I bought a new T series Thinkpad last year. As long as you’re not using it as a hammer or a jack stand, it will hold up pretty well. Supports Linux well. Good build quality.
If you do need that level of build quality I would look at the Panasonic Toughbooks. Just don’t drop one one the floor. It may break. The floor, not the laptop. The laptop will be fine.
How much free time do you people have? At that point I’d just use AI
Free time? What’s that? /s, kinda
Most of that time is spent uploading the tag info up to MusicBrainz. If the band/artist or album isn’t already there, It can indeed take that long. Their web interface is a confusing mess, at least for me. I don’t usually have more than 1 album at a time to deal with manually though, and that not very often.
As for using an LLM (I refuse to call them AI. They ain’t there yet.), if it works, cool! More than likely though, they would try pulling from MusicBrainz, fail to find a match and give up, same as Picard has for OP. An LLM agent harness might be able to more quickly upload album tags where the artist or album doesn’t yet exist in the database though. Hadn’t thought of that before and may give it a try next time the issue crops up. Thanks!
My routine for that is about what you would expect, Coffee, listen to the track, Research it, Manually fill out as much of the tag as I can, upload to MusicBrainz, Repeat.
Each album takes an hour or two. Faster if I can find a page somewhere with the whole album listing, preferably including the names of everyone involved with the album.
There isn’t an easier way that I’ve found.
Every few days I’ll have Picard rescan the collection in the unlikely event someone else has also worked on some of the tracks I’m working on. It does happen, not very often, but it does happen.
Other than needing more RAM, I think it will last a while. The 16GB I got was as much as I could afford.