Changelog goes here! Please add your entry to the bottom of one of the lists below!
With this release, beets now requires Python 3.7 or later (it removes support for Python 3.6).
Major new features:
- The beets importer UI received a major overhaul. Several new configuration options are available for customizing layout and colors:
ui_options
.3721
5028
New features:
plugins/mbsubmit
: add new prompt choices helping further to submit unmatched tracks to MusicBrainz faster.plugins/spotify
: We now fetch track's ISRC, EAN, and UPC identifiers from Spotify when using thespotifysync
command.4992
plugins/discogs
: supply a value for the cover_art_url attribute, for use by fetchart.429
update-cmd
: added`-e
` flag for excluding fields from being updated./plugins/deezer
: Import rank and other attributes from Deezer during import and add a function to update the rank of existing items.4841
- resolve transl-tracklisting relations for pseudo releases and merge data with the actual release
654
- Fetchart: Use the right field (spotify_album_id) to obtain the Spotify album id
4803
- Prevent reimporting album if it is permanently removed from Spotify
4800
- Added option to use cover_art_url as an album art source in the fetchart plugin.
4707
/plugins/fetchart
: The plugin can now get album art from spotify.- Added option to specify a URL in the embedart plugin.
83
list-cmd
singleton:true queries have been made fasterlist-cmd
singleton:1 and singleton:0 can now alternatively be used in queries, same as comp- --from-logfile now parses log files using a UTF-8 encoding in beets/beets/ui/commands.py.
4693
/plugins/bareasc
lookups have been made fasterlist-cmd
lookups using the pattern operator :: have been made faster- Added additional error handling for spotify plugin.
4686
- We now import the remixer field from Musicbrainz into the library.
4428
/plugins/mbsubmit
: Added a new mbsubmit command to print track information to be submitted to MusicBrainz after initial import.4455
- Added spotify_updated field to track when the information was last updated.
- We now import and tag the album information when importing singletons using Spotify source.
4398
/plugins/spotify
: The plugin now provides an additional command spotifysync that allows getting track popularity and audio features information from Spotify.4094
/plugins/spotify
: The plugin now records Spotify-specific IDs in the spotify_album_id, spotify_artist_id, and spotify_track_id fields.4348
- Create the parental directories for database if they do not exist.
3808
4327
musicbrainz-config
: a newmusicbrainz.enabled
option allows disabling the MusicBrainz metadata source during the autotagging process/plugins/kodiupdate
: Now supports multiple kodi instances4101
- Add the item fields
bitrate_mode
,encoder_info
andencoder_settings
. - Add query prefixes
=
and~
. - A new configuration option,
duplicate_keys
, lets you change which fields the beets importer uses to identify duplicates.1133
4199
- Add
exact match <exact-match>
queries, using the prefixes=
and=~
.4251
/plugins/discogs
: Permit appending style to genre.plugins/discogs
: Implement item_candidates for matching singletons.plugins/discogs
: Check for compliant discogs_client module./plugins/convert
: Add a new auto_keep option that automatically converts files but keeps the originals in the library.1840
4302
- Added a
-P
(or--disable-plugins
) flag to specify one/multiple plugin(s) to be disabled at startup. import-options
: Add support for re-running the importer on paths in log files that were created with the-l
(or--logfile
) argument.4379
4387
- Preserve mtimes from archives
4392
- Add
%sunique{} <sunique>
template to disambiguate between singletons.4438
- Add a new
import.ignored_alias_types
config option to allow for specific alias types to be skipped over when importing items/albums. /plugins/smartplaylist
: A new--pretend
option lets the user see what a new or changed smart playlist saved in the config is actually returning.4573
/plugins/fromfilename
: Add debug log messages that inform when the plugin replaced bad (missing) artist, title or tracknumber metadata.4561
4600
musicbrainz-config
: MusicBrainz release pages often link to related metadata sources like Discogs, Bandcamp, Spotify, Deezer and Beatport. When enabled via themusicbrainz.external_ids
options, release ID's will be extracted from those URL's and imported to the library.4220
/plugins/convert
: Add support for generating m3u8 playlists together with converted media files.4373
- Fetch the
release_group_title
field from MusicBrainz. 🐛 4809 plugins/discogs
: Add support for applying album information on singleton imports. 🐛 4716/plugins/smartplaylist
: During explicit runs of thesplupdate
command, the log message "Creating playlist ..."" is now displayed instead of hidden in the debug log, which states some form of progress through the UI.4861
plugins/subsonicupdate
: Updates are now triggered whenever either the beets database is changed or a smart playlist is created/updated. 🐛 4862plugins/importfeeds
: Add a new output format allowing to save a playlist once per import session. 🐛 4863- Make ArtResizer work with
PIL
/pillow
10.0.0 removals.4869
- A new configuration option,
duplicate_verbose_prompt
, allows changing how duplicates are presented during import. 🐛 4866 /plugins/embyupdate
: Add handling for private users by addinguserid
config option.4402
/plugins/substitute
: Add the new plugin substitute as an alternative to the rewrite plugin. The main difference between them being that rewrite modifies files' metadata and substitute does not.2786
- Add support for
artists
andalbumartists
multi-valued tags.505
/plugins/autobpm
: Add the autobpm plugin which uses Librosa to calculate the BPM of the audio.3856
/plugins/fetchart
: Fix the error with CoverArtArchive where the maxwidth option would not be used to download a pre-sized thumbnail for release groups, as is already done with releases./plugins/fetchart
: Fix the error with CoverArtArchive where no cover would be found when the maxwidth option matches a pre-sized thumbnail size, but no thumbnail is provided by CAA. We now fallback to the raw image./plugins/advancedrewrite
: Add an advanced version of the rewrite plugin which allows to replace fields based on a given library query./plugins/lyrics
: Add LRCLIB as a new lyrics provider and a new synced option to prefer synced lyrics over plain lyrics.import-cmd
: Expose import.quiet_fallback as CLI option.import-cmd
: Expose import.incremental_skip_later as CLI option./plugins/smartplaylist
: Add new config option smartplaylist.output./plugins/smartplaylist
: Expose config options as CLI options.
Bug fixes:
/plugins/spotify
: Improve handling of ConnectionError./plugins/deezer
: Improve Deezer plugin error handling and set requests timeout to 10 seconds.4983
/plugins/spotify
: Add bad gateway (502) error handling./plugins/spotify
: Add a limit of 3 retries, instead of retrying endlessly when the API is not available.- Fix a crash when the Spotify API timeouts or does not return a Retry-After interval.
