There is no way to do this in bulk, quickly. I’ve spent 20+ years collecting and it’s still nowhere near “perfect”.

Use Picard, try your best to match the actual release.

I’ve used MP3tag to fix a lot of my downloads, it pulls from Discog.com, and you can edit multiple items manually.

Not sure if this is necessarily something that’d help your situation, but I also am trying to get away from Spotify. Too many missing songs…

back in the day i used picard. is that still a thing?

here it is

For bulk diverse, pre-tagged and sorted collections you really have to go to p2p like soulseek.

For tagging picard is really the only option that can handle bulk tagging with some level of trust and authority, but definitely have a backup or work in chunks just in case it goes awry.

For a spotify replacement, Plexamp is really doing well as long as you have decently tagged media. It can do all the mood radio and playlist suggestion stuff that Spotify and others have been doing.

Beets will work, but you have to put in the effort to get all your music imported correctly (you have a backup, right!), then lastfm plugin will work fine (and metadata, and album art, and lyrics, and …). Once you get started, it’s pretty easy to add new stuff in. It does tend to work better with albums, I’ve mostly moved to getting an album when I’ve wanted a single song, because space is cheap, and I’ve found some interesting stuff that way.

I use lidarr together with plex and jellyfin. For downloading, I have chosen the usenet and it works pretty good full automatic. You just need the right indexers.

Identifying: Picard (I think) by musicbrainz
Organizing and keeping track: Lidarr

There are alternatives to lidarr but that’s what I did for my ~300 files.
Picard matches by current metadata and to some extend by acoustic ID (similar to shazam).

Still better to review files before commiting the metadata (album, year, version, miss matched releases similar releases in name by cover bands or release name etc.)

For downloading more: I had great success with scarce releases (rare touhou songs) on soulseek.

Genre tagging is a huge pain in the ass!

Picard is probably the most popular tool for this, but a problem with any auto-tagger is that you may disagree with the genre selection. Because the data is all crowdsourced you also see inconsistencies… Like “Hip-Hop” and “Hip Hop” both in use. Either you live with that stuff… Or, you do it yourself.

2500 tracks isn’t actually that much to do manually. Chip away at it with a great tool like mp3tag, and once you are caught up, do new additions as you get them.

Someone here said:

It does tend to work better with albums, I’ve mostly moved to getting an album when I’ve wanted a single song…

This is so true. Loose single tracks are a pain in the ass too. Try to get full releases.

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Easytags for metadata

Picard’s interface is super wonky. I’ve been using tag scanner for over a decade and it’s been great.

I use mpd-sima for autoplay functionality. It would in turn require using mpd or mopidy.

It queries last.fm for recommended artists and tries to find a match in your playlist. It works, but honestly it’s not great. I don’t think it’s any fault of the software. Last.FM doesn’t know your library and seems to return limited results, so it’s like a game of battleship actually getting a hit. (Not quite that bad, but the analogy holds water, overall)

Musicbrainz Picard

For downloading music in bulk, I personally subscribe to Deezer and then run Deemix in Docker which allows me to download offline audio in FLAC. I then serve those FLAC using Plex and Navidrome.

I use beets and soulseek but my ambitions are lower than yours.