Arrange music via PC

dausd · July 20, 2022 at 8:18 PM

Hello there,

sorry if this was here (what I imagine), but I couldn't find exactly what I want to ask.

So I have an RPi 3 with LibreELEC, I use it for watching series and playing music from it. The music files are on an external USB. Sometimes I put other music on it. So, I have to open Kodi and import the new files there. I must do this directly on the Rpi, But what I want to do is, arranging this via PC. But I really could not figure out, how.

I open the Kodi Interface in Mozilla Firefox and there I can play music, but not import new one.

I imagined that I could tell my RPi via PC things like "Go to USB, take these 10 songs, makes this playlist from it".

Can you tell me, how?

**chewitt** · July 21, 2022 at 8:26 AM

You can store files on the PC (or low-power NAS device in the network, or the USB drive attached to the PC) then share the files to the RPi and create a network "source" for the shared files instead of having them directly connected to the RPi via USB. You can now rearrange them into whatever filing structure you like on the NAS/USB drive, or (recommended) use MusicBrain`z Piccard to scrape/tag and automagically store the files for you. You'll still need to 'scrape' the files into the Library on the Kodi side but once the tags are redone with MB that process is very accurate and the Web GUI should have a "refresh library" button. I'm not aware of Web GUIs that make playlist creation easier - Kodi is rather designed to do that kind of thing from the TV interface, but avoiding the need to fixup meta/scraping (because it's done properly by Picard) is normally a good win for music management.

dausd · July 21, 2022 at 10:56 AM

Thanks, Chewit. I really hoped that I could do that without additional software and especially without using the TV, since this is very uncomfortable.

Thank you for your answer, I'll check it out!

dausd · July 22, 2022 at 4:23 PM

Me again, I forgot my other question:
If I have all my songs on a USB Stick an dplugged it in into my Rpi, can I access the files then via PC? For example for changing mp3 tags, creating a playlist and so on?

**chewitt** · July 23, 2022 at 7:34 AM

Yes, if the local Samba server has been turned on (which it should be, by default). Expect tagging with Piccard to be slower though as that requires files to be read and written to the remote share. I'd suggest you map the source in Kodi to one dir on the USB, and place new but not-yet-processed files in a separate location - in Piccard you can have it move files to a new location (the source dir) after tagging. This way the filing structure is effectively managed by Piccard.