Beets

2024-04-20 468 words 3 minutes

Contents

Beets Music Tagger

Installation

# dnf install beets beets-plugins
pip install beets

Quickstart

# Import a whole folder
beet import ~/Music

# Import a single file, moving it to its new location
beet import -m Charly_Garcia-Los_Dinosaurios.opus

Configuration

Config file must have .yaml extension, yml extension won’t be recognized

cat > ~/.config/beets/config.yaml << 'EOF'
import:
    #move: yes # Move files instead of copying them (overwrites copy option)
    copy: no   # Do not copy files to de Music directory
    write: no  # Do not write tags when adding to the database
    incremental: yes # Skip importing directories already added
    log: beets.log

paths:
    # Filename format
    default: $albumartist/$album/$track-$title
    singleton: Singles/$artist-$title
    comp: $genre/$album/$track-$title # Compilations
    albumtype:soundtrack: Soundtracks/$album/$track-$title

asciify_paths: yes

EOF

Other options:

replace: RegEx/Replacement pairs to be applied to all filenames
set_fields: Default field values for new music, as a dictionary

Plugins

# Install
pip install beets[fetchart,lyrics,lastgenre]
cat >> ~/.config/beets/config.yaml << 'EOF'
plugins: fetchart lyrics lastgenre
pluginpath:
    - /usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/beetsplug

Some useful plugins. Those marked with X are external, the others native Those marked with D are deprecated, inactive projects

Autotagger

chroma: Use Acoustid fingerprinting to identify audio files
fromfilename: Guess metadata for untagged tracks from their filenames

Metadata

parentwork: Fetch work titles and works they are part of
fetchart: Fetch album cover art from various sources
embedart: Embed album art images into files’ metadata
ftintitle: Add “featured” artists to the title field
beets-yearfixer: Attempts to fix missing original_year or year(X)
beets-importreplace: Perform regex replacements on incoming metadata (X)
beets-xtractor: Fetch attributes like is_instrumental or mood_happy (X)

Files

beets-check: Automatically checksums your files (X)
beets-alternatives: Different versions of your songs for each device (X)
drop2beets: Import singles as soon as they are dropped in a folder (X)
duplicates: List duplicate tracks or albums
beets-noimport: Add directories to the incremental import skip list (X)

Miscellaneous

beets-ydl: downloads audio from youtube-dl (X,D)
beets-autofix: Automates repetitive tasks (X)

Playback

random: Randomly choose albums and tracks from your library
cmus: Integrates with cmus music player(X)
play: sends the results of a music query to your music player (X,D)

Shell Completion

You can get completion script by running beet completion. From there you have two options available.

Loading the script dinamically. This will load an updated script every time ~/.bashrc is sourced

echo 'eval "$(beet completion)"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Dump the script into a file. If you’re worry about loading times, use this option. The cabeat is that you will have to create a new script every time you add a new plugin

beet completion > ~/.beetrc
echo 'source ~/.beetrc' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Be warned that you will have to escape special characters, for example for queries:

# Note the slash in front of the colon
beet list artpath\:

Files and Directories

Database: ~/.config/beets/library.db
Music Directory: ~/Music