beets.md

Beets

Change MusicBrainz IDs of imported albums

First, change the ID metadata.

beet modify "<album name>" mb_albumid=<musicbrainz id>

Then, reimport using the -c flag to copy files in place and -a to use the auto-tagger plugin.

beet import -ca "<path to album directory>"

Import pre-tagged directories

beet import -C -A -W <dir>

For a set of directories, a for-loop like this will suffice:

for dir in *; do
  if [ -d "${dir}" ]; then
    pushd "${dir}"
    for album in *; do
      if [ -d "${album}" ]; then
        beet import -C -A -W "${album}"
      fi
    done
    popd
  fi
done

Edit all tags for an album

Use the 'edit' plugin to alter metadata via a text editor. Simply add 'edit' to the plugins list in the Beets config files, and then run:

beet edit "<album>" --all

Replace embedded cover art

In cases where the cover art downloaded using the fetchart plugin is too large, extract the file, compress it, and then re-embed it.

To extract cover art directly, run:

beet extractart "<album>"

The output messages will say where the cover image is located, likely as cover.jpg in the album directory.

Then, compress the file using ImageMagick, e.g.:

magick cover.jpg -strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0 -quality 95% cover-new.jpg
mv cover-new.jpg cover.jpg

Alternately, instead of using extractart and then magick, one can use ffmpeg directly:

ffmpeg -i "<song file"> -map 0:v cover.jpg

In practice, though, the defaults FFmpeg will produce an overly-compressed file. The above ImageMagick example is less aggressive.

A third option, of course, is to simply download a new cover art file to replace the existing one.

With an appropriate cover art file, simply run:

beet embedart -f cover.jpg "<album>"

Making exact queries

The QUERY string will match precisely if <field>:<string> is specified, and it allows regexes with <field>::<string>. However, short strings, when used with the : syntax, will nevertheless match many, many files as if a regex had been specified. Therefore, for any specific query, use ^ and $ in a regex:

beet <command> '<field>::^<string>$'

Doing so will guarantee that the patterns will be matched.

Scan library for missing MusicBrainz tags

To scan the library and write missing tags to the Beets database, first enable the mbscan plugin by adding it to the plugins: <list> field in the ~/.config/beets/config.yaml file. Then, run:

beet mbscan

Adjust the command by running: beet mbscan <query> to only update specific files.

NOTE: This command will remove any changes (e.g. fixed capitalization/spelling, additional metadata fields) to the files in the library. Only run this when existing tags have been systematically corrupted.

List all album Musicbrainz IDs

Use beet list and pass the -a (return albums) flag and use -f to format the output:

beet list -af '$mb_albumid: $album'

Rename (and move) files and albums

To rename files, use the edit plugin:

beet edit "<query>"

where "" is a string that corresponds to the album and/or track metadata. The command will open a temporary YAML file for editing. Save the changes, exit the editor, and accept the changes at the final prompt.

To rename albums, pass the -a flag to beet edit:

beet edit -a "<query>"

Note that changing track titles will move the file to correspond to its new title. Changing the album for all tracks will not move them to a new directory. The album metadata itself (-a) needs to be changed for that to happen.

Specify MBID during import

To specify the MBID for an album directly and skip the prompt / metadata-scanning behavior, use the --search-id flag.

beet import --search-id <mbid> <path>