I would’ve suggested MusicBrainz as a metadata library to pull genre tags from, but I’m pretty sure beets uses that as it’s source too. I tried beets on my collection, but ended up just using MusicBrainz Picard and tagging things manually because beets would basically pick the first match it found a lot of the time, and there was usually a more correct option in the database.

As far as bulk downloading diverse music catalogs, I don’t really know of any good sources, but there probably are music-focused trackers out there that could provide that. I’ve just slowly build my collection up album by album as I found things that interested me. Maybe check the likes of last.fm and ListenBrainz for most played music in their stats, and start collecting those?

How do you intend to access your music collection? Navidrome? or are you just building up folders of music?

damn I just bit the bullet and am manually updating the metadata for my library of 5000 thousand songs, mostly cause I’m old enough that this was the way I did it before Spotify, so now I’m just going back to my old ways… hope you find a solution though, it’d be mighty helpful

Are we talking full albums here or tracks and singles?

Beets, the MusicBrainz tagger can handle this.

plugins: lastgenre should load the plugin, but I think you’ve come that far.

In the config.yaml file you’ll also need to tell the plugin to get some tags.

lastgenre:
    auto: yes
    count: 1
    source: artist

I usually keep the count at 1…

If you are importing singletons you need to use the -s option, otherwise importing albums should work.

I know that likely didn’t answer the question, but somebody might find it helpful.

Ex Falso is an OK tagger for manually doing stuff.

2,500 isn’t much. I think many of us here could point you in the right direction for getting loads of high quality music. But, I am not super comfortable dropping names…the first thing listed on this site is a super easy way to get started https://github.com/Shakil-Shahadat/awesome-piracy#music-downloading

Your next problem will be too much music, which is where I am at, but that isn’t a complaint or a flex. It happens when you’ve been hoarding since the '90s.

Honestly, i understand this isn’t what you’re looking for but apps like spotube, vimusic, nuclear and others provide different interfaces without ads. Spotube is what I use and it’s available on both desktop and mobile.

Mp3Tag https://www.mp3tag.de/en/, My tool for downloading playlists loooks to still be working https://archive.org/details/ytop_v1.0_202305

EDIT: Actually, my tool seems to need an update, just tried a playlist, didn’t finish any files. Overlord google is actively sabotaging anything “free”