4942
/plugins/scrub
: Fixed the import behavior where scrubbed database tags were restored to newly imported tracks with config settingsscrub.auto: yes
andimport.write: no
.4326
/plugins/deezer
: Fixed the error where Deezer plugin would crash if non-Deezer id is passed during import./plugins/fetchart
: Fix fetching from Cover Art Archive when the maxwidth option is set to one of the supported Cover Art Archive widths./plugins/discogs
: Fix "Discogs plugin replacing Feat. or Ft. with a comma" by fixing an oversight that removed a functionality from the code base when the MetadataSourcePlugin abstract class was introduced in PR's #3335 and #3371.4401
/plugins/convert
: Set defaultmax_bitrate
value toNone
to avoid transcoding when this parameter is not set.4472
/plugins/replaygain
: Avoid a crash when errors occur in the analysis backend.4506
- We now use Python's defaults for command-line argument encoding, which should reduce the chance for errors and "file not found" failures when invoking other command-line tools, especially on Windows.
4507
- We now respect the Spotify API's rate limiting, which avoids crashing when the API reports code 429 (too many requests).
4370
- Fix implicit paths OR queries (e.g.
beet list /path/ , /other-path/
) which have previously been returning the entire library.1865
- The Discogs release ID is now populated correctly to the discogs_albumid field again (it was no longer working after Discogs changed their release URL format).
4225
- The autotagger no longer considers all matches without a MusicBrainz ID as duplicates of each other.
4299
/plugins/convert
: Resize album art when embedding2116
/plugins/deezer
: Fix auto tagger pagination issues (fetch beyond the first 25 tracks of a release)./plugins/spotify
: Fix auto tagger pagination issues (fetch beyond the first 50 tracks of a release)./plugins/lyrics
: Fix Genius search by using query params instead of body./plugins/unimported
: The newignore_subdirectories
configuration option added in 1.6.0 now has a default value if it hasn't been set./plugins/deezer
: Tolerate missing fields when searching for singleton tracks.4116
/plugins/replaygain
: The type of the internalr128_track_gain
andr128_album_gain
fields was changed from integer to float to fix loss of precision due to truncation.4169
- Fix a regression in the previous release that caused a TypeError when moving files across filesystems.
4168
/plugins/convert
: Deleting the original files during conversion no longer logs output when thequiet
flag is enabled.plugins/web
: Fix handling of "query" requests. Previously queries consisting of more than one token (separated by a slash) always returned an empty result./plugins/discogs
: Skip Discogs query on insufficiently tagged files (artist and album tags missing) to prevent arbitrary candidate results.4227
plugins/lyrics
: Fixed issues with the Tekstowo.pl and Genius backends where some non-lyrics content got included in the lyricsplugins/limit
: Better header formatting to improve indexplugins/replaygain
: Correctly handle theoverwrite
config option, which forces recomputing ReplayGain values on import even for tracks that already have the tags.plugins/embedart
: Fix a crash when using recent versions of ImageMagick and thecompare_threshold
option.4272
plugins/lyrics
: Fixed issue with Genius header being included in lyrics, added test case of up-to-date Genius htmlplugins/importadded
: Fix a bug with recently added reflink import option that causes a crash when ImportAdded plugin enabled.4389
plugins/convert
: Fix a bug with the wma format alias./plugins/web
: Fix get file from item./plugins/lastgenre
: Fix a duplicated entry for trip hop in the default genre list.4510
plugins/lyrics
: Fixed issue with Tekstowo backend not actually checking if the found song matches.4406
plugins/embedart
: Add support for ImageMagick 7.1.1-124836
/plugins/fromfilename
: Fix failed detection of <track> <title> filename patterns.4561
4600
- Fix issue where deletion of flexible fields on an album doesn't cascade to items
4662
- Fix issue where
beet write
continuously retags thealbumtypes
metadata field in files. Additionally broken data could have been added to the library when the tag was read from file back into the library usingbeet update
. It is required for all users to check if such broken data is present in the library. Following the instructions described here, a sanity check and potential fix is easily possible.4528
- Fix updating "data_source" on re-imports and improve logging when flexible attributes are being re-imported.
4726
/plugins/fetchart
: Correctly select the cover art from fanart.tv with the highest number of likes/plugins/lyrics
: Fix a crash with the Google backend when processing some web pages.4875
- Modifying flexible attributes of albums now cascade to the individual album tracks, similar to how fixed album attributes have been cascading to tracks already. A new option
--noinherit/-I
tomodify <modify-cmd>
allows changing this behaviour.4822
- Fix bug where an interrupted import process poisons the database, causing a null path that can't be removed.
4906
/plugins/discogs
: Fix bug where empty artist and title fields would return None instead of an empty list.4973
- Fix bug regarding displaying tracks that have been changed not being displayed unless the detail configuration is enabled.
For plugin developers:
- beets now explicitly prevents multiple plugins to define replacement functions for the same field. When previously defining template_fields for the same field in two plugins, the last loaded plugin would silently overwrite the function defined by the other plugin. Now, beets will raise an exception when this happens.
5002
For packagers:
- As noted above, the minimum Python version is now 3.7.
- We fixed a version for the dependency on the Confuse library.
4167
- The minimum required version of
mediafile
is now 0.9.0.
Other changes:
- Add
sphinx
andsphinx_rtd_theme
as dependencies for a newdocs
extra4643
/plugins/absubmit
: Deprecate theabsubmit
plugin since AcousticBrainz has stopped accepting new submissions.4627
/plugins/acousticbrainz
: Deprecate theacousticbrainz
plugin since the AcousticBrainz project has shut down.4627
/plugins/limit
: Limit query results to head or tail (lslimit
command only)/plugins/fish
: Add--output
option./plugins/lyrics
: Remove Musixmatch from default enabled sources as they are currently blocking requests from the beets user agent.4585
/faq
:multidisc
: Elaborated the multi-disc FAQ4806
/faq
:src
: Removed some long lines.
This release is our first experiment with time-based releases! We are aiming to publish a new release of beets every 3 months. We therefore have a healthy but not dizzyingly long list of new features and fixes.
With this release, beets now requires Python 3.6 or later (it removes support for Python 2.7, 3.4, and 3.5). There are also a few other dependency changes---if you're a maintainer of a beets package for a package manager, thank you for your ongoing efforts, and please see the list of notes below.
