed if the other directory contains the same songs but with better quality.

That said, I think beets is really well designed and @sampsyo is a nice guy, but I wanted to have the freedom of a new project to experiment with ways to organize music.

How do do you perform a common task like importing, editing music?

Basically, you write all your "root paths" where you have music files in your configuration file at ~/.config/bard, like:

{
...
    "musicPaths": [
        "/home/Eruluvatar/music",
        "/mnt/data/more-music"
    ]
...
}

Check this comment for a full example of a config file.

Then you run bard update to update the database. Note that an update/import will never move or modify in any way your files, it only modifies bard's own database.

If you want to use any of the audio comparison methods, remember to run bard find-audio-duplicates after updating the database, that will take a bit longer to run, but after it finishes, you'll be able to find song duplicates. Note you can stop the process at any time with Ctrl-C and it'll continue from the last song processed when you run it again.

Is it focused on songs or on albums?

Right now it's focused on songs, but I plan to change that and integrate it with all the data available at MusicBrainz (assuming your files have proper musicbrainz tags like the ones written by picard, which I can't recommend enough).

If you have any other question please ask here since it might be useful for others too.

In any case, I'll keep this issue open to remind me to write some proper documentation.