DCAudioDIY.com

My 16TB or so of stored music is such a mess that no ordinary DLNA server could make sense of it. Between the bootleg broadcasts and LPs, 40+ CD Japanese EMI-Toshiba historical box sets (tagged in Japanese, of course), 78 rpm rips, and so forth, much of it lacking proper metadata, I could never find half the stuff I'm looking for. I've settled for naming folders in a way that I know roughly what desirable artist or work they may contain, then use a Mac OS app called Neofinder which will scan the NAS and has a search function that points me to the key term I'm looking for. Then I drag-and-drop to Audirvana.

My library was set up by in various folders. The main folders were DSD and PCM. I discarded the DSD because when I has a DAC capable of rendering DSD I did not like the quality of the sound.
The PCM folder is divided into Classical and POP. POP has everything other than Classical but a few Classical albums got in there. Each sub-folder is divided up alphabetically.
This was a lot of work by the guy that set this up and I did not like it at first, but I have grown to like it very much. When I am at my computer I use FooBar and it finds things very quickly and I can find and listen or down load an album very easily.

I know there are programs out there that can scan and correct a lot problems of a music library. I have never tried them but I remeber reading somewhere about them. Maybe a member has knowledge and will share.

Audirvana recently added a feature that automatically scans the library and makes "adjustments" to the metadata and tries to fill in some blanks. It was a default and people were very angry about it ("I'll tag my own files, thank you!"), so they had to add the option to turn it off. I think there are programs that will seek to fill in missing data but I'd be very wary of them. Maybe someone else has more information.

I hate to say that the metadata issue is one thing that Roon excels at, if it recognizes the album, then it will pull down the metadata and cover art associated with the album in most cases.

It obviously doesn’t work on bootleg, obscure releases or vinyl rips.

Still, I find folder browsing is often faster or easier if I know what I am looking for.

BTW I do hove two backups. one onsite and one offsite.

Roon did an update about a year ago that allowed in addition to searches by composer, artist, orchestra, etc to search by folder which used to be absent. I use it when I have tracks from many different sources that become test music. BTW, I also have many tracks recorded by different people that did not have appropriate metadata. You can use Windows Explorer to add the appropriate data.