Major new features:
- When fetching genres from MusicBrainz, we now include genres from the release group (in addition to the release). We also prioritize genres based on the number of votes. Thanks to
aereaux
. - Primary and secondary release types from MusicBrainz are now stored in a new
albumtypes
field. Thanks toedgars-supe
.2200
- An accompanying new
/plugins/albumtypes
includes some options for formatting this newalbumtypes
field. Thanks toedgars-supe
. - The
modify-cmd
andimport-cmd
can now use/reference/pathformat
formats when setting fields. For example, you can now dobeet modify title='$track $title'
to put track numbers into songs' titles.488
Other new things:
/plugins/permissions
: The plugin now sets cover art permissions to match the audio file permissions./plugins/unimported
: A new configuration option supports excluding specific subdirectories in library./plugins/info
: Add support for an--album
flag./plugins/export
: Similarly add support for an--album
flag.beet move
now highlights path differences in color (when enabled).- When moving files and a direct rename of a file is not possible (for example, when crossing filesystems), beets now copies to a temporary file in the target folder first and then moves to the destination instead of directly copying the target path. This gets us closer to always updating files atomically. Thanks to
catap
.4060
/plugins/fetchart
: Add a new option to store cover art as non-progressive image. This is useful for DAPs that do not support progressive images. Setdeinterlace: yes
in your configuration to enable this conversion./plugins/fetchart
: Add a new option to change the file format of cover art images. This may also be useful for DAPs that only support some image formats.- Support flexible attributes in
%aunique
.2678
3553
- Make
%aunique
faster, especially when using inline fields.4145
Bug fixes:
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix a crash when Beautiful Soup is not installed.4027
/plugins/discogs
: Support a new Discogs URL format for IDs.4080
/plugins/discogs
: Remove built-in rate-limiting because the Discogs Python library we use now has its own rate-limiting.4108
/plugins/export
: Fix some duplicated output./plugins/aura
: Fix a potential security hole when serving image files.4160
For plugin developers:
- :py
beets.library.Item.destination
now accepts a replacements argument to be used in favor of the default. - The pluginload event is now sent after plugin types and queries are available, not before.
- A new plugin event, album_removed, is called when an album is removed from the library (even when its file is not deleted from disk).
Here are some notes for packagers:
- As noted above, the minimum Python version is now 3.6.
- We fixed a flaky test, named test_album_art in the test_zero.py file, that some distributions had disabled. Disabling this test should no longer be necessary.
4037
4038
- This version of beets no longer depends on the six library.
4030
- The gmusic plugin was removed since Google Play Music has been shut down. Thus, the optional dependency on gmusicapi does not exist anymore.
4089
This long overdue release of beets includes far too many exciting and useful features than could ever be satisfactorily enumerated. As a technical detail, it also introduces two new external libraries: MediaFile and Confuse used to be part of beets but are now reusable dependencies---packagers, please take note. Finally, this is the last version of beets where we intend to support Python 2.x and 3.5; future releases will soon require Python 3.6.
One non-technical change is that we moved our official #beets
home on IRC from freenode to Libera.Chat.
Major new features:
- Fields in queries now fall back to an item's album and check its fields too. Notably, this allows querying items by an album's attribute: in other words,
beet list foo:bar
will not only find tracks with the foo attribute; it will also find tracks on albums that have the foo attribute. This may be particularly useful in thepath-format-config
, which matches individual items to decide which path to use. Thanks toFichteFoll
.2797
2988
- A new
reflink
config option instructs the importer to create fast, copy-on-write file clones on filesystems that support them. Thanks torubdos
. - A new
/plugins/unimported
lets you find untracked files in your library directory. - The
/plugins/aura
has arrived! Try out the future of remote music library access today. - We now fetch information about works from MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz matches provide the fields
work
(the title),mb_workid
(the MBID), andwork_disambig
(the disambiguation string). Thanks todosoe
.2580
3272
- A new
/plugins/parentwork
gets information about the original work, which is useful for classical music. Thanks todosoe
.2580
3279
/plugins/bpd
: BPD now supports most of the features of version 0.16 of the MPD protocol. This is enough to get it talking to more complicated clients like ncmpcpp, but there are still some incompatibilities, largely due to MPD commands we don't support yet. (Let us know if you find an MPD client that doesn't get along with BPD!)3214
800
- A new
/plugins/deezer
can autotag tracks and albums using the Deezer database. Thanks torhlahuja
.3355
- A new
/plugins/bareasc
provides a new query type: "bare ASCII" queries that ignore accented characters, treating them as though they were plain ASCII characters. Use the#
prefix withlist-cmd
or other commands.3882
/plugins/fetchart
: The plugin can now get album art from last.fm.3530
/plugins/web
: The API now supports the HTTP DELETE and PATCH methods for modifying items. They are disabled by default; setreadonly: no
in your configuration file to enable modification via the API.3870
Other new things:
beet remove
now also allows interactive selection of items from the query, similar tobeet modify
.- Enable HTTPS for MusicBrainz by default and add configuration option https for custom servers. See
musicbrainz-config
for more details. /plugins/mpdstats
: Add a new strip_path option to help build the right local path from MPD information./plugins/convert
: Conversion can now parallelize conversion jobs on Python 3./plugins/lastgenre
: Add a new title_case config option to make title-case formatting optional.- There's a new message when running
beet config
when there's no available configuration file.3779
- When importing a duplicate album, the prompt now says "keep all" instead of "keep both" to reflect that there may be more than two albums involved.
3569
/plugins/chroma
: The plugin now updates file metadata after generating fingerprints through the submit command./plugins/lastgenre
: Added more heavy metal genres to the built-in genre filter lists.- A new
/plugins/subsonicplaylist
can import playlists from a Subsonic server. /plugins/subsonicupdate
: The plugin now automatically chooses between token- and password-based authentication based on the server version.- A new
extra_tags
configuration option lets you use more metadata in MusicBrainz queries to further narrow the search. - A new
/plugins/fish
adds Fish shell tab autocompletion to beets. plugins/fetchart
andplugins/embedart
: Added a newquality
option that controls the quality of the image output when the image is resized.plugins/keyfinder
: Added support for keyfinder-cli. Thanks toBrainDamage
.plugins/fetchart
: Added a newhigh_resolution
config option to allow downloading of higher resolution iTunes artwork (at the expense of file size).3391
plugins/discogs
: The plugin applies two new fields: discogs_labelid and discogs_artistid.3413
/plugins/export
: Added a new-f
(--format
) flag, which can export your data as JSON, JSON lines, CSV, or XML. Thanks toaustinmm
.3402
/plugins/convert
: Added a new-l
(--link
) flag andlink
option as well as the-H
(--hardlink
) flag andhardlink
option, which symlink or hardlink files that do not need to be converted (instead of copying them).2324
/plugins/replaygain
: The plugin now supports aper_disc
option that enables calculation of album ReplayGain on disc level instead of album level. Thanks tosamuelnilsson
.293
/plugins/replaygain
: The newffmpeg
ReplayGain backend supportsR128_
tags.3056
plugins/replaygain
: A newr128_targetlevel
configuration option defines the reference volume for files usingR128_
tags.targetlevel
only configures the reference volume forREPLAYGAIN_
files.3065
/plugins/discogs
: The plugin now collects the "style" field. Thanks tothedevilisinthedetails
.2579
3251
/plugins/absubmit
: By default, the plugin now avoids re-analyzing files that already have AcousticBrainz data. There are newforce
andpretend
options to help control this new behavior. Thanks toSusannaMaria
.3318
/plugins/discogs
: The plugin now also gets genre information and a newdiscogs_albumid
field from the Discogs API. Thanks tothedevilisinthedetails
.465
3322
/plugins/acousticbrainz
: The plugin now fetches two more additional fields:moods_mirex
andtimbre
. Thanks tomalcops
.2860
/plugins/playlist
and/plugins/smartplaylist
: A newforward_slash
config option facilitates compatibility with MPD on Windows. Thanks toMartyLake
.3331
3334
- The data_source field, which indicates which metadata source was used during an autotagging import, is now also applied as an album-level flexible attribute.
