Once you have an account, either because you got an invitation or reg is open, most usenet indexers have a free tier that lets you grab a few files per day. The invitation alone is not going to give you a premium account for free.
I do recommend getting on to a couple of good indexers and using the free grabs to see how you like usenet. Personally, I love it, even though it isn't free. YMMV.
You can keep tagging files ~forever and still not have them perfect… I just stop after when I think it’s good enough and I might start tagging them again at another time.
QFT!!
My current genre process is more hands-on but it's working for me. When I grab something, usually a complete discography, I look up the artist on Discogs, and use their genre pick. Sometimes I will put in specific genres for specific albums but usually, one genre for the whole discography is good enough.
Normally I can tolerate the Discogs genre picks, and this gives me a pretty consistent and bounded list of genres used in my library.
But like you said, it can never be perfect. Organizing my library can be kind of soothing though, like playing solitaire.
I would like to add that for people who may be intimidated by the tagging section, the tags that Deemix gives you are usually pretty decent to start with. You can clean them up to match your preferred format with a couple of quick mp3tag shortcuts. The hardest part is rectifying genres, which it looks like a lot of your automation is designed to do.
mp3tag is an amazing tool and anyone with a big music collection would be well served to study it!
It's not really like radio, it's a bunch of people running their own shows at times of their choosing. But if you follow a bunch of people who are doing 2-3 shows a week, pretty soon you will find that when you look at the "Following" page to see what's happening right now, something worth listening to is probably on.
Here's what my Following page looks like at the moment: https://i.imgur.com/7OXkRbN.jpeg
Not too good, but it's early still. Only one person I follow is live and it looks like they are chatting instead of playing music, which is unusual (and I won't bother to listen).
There are some recommendations below. If I click Show More, I can see 8 other live streams. (I can see more under the Browse feature.) : https://i.imgur.com/U5Bvec5.jpeg
Some of these 8 I recognize as being not my taste, some show genres I don't care about, but there are a few that I will check out. OK... the reggae dude was playing hip-hop which isn't my bag but I might check back later because I like reggae and ragga. The funk dude was playing great music but wouldn't shut up. SlugRadio is playing some good EBM that is new to me, the DJ puts up a track ID in the chat stream, and most importantly doesn't seem to be on mic all the time. So that's a good find and if the music stays good, I'll probably Follow that channel. (this is what the stream looks like: https://i.imgur.com/cCFPpG7.jpeg)
One other thing...
Twitch lets you watch replays of shows which gives you even more ways to find something to listen to... But, they process saved videos and knock out copyrighted audio, so most recorded DJ streams are mangled. For some reason, Twitch gets away with letting people do anything they want when the show is live, while YT uses realtime detection to mute your stream and issue a copyright strike.
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.
I was surprised to see only one other reference to Twitch. I have found Twitch to be AMAZING for new music discovery. MOST of the time when I listen to music, it is actually through Twitch. I have many good hosts saved and checking the who's on now page is the first thing I do when I want to turn on music. And when the apocalypse comes, I have a good library myself now...
There's a catch, of course. A lot of Twitch streamers are fucking irritating! It takes time to find channels that meet my needs...
Plays my kind of music (classic rock, 80s, industrial, darkwave, synthpop, electro, gothic rock, some dance genres like filth... to name a few). If anyone wants channel recommendations I am happy to list some.
Ideally, the video feed clearly shows the track ID (so I know what music to grab!)
The host isn't on mic all the time. It just kills me when I find someone playing good music with track IDs and they talk too much. The more of the video frame taken up by the DJ, and the bigger the mic, the greater the chance that they won't shut up, haha.
A good host will namedrop and raid hosts with similar taste, so once you find a couple that you like, your list of follows will expand quickly.
Here are a few more tips...
If you follow someone on Twitch, there is a separate toggle for receiving notifications when they go live. For 95% of the people I follow, notifications are OFF. A few are so good I want notifications.
"Alternative Player for Twitch" in the Chrome extensions is a cool alternate client that MUTES ADS. There are a few such extensions, this one has been the most reliable for me. However, for some reason it does not support taking you on a raid (that is when your channel ends and sends all the viewers to someone else).
There is a cool alternate client for Android TV called S0undTV.
Some Twitch hosts will put their shows on Mixcloud too, so check their details
Even if a host does not list the track IDs for what they are playing you may have success IDing music with something like Shazaam. On-screen ID is so convenient though.
Get to know a mass tagging tool like mp3tag, and you can RAPIDLY expand the size of your music library.
It seems impossible to tell Twitch to not suggest channels that you are not interested in. You can spend hours trying to kill off bad recommendations but it doesn't matter. For example I do not care about game streaming or people playing live music but I CANNOT get them out of my Recommended list. You just have to learn to ignore them.
Ahhhh I get ya now, sorry.
Yeah with a free account I think you can still get low quality MP3s, not worth it.