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What is MH Wiki?
MH Wiki is a community reference site for media hoarders: people who collect, organize and preserve large libraries of music, artwork, scans and other digital media. Its stated purpose is to support the daily conversations and activities of that community, so the content leans toward practical workflows rather than general introductions to collecting.
The site is organized around tasks and reference material. From its navigation, the main areas cover:
- Guides — finding artwork, saving storage space, scanning media, and ripping CDs, including separate instructions for Linux, macOS and Windows.
- Reference — codes and identifiers, music sources, MusicBee setup, and naming conventions.
- Projects and Bibles — long-form community documents such as the QF Bible and the Salty Bible.
- FAQ and Fun — orientation material and lighter community content.
Who it is for
The wiki assumes you already have a library and want to manage it better. A typical reader might have thousands of ripped albums, be unsure how to name files consistently, want higher-quality cover art, or need to free up disk space without losing anything important. Someone who just wants a music player recommendation will find less here than someone wrestling with folder structures, tags or scan quality.
How to use it
Start with the FAQ for orientation, then jump straight to the guide matching your operating system or task. If you are new to ripping, the platform-specific CD ripping pages are the most concrete entry point. For library-wide consistency, the naming and MusicBee sections are worth reading together, since naming rules only pay off if your player or tagger applies them the same way.
As a next step, decide which single problem costs you the most time — inconsistent names, missing artwork or shrinking disk space — and read that section first rather than working through the wiki in order.
How do I rip CDs on Linux, macOS, or Windows?
The MH Wiki is a community reference for media hoarders, and its "Ripping cds" section splits the task by operating system — Linux, macOS and Windows each get their own guide — so you can jump straight to the platform you actually use rather than reading a generic tutorial that assumes Windows.
What each platform guide covers
- Windows: the most common starting point for newcomers, with the widest choice of rippers and the most hand-holding documentation.
- macOS: typically leans on tools that fit Apple's ecosystem, including options that use the system's own CD handling.
- Linux: usually command-line oriented, which suits users who want scriptable, repeatable rips across a large collection.
The wiki also links onward to related topics such as finding artwork, saving space, scanning media, and codes and identifiers — the metadata side of ripping that determines whether your files stay organised years later.
A practical way to decide
If you are ripping a handful of discs, pick the guide for the computer you already own and follow it start to finish. If you are ripping hundreds, the more important decision is your output format and folder structure, because re-ripping later is far more painful than choosing the right settings now. Check the "Saving Space" and "Codes and Identifiers" pages alongside the ripping guide before you begin.
For background on the wider hobby, MH Wiki is the natural starting point, and MusicBrainz is the usual destination for the disc IDs and release metadata that make a ripped library searchable.
What are the best methods for scanning and saving artwork for media files?
For most people, the practical answer is a two-stage method: scan at a higher resolution than you plan to keep, then save a smaller, consistently named copy alongside the media. The MH Wiki's section headings point to exactly this workflow — it groups "Scanning" with "Saving Space" and "Finding Artwork", while "Naming" sits separately under Reference — which suggests the site treats scanning, storage and file naming as related tasks rather than one-off steps.
A workable scanning routine
- Scan flat items (booklets, inserts, cards) at 600 dpi if your scanner allows it. That gives you room to crop, straighten and downscale without losing detail.
- Scan at 300 dpi for anything you only need for on-screen browsing; it keeps files smaller and is usually enough for a front cover.
- Crop to the artwork edge, not the scanner glass, and straighten before saving. Doing this once at high resolution saves repeating it later.
- Keep the full-resolution scan as your master, then export a compressed version for daily use.
Saving and naming
Store artwork in a predictable place and name it predictably. A common convention is one folder per album or title, with files named for their role — front, back, booklet page number, disc — so they sort in a sensible order. The MH Wiki's "Naming" reference section is the place to check for community conventions if you want your files to match what other hoarders expect.
For format, use a lossless format such as PNG or TIFF for masters and a quality-controlled JPEG or WebP for the copy embedded in or displayed with your media. Avoid repeatedly re-saving JPEGs, since each save degrades the image.
Finding artwork you did not scan
If you cannot scan an item yourself, the MH Wiki's "Finding Artwork" section is the natural starting point. For general reference on releases and cover images, MusicBrainz and Discogs are widely used, though cover images there vary in resolution and provenance. For playback and tagging, MusicBee is referenced by the wiki itself as a music source/player, and it can display and manage embedded artwork.
Choosing between embedding and sidecar files
| Approach | Best for | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Embedded in the file | Portability; artwork travels with the track | Larger media files; re-embedding needed if you change art |
| Separate image file in the folder | Easy to swap, inspect and archive | Some players ignore it; naming must be consistent |
A sensible default: embed a modestly sized front cover for portability, and keep the high-resolution master plus any extra scans as separate files in the folder. That way your library stays usable on phones and portable players while your archive retains the detail.
Next step: pick one album, scan or download its front and back at 600 dpi, crop and straighten them, save the masters, then export 300 dpi or smaller versions named "front" and "back" in the album folder. Once that pattern feels right, repeat it across the collection rather than experimenting album by album.
How can I manage storage space when hoarding media files?
Managing storage while hoarding media is mostly about deciding what deserves to stay local and what can be re-fetched or stored compactly. The MH Wiki is built around exactly that daily workflow: its navigation groups topics such as Saving Space, Scanning Media, Ripping CDs (with separate guides for Linux, macOS, and Windows), and Finding Artwork, alongside reference material on codes, identifiers, and music sources. That structure reflects a practical split between shrinking files, verifying what you already have, and knowing where a replacement copy could come from.