3350
1693
/plugins/beatport
: The plugin now gets the musical key, BPM, and genre for each track.2080
- A new
/plugins/bpsync
can synchronize metadata changes from the Beatport database (like the existing/plugins/mbsync
for MusicBrainz). /plugins/hook
: The plugin now treats non-zero exit codes as errors.3409
/plugins/subsonicupdate
: A newurl
configuration replaces the older (and now deprecated) separatehost
,port
, andcontextpath
config options. As a consequence, the plugin can now talk to Subsonic over HTTPS. Thanks tojef
.3449
/plugins/discogs
: The newindex_tracks
option enables incorporation of work names and intra-work divisions into imported track titles. Thanks tocole-miller
.3459
/plugins/web
: The query API now interprets backslashes as path separators to support path queries. Thanks tonmeum
.3567
beet import
now handles tar archives with bzip2 or gzip compression.3606
beet import
also now handles 7z archives, via the py7zr library. Thanks toarogl
.3906
/plugins/plexupdate
: Added an option to use a secure connection to Plex server, and to ignore certificate validation errors if necessary.2871
/plugins/convert
: A newdelete_originals
configuration option can delete the source files after conversion during import. Thanks tologan-arens
.2947
- There is a new
--plugins
(or-p
) CLI flag to specify a list of plugins to load. - A new
genres
option fetches genre information from MusicBrainz. This functionality depends on functionality that is currently unreleased in the python-musicbrainzngs library: see PR #266. Thanks toaereaux
. /plugins/replaygain
: Analysis now happens in parallel using thecommand
andffmpeg
backends.3478
plugins/replaygain
: The bs1770gain backend is removed. Thanks toSamuelCook
.- Added
trackdisambig
which stores the recording disambiguation from MusicBrainz for each track.1904
plugins/fetchart
: The newmax_filesize
configuration sets a maximum target image file size./plugins/badfiles
: Checkers can now run during import with thecheck_on_import
config option./plugins/export
: The plugin is now much faster when using the --include-keys option is used. Thanks tossssam
.- The importer's
set_fields
option now saves all updated fields to on-disk metadata.3925
3927
- We now fetch ISRC identifiers from MusicBrainz. Thanks to
aereaux
. /plugins/metasync
: The plugin now also fetches the "Date Added" field from iTunes databases and stores it in theitunes_dateadded
field. Thanks tosandersantema
./plugins/lyrics
: Added a new Tekstowo.pl lyrics provider. Thanks to various people for the implementation and for reporting issues with the initial version.3344
3904
3905
3994
beet update
will now confirm that the user still wants to update if their library folder cannot be found, preventing the user from accidentally wiping out their beets database. Thanks to user: logan-arens.1934
Fixes:
- Adapt to breaking changes in Python's
ast
module in Python 3.8. /plugins/beatport
: Fix the assignment of the genre field, and rename musical_key to initial_key.3387
/plugins/lyrics
: Fixed the Musixmatch backend for lyrics pages when lyrics are divided into multiple elements on the webpage, and when the lyrics are missing./plugins/web
: Allow use of the backslash character in regex queries.3867
/plugins/web
: Fixed a small bug that caused the album art path to be redacted even wheninclude_paths
option is set.3866
/plugins/discogs
: Fixed a bug with theindex_tracks
option that sometimes caused the index to be discarded. Also, remove the extra semicolon that was added when there is no index track./plugins/subsonicupdate
: The API client was using the POST method rather the GET method. Also includes better exception handling, response parsing, and tests./plugins/the
: Fixed incorrect regex for "the" that matched any 3-letter combination of the letters t, h, e.3701
/plugins/fetchart
: Fixed a bug that caused the plugin to not take environment variables, such as proxy servers, into account when making requests.3450
/plugins/fetchart
: Temporary files for fetched album art that fail validation are now removed./plugins/inline
: In function-style field definitions that refer to flexible attributes, values could stick around from one function invocation to the next. This meant that, when displaying a list of objects, later objects could seem to reuse values from earlier objects when they were missing a value for a given field. These values are now properly undefined.2406
/plugins/bpd
: Seeking by fractions of a second now works as intended, fixing crashes in MPD clients like mpDris2 on seek. Theplaylistid
command now works properly in its zero-argument form.3214
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix a Python 3 incompatibility in the Python Audio Tools backend.3305
/plugins/importadded
: Fixed a crash that occurred when theafter_write
signal was emitted.3301
plugins/replaygain
: Fix the storage format for R128 gain tags.3311
3314
/plugins/discogs
: Fixed a crash that occurred when the master URI isn't set in the API response.2965
3239
/plugins/spotify
: Fix handling of year-only release dates returned by the Spotify albums API. Thanks torhlahuja
.3343
- Fixed a bug that caused the UI to display incorrect track numbers for tracks with index 0 when the
per_disc_numbering
option was set.3346
none_rec_action
does not import automatically whentimid
is enabled. Thanks toRollingStar
.3242
- Fix a bug that caused a crash when tagging items with the beatport plugin.
3374
beet import
now logs which files are ignored when in debug mode.3764
/plugins/bpd
: Fix the transition to next track when in consume mode. Thanks toaereaux
.3437
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix a corner-case with Genius lowercase artist names3446
/plugins/parentwork
: Don't save tracks when nothing has changed.3492
- Added a warning when configuration files defined in the include directive of the configuration file fail to be imported.
