u/AmjadFaisal94

Hello fellow hoarders and audiophiles!

I’m embarking on a massive, long, but exciting journey to rebuild and organize my offline music library from scratch. I am from Jordan, so a huge portion of my archive is dedicated to preserving Middle Eastern and Arabic musical heritage (which I call my "Arabian Legacy"), alongside a solid collection of foreign music and various audio miscellany.

The end goal is a pristine, bit-perfect FLAC archive of around 100,000 tracks hosted on a NAS. I want the metadata and folder hierarchy to be so strict and clean, and for serving it via Navidrome to Symfonium on my mobile/DAP devices to be absolutely flawless.

Before I fully dive in, I wanted to share my "Audio Archive OS" (the strict rules I’ve set for myself) with this community. I would love to hear your thoughts, any edge cases I might have missed, or general tips for preserving sanity during a project of this scale!

Here is my blueprint:

First: General Structure
Attached in the photo above.

Second: Artists' Folders — Definition & Content
- Studio Albums: Every official release completed as an Album (Original Albums, Remastered Versions, Reissues, Deluxe Editions, Solo OSTs, Albums Combined with Another Artist).
- Singles & EPs: Every official release completed as a Single or an Extended Play.
- Compilations: Collection of Previous Works (Best Of, Greatest Hits, Thematic Compilations, Anthologies).
- Live: Any recording performed in Front of an Audience (Official concerts, Live broadcasts, Bootlegs).
- Unsorted: Any recording of Unknown or Unofficial Origin (YouTube rips, Leaked recordings, Demos, unreleased, rarities).

Third: Collections & Misc Folder — Definition & Content
- Miscellaneous Collections: General audio miscellany, uncategorized tracks, standalone sound files.
- Various Artists & Thematic: Compilations, collaborative anthologies, multi-artist collections.
- Nasheeds & Religious: Islamic vocal music, spiritual chants, devotional acapella/percussion tracks.
- Qur'an: recitations, including complete sets (Murattal/Mujawwad) and distinct Surahs.
- Soundtracks: Original scores, OSTs, and themes from films, series, documentaries, and video games.
- Radio & TV Archives: Radio program archives, talk show segments, live airchecks, and broadcast recordings.
- Spoken Word: Non-musical spoken content (audiobooks, podcasts, lectures, speeches, interviews).

Fourth: Naming — From the Root to the Track
- Artist Folders Naming: All artists are within alphabetically ordered folders.
- The "#" Category: A dedicated folder placed at the very top for artist/band names starting with numbers (e.g., 2Pac, 50 Cent, The 1975).
- The "The" Rule: Articles ("The", "A", "An") must always be ignored during alphabetical sorting. "The 1975" goes to #, "The Smiths" goes to S.
- Track Folder Naming: All tracks must be within a folder, starting with (YEAR).
Confirmed Year: (1965) Album Name
Approximate Year: (ca. 1965) Album Name
Unknown Year: (Unknown) Album Name
Remastered Edition: (1965) Album Name [Remaster 1999]
Reissue: (1965) Album Name [Reissue 2000]
Special / Deluxe Edition: (1965) Album Name [Deluxe Edition]
Original Soundtrack: (1965) Album Name [OST]
Collaborative Album: (1965) Album Name [with Artist B]
- Track Naming: Track numbers must always use two-digit zero-padding. File names are strictly for the track title.
Format: 01. Track Name.ext
Rule: No "Featuring", "vs", or "with" in the filename itself. The place for collaborative info is embedded strictly within the ID3/FLAC metadata tags. "Featuring" credits do not warrant separate subfolders.

Fifth: Quick Classification Guide (Examples)
Standard Album → 01. Studio Albums
Remaster or Reissue → 01. Studio Albums (with suffix [Remaster or Reissue] in folder name)
Collaborative Album → 01. Studio Albums (with suffix [with X] in folder name)
Solo Soundtrack → 01. Studio Albums (with suffix [OST] in folder name)
Extended Play (EP) / Single → 02. Singles & EPs
Featured Track (Featuring) → Standard location (credited via embedded info only)
Best Of / Greatest Hits → 03. Compilations
Live Performance / Concert → 04. Live
Bootleg / YouTube Rip → 05. Unsorted
Multi-Artist Soundtrack → Collections & Misc → 01. OST

What do you guys think? Is there a glaring flaw in my logic, or any particular software tool you'd recommend to speed up the metadata tagging/sorting process before I drop everything onto the NAS? Any advice is highly appreciated!

I’m looking for advice on choosing a DAP for a very large offline FLAC library of around 4TB.

My library is organized in a hierarchical folder structure on the laptop and uses Syncthing to sync it to my phone, and I manage my playlists through Symfonium. Ideally, I’d like to keep using Symfonium or a similar Android app and preserve my existing playlists/library structure.

What I’m looking for:

- Access to the entire library.

- Keep the original FLAC files, with no transcoding.

- Good performance with tens of thousands of tracks.

- Reliable indexing, browsing, and searching.

- A practical portable device for daily listening.

I’m particularly interested in the FiiO M27, since its dual microSD slots can theoretically support up to 4TB (2×2TB), alongside 8GB RAM and 256GB internal storage.

My main questions are:

How well does the M27 handle extremely large libraries? Is browsing/searching across two 2TB cards responsive, or does indexing become an issue?

Is there noticeable lag with tens of thousands of tracks?

How good is the Android/software support? Can Symfonium or similar apps handle a library this large without major limitations?

What is the real-world battery life when used as a portable player?

Would you actually recommend a DAP for this use case, particularly the M27?

I’d especially appreciate real-world experiences with very large FLAC libraries, indexing, search speed, playlists, battery life, and long-term usability.

If you wouldn’t recommend the M27, are there any other DAPs or solutions you’d suggest for a 4TB FLAC library?