A workable approach
- Know your library before you shrink it. Scanning and cataloguing files first tells you where the bulk actually sits, so you don't waste effort re-encoding the wrong folders.
- Treat lossy re-encoding as a last resort. It is irreversible and degrades quality; it makes sense mainly for material you rarely revisit or that exists elsewhere in better form.
- Store the heavy originals offline, keep a lean working set on fast storage. External drives, NAS units, or archival discs handle cold storage; your internal drive holds what you actually play or view.
- Keep artwork and metadata with the files. Small in size, but losing them makes a collection much harder to browse later.
- Verify before deleting anything. Confirm a file is intact and that a replacement source exists before you free the space.
Choosing between the main options
| Method | Best for | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Lossless compression / container changes | Music and video you want to keep intact | Modest space savings |
| Lossy re-encode | Low-priority or duplicate copies | Permanent quality loss |
| External or network storage | Large archives, cold backups | Slower access, hardware cost |
| Disc-based archiving | Long-term offline retention | Manual retrieval, media wear |
For a concrete case: if a 4 TB drive is full of concert recordings you watch twice a year, move them to an external drive and keep only recent favourites on the internal disk — rather than re-encoding everything and losing quality you can't recover. If instead the space is consumed by hundreds of duplicate CD rips, deduplicating and re-ripping properly once is the better fix, which is where the MH Wiki's CD-ripping guides for each operating system become relevant.
A useful next step is to run a full scan of your library and sort folders by total size before changing anything; that single pass usually shows that a small number of directories account for most of the pressure.
What are the recommended music sources and naming conventions for MusicBee?
The MH Wiki points to MusicBee as a cataloguing tool for hoarders, but it does not publish a single recommended list of music sources or a mandatory naming scheme on its welcome page. Instead, the wiki separates sourcing from naming: one section covers "Music Sources," while a separate "MusicBee Naming" page deals with how files and tags should be structured inside MusicBee.
What the wiki actually offers
- Music Sources – a reference section for where music can be obtained, aimed at people building or maintaining large libraries.
- MusicBee Naming – guidance for configuring MusicBee's file-organisation and renaming rules, so the same conventions apply across an entire collection.
- Codes and Identifiers – a companion reference for the identifiers used to distinguish releases, which matters when two editions of the same album would otherwise collide.
- Ripping guides – separate pages for Windows, macOS and Linux, covering the step before naming: getting accurate files off physical media.
The practical takeaway is that the wiki treats sourcing and naming as two decisions, not one. Sourcing determines what you have; naming determines whether you can find it again.
A concrete scenario
Suppose you rip a CD on Windows and add it to MusicBee. Without a naming rule, tracks may land as 01 Track01.mp3 in a folder named after the disc. Six months later, a second pressing of the same album arrives with different mastering. If both were filed under the same folder and title pattern, they collide. Using the wiki's identifiers reference alongside a MusicBee naming pattern that includes catalogue number or release year lets both copies coexist and remain distinguishable.
How to choose your own conventions
| Decision | Option | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Folder structure | Artist / Album | Simple, but weak for compilations and classical |
| Folder structure | Artist / Year – Album | Separates editions, longer paths |
| Filename | Track number + title | Readable, but breaks with multi-disc sets |
| Filename | Disc-track + title | Handles box sets, slightly less tidy |
| Tags | Fill everything manually | Accurate, slow at scale |
| Tags | Automated lookup | Fast, but needs review for edge cases |
Start by writing down one rule for folders and one for filenames, then apply it in MusicBee's renaming settings before importing anything new. The MH Wiki's naming page is the place to check the specifics of those settings, and its ripping guides cover the earlier step. For general MusicBee documentation, see MusicBee.
What are the QF Bible and Salty Bible on MH Wiki?
The QF Bible and the Salty Bible are two named reference "bibles" hosted on MH Wiki, a community wiki for media hoarders. In the site's own navigation they sit alongside the FAQ, guides on finding artwork, saving space, scanning media and ripping CDs, and reference material such as codes and identifiers — so they read as deep-dive documentation rather than introductory pages.
What each one is for
- The QF Bible — a reference document in the wiki's Bibles section, aimed at the "quality-focused" side of hoarding: the people who care less about having a file than about having the right file, properly identified and properly documented.
- The Salty Bible — the companion reference, understood in community usage as the more opinionated, experience-driven counterpart: accumulated hard-won lessons, grievances and practical warnings about sourcing, releases and common mistakes.
The names themselves are community shorthand rather than official standards. "QF" reads as quality-first/quality-focused, and "salty" is hoarder slang for the jaded, been-burned-before perspective — the tone of someone who has seen too many mislabelled rips.
How to use them
Treat both as lookup documents, not cover-to-cover reads. A practical workflow:
- Start with the wiki's general guides when you are learning a task — ripping a CD, scanning artwork, freeing up disk space.
- Move to the Bibles when you hit a judgement call: which release to keep, how to identify something ambiguous, whether a source is trustworthy.
- Cross-check against the wiki's reference pages on codes and identifiers, since both Bibles lean on that vocabulary.
Who benefits most
New hoarders get the most from the QF Bible as a grounding in what "good" looks like before they build a library. People with an existing collection tend to get more from the Salty Bible, because its value is in recognising the traps they have already half-fell into. If you only have time for one, pick based on whether you are building or auditing.
For the actual content, read both directly at MH Wiki — the Bibles section is where the detail lives, and the surrounding guides give the context needed to apply it.
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