3498
- Added normalization to integer values in the database, which should avoid problems where fields like
bpm
would sometimes store non-integer values.762
3507
3508
- Fix a crash when querying for null values.
3516
3517
/plugins/lyrics
: Tolerate a missing lyrics div in the Genius scraper. Thanks tothejli21
.3535
3554
/plugins/lyrics
: Use the artist sort name to search for lyrics, which can help find matches when the artist name has special characters. Thanks tohashhar
.3340
3558
/plugins/replaygain
: Trying to calculate volume gain for an album consisting of some formats usingReplayGain
and some usingR128
will no longer crash; instead it is skipped and and a message is logged. The log message has also been rewritten for to improve clarity. Thanks toautrimpo
.3533
/plugins/lyrics
: Adapt the Genius backend to changes in markup to reduce the scraping failure rate.3535
3594
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix a crash when writing ReST files for a query without results or fetched lyrics.2805
/plugins/fetchart
: Attempt to fetch pre-resized thumbnails from Cover Art Archive if themaxwidth
option matches one of the sizes supported by the Cover Art Archive API. Thanks totrolley
.3637
/plugins/ipfs
: Fix Python 3 compatibility. Thanks tomusoke
.2554
- Fix a bug that caused metadata starting with something resembling a drive letter to be incorrectly split into an extra directory after the colon.
3685
/plugins/mpdstats
: Don't record a skip when stopping MPD, as MPD keeps the current track in the queue. Thanks toaereaux
.3722
- String-typed fields are now normalized to string values, avoiding an occasional crash when using both the
/plugins/fetchart
and the/plugins/discogs
together.3773
3774
- Fix a bug causing PIL to generate poor quality JPEGs when resizing artwork.
3743
plugins/keyfinder
: Catch output fromkeyfinder-cli
that is missing key.2242
plugins/replaygain
: Disable parallel analysis on import by default.3819
/plugins/mpdstats
: Fix Python 2/3 compatibility3798
/plugins/discogs
: Replace the deprecated official discogs-client library with the community supported python3-discogs-client library.3608
/plugins/chroma
: Fixed submitting AcoustID information for tracks that already have a fingerprint.3834
- Allow equals within the value part of the
--set
option to thebeet import
command.2984
- Duplicates can now generate checksums. Thanks
wisp3rwind
for the pointer to how to solve. Thanks toarogl
.2873
- Templates that use
%ifdef
now produce the expected behavior when used in conjunction with non-string fields from the/plugins/types
.3852
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix crashes when a website could not be retrieved, affecting at least the Genius source.3970
/plugins/duplicates
: Fix a crash when running thedup
command with a query that returns no results.3943
/plugins/beatport
: Fix the default assignment of the musical key.3377
/plugins/lyrics
: Improved searching on the Genius backend when the artist contains special characters.3634
/plugins/parentwork
: Also get the composition date of the parent work, instead of just the child work. Thanks toaereaux
.3650
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix a bug in the heuristic for detecting valid lyrics in the Google source.2969
/plugins/thumbnails
: Fix a crash due to an incorrect string type on Python 3.3360
/plugins/fetchart
: The Cover Art Archive source now iterates over all front images instead of blindly selecting the first one./plugins/lyrics
: Removed the LyricWiki source (the site shut down on 21/09/2020)./plugins/subsonicupdate
: The plugin is now functional again. A new auth configuration option is required in the configuration to specify the flavor of authentication to use.4002
For plugin developers:
- MediaFile has been split into a standalone project. Where you used to do
from beets import mediafile
, now just doimport mediafile
. Beets re-exports MediaFile at the old location for backwards-compatibility, but a deprecation warning is raised if you do this since we might drop this wrapper in a future release. - Similarly, we've replaced beets' configuration library (previously called Confit) with a standalone version called Confuse. Where you used to do
from beets.util import confit
, now just doimport confuse
. The code is almost identical apart from the name change. Again, we'll re-export at the old location (with a deprecation warning) for backwards compatibility, but we might stop doing this in a future release. beets.util.command_output
now returns a named tuple containing both the standard output and the standard error data instead of just stdout alone. Client code will need to access thestdout
attribute on the return value. Thanks tozsinskri
.3329
- There were sporadic failures in
test.test_player
. Hopefully these are fixed. If they resurface, please reopen the relevant issue.3309
3330
- The
beets.plugins.MetadataSourcePlugin
base class has been added to simplify development of plugins which query album, track, and search APIs to provide metadata matches for the importer. Refer to the/plugins/spotify
and the/plugins/deezer
for examples of using this template class.3355
- Accessing fields on an Item now falls back to the album's attributes. So, for example,
item.foo
will first look for a field foo on item and, if it doesn't exist, next tries looking for a field named foo on the album that contains item. If you specifically want to access an item's attributes, useItem.get(key, with_album=False)
.2988
Item.keys
also has awith_album
argument now, defaulting toTrue
.- A
revision
attribute has been added toDatabase
. It is increased on every transaction that mutates it.2988
- The classes
AlbumInfo
andTrackInfo
now convey arbitrary attributes instead of a fixed, built-in set of field names (which was important to address1547
). Thanks todosoe
. - Two new events,
mb_album_extract
andmb_track_extract
, let plugins add new fields based on MusicBrainz data. Thanks todosoe
.
For packagers:
- Beets' library for manipulating media file metadata has now been split to a standalone project called MediaFile, released as
mediafile
. Beets now depends on this new package. Beets now depends on Mutagen transitively through MediaFile rather than directly, except in the case of one of beets' plugins (in particular, the/plugins/scrub
). - Beets' library for configuration has been split into a standalone project called Confuse, released as
confuse
. Beets now depends on this package. Confuse has existed separately for some time and is used by unrelated projects, but until now we've been bundling a copy within beets. - We attempted to fix an unreliable test, so a patch to skip or repair the test may no longer be necessary.
- This version drops support for Python 3.4.
- We have removed an optional dependency on bs1770gain.
This small update is part of our attempt to release new versions more often! There are a few important fixes, and we're clearing the deck for a change to beets' dependencies in the next version.
The new feature is:
- You can use the NO_COLOR environment variable to disable terminal colors.
3273
There are some fixes in this release:
- Fix a regression in the last release that made the image resizer fail to detect older versions of ImageMagick.
3269
/plugins/gmusic
: Theoauth_file
config option now supports more flexible path values, including~
for the home directory.3270
/plugins/gmusic
: Fix a crash when using version 12.0.0 or later of thegmusicapi
module.3270
- Fix an incompatibility with Python 3.8's AST changes.
