FAQ

How can I edit my music metadata (id3 tags)? How can I rename/move my files?

With Navidrome you can’t. Navidrome does not write to your music folder or the files by design. It may have capabilities to change/add cover art for artists, albums and playlists in the future, but even then it won’t write these images to your Music Folder or embed them in the files.

The main reason for this is security: With an internet-facing server like Navidrome, users would only be one exploit away from all their music getting deleted.

There are many excellent “real” tag editors / music library managers out there to work with your music library.

Navidrome recommends: beets (Linux, macOS, Windows) and Musicbrainz Picard (Linux, macOS, Windows).

Others: mp3tag (Windows), ExifTool (Linux, macOS, Windows), Yate (macOS), foobar2000 (Windows, macOS), MusicBee (Windows), Media Monkey (Windows), Groove Music (Windows), Windows Media Player (Windows), Apple iTunes (Windows, macOS), Apple Music (macOS).

If you are new to organizing and tagging your library, take a look at this post about how to use Picard or beets with Navidrome: Organizing music with Musicbrainz Picard

I have an album with tracks by different artists, why is it broken up into lots of separate albums, each with their own artist?

Navidrome only organises music by tags, it will not automatically group a folder containing a bunch of songs with different artists into one album.

For a “Various Artists” compilation, the Part Of Compilation tag (TCMP for id3, COMPILATION for FLAC) must be set, for all tracks.

For a single-artist album with a different artist name for each track (for example “Alice feat. Bob” , “Alice feat. Carol”), the Album Artist tags must be the same (“Alice”) for all tracks.

Where are the logs?

To achieve maximum compatibility with a great number of platforms, Navidrome follows the Twelve Factor App methodology as much as possible. Specifically in the case of logs, Navidrome does not try to do any storage or routing of any log files, it only outputs all information to stdout, making it easy for the proper logging tools in each platform to handle them. Some examples bellow:

• Linux: if you installed Navidrome using the Systemd unit (as explained in the install instructions), you can see the logs using the journalctl tool: journalctl -f -u navidrome.service.

• Docker: you can use docker logs or docker-compose logs to retrieve/follow the logs.

• Windows: depending on what you used to install Navidrome as a service, the logs will be in different locations by default:

  • if you used Shawl, just check the shawl_for_navidrome_*.log files created in the same location as the Shawl executable.
  • if you used NSSM, the location of the logs are specified by the AppStdout attribute.
  • if you used WinSW, the log file is in the same directory as the WinSW configuration file for the Navidrome service.

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