3278
Here's a note for packagers:
pathlib
is now an optional test dependency on Python 3.4+, removing the need for a Debian patch.3275
This release is far too long in coming, but it's a good one. There is the usual torrent of new features and a ridiculously long line of fixes, but there are also some crucial maintenance changes. We officially support Python 3.7 and 3.8, and some performance optimizations can (anecdotally) make listing your library more than three times faster than in the previous version.
The new core features are:
- A new
config-aunique
configuration option allows setting default options for theaunique
template function. - The
albumdisambig
field no longer includes the MusicBrainz release group disambiguation comment. A newreleasegroupdisambig
field has been added.3024
- The
modify-cmd
command now allows resetting fixed attributes. For example,beet modify -a artist:beatles artpath!
resetsartpath
attribute from matching albums back to the default value.2497
- A new importer option,
ignore_data_tracks
, lets you skip audio tracks contained in data files.3021
There are some new plugins:
- The
/plugins/playlist
can query the beets library using M3U playlists. Thanks toHolzhaus
andXenopathic
.123
3145
- The
/plugins/loadext
allows loading of SQLite extensions, primarily for use with the ICU SQLite extension for internationalization.3160
3226
- The
/plugins/subsonicupdate
can automatically update your Subsonic library. Thanks tomaffo999
.3001
And many improvements to existing plugins:
/plugins/lastgenre
: Added option-A
to match individual tracks and singletons.3220
3219
/plugins/play
: The plugin can now emit a UTF-8 BOM, fixing some issues with foobar2000 and Winamp. Thanks tomz2212
.2944
/plugins/gmusic
:- Add a new option to automatically upload to Google Play Music library on track import. Thanks to
shuaiscott
. - Add new options for Google Play Music authentication. Thanks to
thetarkus
.3002
- Add a new option to automatically upload to Google Play Music library on track import. Thanks to
/plugins/replaygain
:albumpeak
on large collections is calculated as the average, not the maximum.3008
3009
/plugins/chroma
:- Now optionally has a bias toward looking up more relevant releases according to the
preferred
configuration options. Thanks toarcher4499
.3017
- Fingerprint values are now properly stored as strings, which prevents strange repeated output when running
beet write
. Thanks toHolzhaus
.3097
2942
- Now optionally has a bias toward looking up more relevant releases according to the
/plugins/convert
: The plugin now has anid3v23
option that allows you to override the globalid3v23
option. Thanks toHolzhaus
.3104
/plugins/spotify
:- The plugin now uses OAuth for authentication to the Spotify API. Thanks to
rhlahuja
.2694
3123
- The plugin now works as an import metadata provider: you can match tracks and albums using the Spotify database. Thanks to
rhlahuja
.3123
- The plugin now uses OAuth for authentication to the Spotify API. Thanks to
/plugins/ipfs
: The plugin now supports anocopy
option which passes that flag to ipfs. Thanks towildthyme
./plugins/discogs
: The plugin now has rate limiting for the Discogs API.3081
/plugins/mpdstats
,/plugins/mpdupdate
: These plugins now use theMPD_PORT
environment variable if no port is specified in the configuration file.3223
/plugins/bpd
:- MPD protocol commands
consume
andsingle
are now supported along with updated semantics forrepeat
andprevious
and new fields forstatus
. The bpd server now understands and ignores some additional commands.3200
800
- MPD protocol command
idle
is now supported, allowing the MPD version to be bumped to 0.14.3205
800
- MPD protocol command
decoders
is now supported.3222
- The plugin now uses the main beets logging system. The special-purpose
--debug
flag has been removed. Thanks toarcresu
.3196
- MPD protocol commands
/plugins/mbsync
: The plugin no longer queries MusicBrainz when either themb_albumid
ormb_trackid
field is invalid. See also the discussion on Google Groups Thanks toarogl
./plugins/export
: The plugin now also exportspath
field if the user explicitly specifies it with-i
parameter. This only works when exporting library fields.3084
/plugins/acousticbrainz
: The plugin now declares types for all its fields, which enables easier querying and avoids a problem where very small numbers would be stored as strings. Thanks torain0r
.2790
3238
Some improvements have been focused on improving beets' performance:
- Querying the library is now faster:
- We only convert fields that need to be displayed. Thanks to
pprkut
.3089
- We now compile templates once and reuse them instead of recompiling them to print out each matching object. Thanks to
SimonPersson
.3258
- Querying the library for items is now faster, for all queries that do not need to access album level properties. This was implemented by lazily fetching the album only when needed. Thanks to
SimonPersson
.3260
- We only convert fields that need to be displayed. Thanks to
/plugins/absubmit
,/plugins/badfiles
: Analysis now works in parallel (on Python 3 only). Thanks tobemeurer
.2442
3003
/plugins/mpdstats
: Use thecurrentsong
MPD command instead ofplaylist
to get the current song, improving performance when the playlist is long. Thanks toray66
.3207
2752
Several improvements are related to usability:
- The disambiguation string for identifying albums in the importer now shows the catalog number. Thanks to
8h2a
.2951
- Added whitespace padding to missing tracks dialog to improve readability. Thanks to
jams2
.2962
- The
move-cmd
command now lists the number of items already in-place. Thanks toRollingStar
.3117
- Modify selection can now be applied early without selecting every item.
3083
- Beets now emits more useful messages during startup if SQLite returns an error. The SQLite error message is now attached to the beets message.
3005
- Fixed a confusing typo when the
/plugins/convert
plugin copies the art covers.3063
Many fixes have been focused on issues where beets would previously crash:
- Avoid a crash when archive extraction fails during import.
3041
- Missing album art file during an update no longer causes a fatal exception (instead, an error is logged and the missing file path is removed from the library).
3030
- When updating the database, beets no longer tries to move album art twice.
3189
- Fix an unhandled exception when pruning empty directories.
1996
3209
/plugins/fetchart
: Added network connection error handling to backends so that beets won't crash if a request fails. Thanks toHolzhaus
.1579
/plugins/badfiles
: Avoid a crash when the underlying tool emits undecodable output.3165
/plugins/beatport
: Avoid a crash when the server produces an error.3184
/plugins/bpd
: Fix crashes in the bpd server during exception handling.3200
/plugins/bpd
: Fix a crash triggered when certain clients tried to list the albums belonging to a particular artist.3007
3215
/plugins/replaygain
: Avoid a crash when thebs1770gain
tool emits malformed XML.2983
3247
There are many fixes related to compatibility with our dependencies including addressing changes interfaces:
- On Python 2, pin the
jellyfish
requirement to version 0.6.0 for compatibility. - Fix compatibility with Python 3.7 and its change to a name in the
re
module.2978
- Fix several uses of deprecated standard-library features on Python 3.7. Thanks to
arcresu
.3197
- Fix compatibility with pre-release versions of Python 3.8.
3201
3202
/plugins/web
: Fix an error when using more recent versions of Flask with CORS enabled. Thanks torveachkc
.2979
:2980
- Avoid some deprecation warnings with certain versions of the MusicBrainz library. Thanks to
zhelezov
.2826
3092
- Restore iTunes Store album art source, and remove the dependency on
python-itunes
, which had gone unmaintained and was not Python-3-compatible. Thanks toocelma
for creatingpython-itunes
in the first place. Thanks tonathdwek
.2371
2551
2718
/plugins/lastgenre
,/plugins/edit
: Avoid a deprecation warnings from thePyYAML
library by switching to the safe loader. Thanks totranslit
andsbraz
.3192
3225
- Fix a problem when resizing images with
PIL
/pillow
on Python 3. Thanks toarchitek
.2504
3029
And there are many other fixes:
- R128 normalization tags are now properly deleted from files when the values are missing. Thanks to
autrimpo
.2757
- Display the artist credit when matching albums if the
artist_credit
configuration option is set.2953
- With the
from_scratch
configuration option set, only writable fields are cleared. Beets now no longer ignores the format your music is saved in.2972
- The
%aunique
template function now works correctly with the-f/--format
option.3043
- Fixed the ordering of items when manually selecting changes while updating tags Thanks to
TaizoSimpson
.3501
- The
%title
template function now works correctly with apostrophes. Thanks toGuilhermeHideki
.3033
/plugins/lastgenre
: It's now possible to set theprefer_specific
option without also settingcanonical
.2973
/plugins/fetchart
: The plugin now respects theignore
andignore_hidden
settings.1632
/plugins/hook
: Fix byte string interpolation in hook commands.2967
3167
/plugins/the
: Log a message when something has changed, not when it hasn't. Thanks toarcresu
.3195
/plugins/lastgenre
: Theforce
config option now actually works.2704
3054
- Resizing image files with ImageMagick now avoids problems on systems where there is a
convert
command that is not ImageMagick's by using themagick
executable when it is available. Thanks toababyduck
.2093
3236
There is one new thing for plugin developers to know about:
- In addition to prefix-based field queries, plugins can now define named queries that are not associated with any specific field. For example, the new
/plugins/playlist
supports queries likeplaylist:name
although there is no field namedplaylist
. Seeextend-query
for details.
And some messages for packagers:
- Note the changes to the dependencies on
jellyfish
andmunkres
. - The optional
python-itunes
dependency has been removed. - Python versions 3.7 and 3.8 are now supported.
This new release includes lots of new features in the importer and the metadata source backends that it uses. We've changed how the beets importer handles non-audio tracks listed in metadata sources like MusicBrainz:
- The importer now ignores non-audio tracks (namely, data and video tracks) listed in MusicBrainz. Also, a new option,
ignore_video_tracks
, lets you return to the old behavior and include these video tracks.1210
- A new importer option,
ignored_media
, can let you skip certain media formats.2688
There are other subtle improvements to metadata handling in the importer:
- In the MusicBrainz backend, beets now imports the
musicbrainz_releasetrackid
field. This is a first step toward406
. Thanks toRawrmonkeys
. - A new importer configuration option,
artist_credit
, will tell beets to prefer the artist credit over the artist when autotagging.1249
And there are even more new features:
/plugins/replaygain
: Thebeet replaygain
command now has--force
,--write
and--nowrite
options.2778
- A new importer configuration option,
incremental_skip_later
, lets you avoid recording skipped directories to the list of "processed" directories inincremental
mode. This way, you can revisit them later with another import. Thanks tosekjun9878
.2773
/plugins/fetchart
: The configuration options now support finer-grained control via thesources
option. You can now specify the search order for different matching strategies within different backends./plugins/web
: A newcors_supports_credentials
configuration option lets in-browser clients communicate with the server even when it is protected by an authorization mechanism (a proxy with HTTP authentication enabled, for example).- A new
/plugins/sonosupdate
plugin automatically notifies Sonos controllers to update the music library when the beets library changes. Thanks tocgtobi
. /plugins/discogs
: The plugin now stores master release IDs intomb_releasegroupid
. It also "simulates" track IDs using the release ID and the track list position. Thanks todbogdanov
.2336
/plugins/discogs
: Fetch the original year from master releases.1122
There are lots and lots of fixes:
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix a corner-case with thebs1770gain
backend where ReplayGain values were assigned to the wrong files. The plugin now requires version 0.4.6 or later of thebs1770gain
tool.2777
/plugins/lyrics
: The plugin no longer crashes in the Genius source when BeautifulSoup is not found. Instead, it just logs a message and disables the source.2911
/plugins/lyrics
: Handle network and API errors when communicating with Genius.2771
/plugins/lyrics
: Thelyrics
command previously wrote ReST files by default, even when you didn't ask for them. This default has been fixed./plugins/lyrics
: When writing ReST files, thelyrics
command now groups lyrics by thealbumartist
field, rather thanartist
.2924
- Plugins can now see updated import task state, such as when rejecting the initial candidates and finding new ones via a manual search. Notably, this means that the importer prompt options that the
/plugins/edit
provides show up more reliably after doing a secondary import search.2441
2731
/plugins/importadded
: Fix a crash on non-autotagged imports. Thanks tom42i
.2601
1918
/plugins/plexupdate
: The Plex token is now redacted in configuration output. Thanks toKovrinic
.2804
- Avoid a crash when importing a non-ASCII filename when using an ASCII locale on Unix under Python 3.
2793
2803
- Fix a problem caused by time zone misalignment that could make date queries fail to match certain dates that are near the edges of a range. For example, querying for dates within a certain month would fail to match dates within hours of the end of that month.
2652
/plugins/convert
: The plugin now runs before other plugin-provided import stages, which addresses an issue with generating ReplayGain data incompatible between the source and target file formats. Thanks toautrimpo
.2814
/plugins/ftintitle
: Thedrop
config option had no effect; it now does what it says it should do.2817
- Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the event based on the order of your
preferred
countries rather than the order of release events in MusicBrainz.2816
/plugins/web
: The time display in the web interface would incorrectly jump at the 30-second mark of every minute. Now, it correctly changes over at zero seconds.2822
/plugins/web
: Fetching album art now works (instead of throwing an exception) under Python 3. Additionally, the server will now return a 404 response when the album ID is unknown (instead of throwing an exception and producing a 500 response).2823
/plugins/web
: Fix an exception on Python 3 for filenames with non-Latin1 characters. (These characters are now converted to their ASCII equivalents.)2815
- Partially fix bash completion for subcommand names that contain hyphens. Thanks to
jhermann
.2836
2837
/plugins/replaygain
: Really fix album gain calculation using the GStreamer backend.2846
- Avoid an error when doing a "no-op" move on non-existent files (i.e., moving a file onto itself).
2863
/plugins/discogs
: Fix themedium
andmedium_index
values, which were occasionally incorrect for releases with two-sided mediums such as vinyl. Also fix themedium_total
value, which now contains total number of tracks on the medium to which a track belongs, not the total number of different mediums present on the release. Thanks todbogdanov
.2887
- The importer now supports audio files contained in data tracks when they are listed in MusicBrainz: the corresponding audio tracks are now merged into the main track list. Thanks to
jdetrey
.1638
/plugins/keyfinder
: Avoid a crash when trying to process unmatched tracks.2537
/plugins/mbsync
: Support MusicBrainz recording ID changes, relying on release track IDs instead. Thanks tojdetrey
.1234
/plugins/mbsync
: We can now successfully update albums even when the first track has a missing MusicBrainz recording ID.2920
There are a couple of changes for developers:
- Plugins can now run their import stages early, before other plugins. Use the
early_import_stages
list instead of plainimport_stages
to request this behavior.2814
- We again properly send
albuminfo_received
andtrackinfo_received
in all cases, most notably when using thembsync
plugin. This was a regression since version 1.4.1.2921
The highlight of this release is "album merging," an oft-requested option in the importer to add new tracks to an existing album you already have in your library. This way, you no longer need to resort to removing the partial album from your library, combining the files manually, and importing again.
Here are the larger new features in this release:
- When the importer finds duplicate albums, you can now merge all the tracks---old and new---together and try importing them as a single, combined album. Thanks to
udiboy1209
.112
2725
/plugins/lyrics
: The plugin can now produce reStructuredText files for beautiful, readable books of lyrics. Thanks toanarcat
.2628
- A new
from_scratch
configuration option makes the importer remove old metadata before applying new metadata. This new feature complements thezero </plugins/zero>
andscrub </plugins/scrub>
plugins but is slightly different: beets clears out all the old tags it knows about and only keeps the new data it gets from the remote metadata source. Thanks totummychow
.934
2755
There are also somewhat littler, but still great, new features:
/plugins/convert
: A newno_convert
option lets you skip transcoding items matching a query. Instead, the files are just copied as-is. Thanks toStunner
.2732
2751
/plugins/fetchart
: A new quiet switch that only prints out messages when album art is missing. Thanks toeuri10
.2683
/plugins/mbcollection
: You can configure a custom MusicBrainz collection via the newcollection
configuration option.2685
/plugins/mbcollection
: The collection update command can now remove albums from collections that are longer in the beets library./plugins/fetchart
: Theclearart
command now asks for confirmation before touching your files. Thanks tokonman2
.2708
2427
/plugins/mpdstats
: The plugin now correctly updates song statistics when MPD switches from a song to a stream and when it plays the same song multiple times consecutively.2707
/plugins/acousticbrainz
: The plugin can now be configured to write only a specific list of tags. Thanks towoparry
.
There are lots and lots of bug fixes:
/plugins/hook
: Fixed a problem where accessing non-string properties ofitem
oralbum
(e.g.,item.track
) would cause a crash. Thanks tobroddo
.2740
/plugins/play
: Whenrelative_to
is set, the plugin correctly emits relative paths even when querying for albums rather than tracks. Thanks toj000
.2702
- We suppress a spurious Python warning about a
BrokenPipeError
being ignored. This was an issue when using beets in simple shell scripts. Thanks toAzphreal
.2622
2631
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix a regression in the previous release related to the new R128 tags.2615
2623
/plugins/lyrics
: The MusixMatch backend now detects and warns when the server has blocked the client. Thanks toanarcat
.2634
2632
/plugins/importfeeds
: Fix an error on Python 3 in certain configurations. Thanks todjl
.2467
2658
/plugins/edit
: Fix a bug when editing items during a re-import with the-L
flag. Previously, diffs against against unrelated items could be shown or beets could crash.2659
/plugins/kodiupdate
: Fix the server URL and add better error reporting.2662
- Fixed a problem where "no-op" modifications would reset files' mtimes, resulting in unnecessary writes. This most prominently affected the
/plugins/edit
when saving the text file without making changes to some music.2667
/plugins/chroma
: Fix a crash when running thesubmit
command on Python 3 on Windows with non-ASCII filenames.2671
/plugins/absubmit
: Fix an occasional crash on Python 3 when the AB analysis tool produced non-ASCII metadata.2673
/plugins/duplicates
: Use the default tiebreak for items or albums when the configuration only specifies a tiebreak for the other kind of entity. Thanks tocgevans
.2758
/plugins/duplicates
: Fix the--key
command line option, which was ignored./plugins/replaygain
: Fix album ReplayGain calculation with the GStreamer backend.2636
/plugins/scrub
: Handle errors when manipulating files using newer versions of Mutagen.2716
/plugins/fetchart
: The plugin no longer gets skipped during import when the "Edit Candidates" option is used from the/plugins/edit
.2734
- Fix a crash when numeric metadata fields contain just a minus or plus sign with no following numbers. Thanks to
eigengrau
.2741
/plugins/fromfilename
: Recognize file names that contain only a track number, such as 01.mp3. Also, the plugin now allows underscores as a separator between fields. Thanks toVrihub
.2738
2759
- Fixed an issue where images would be resized according to their longest edge, instead of their width, when using the
maxwidth
config option in the/plugins/fetchart
and/plugins/embedart
. Thanks tosekjun9878
.2729
There are some changes for developers:
- "Fixed fields" in Album and Item objects are now more strict about translating missing values into type-specific null-like values. This should help in cases where a string field is unexpectedly None sometimes instead of just showing up as an empty string.
2605
- Refactored the move functions the beets.library module and the manipulate_files function in beets.importer to use a single parameter describing the file operation instead of multiple Boolean flags. There is a new numerated type describing how to move, copy, or link files.
2682
Version 1.4.5 adds some oft-requested features. When you're importing files, you can now manually set fields on the new music. Date queries have gotten much more powerful: you can write precise queries down to the second, and we now have relative queries like -1w
, which means one week ago.
Here are the new features:
- You can now set fields to certain values during
import-cmd
, using either a--set field=value
command-line flag or a newset_fields
configuration option under the importer section. Thanks tobartkl
.1881
2581
Date queries <datequery>
can now include times, so you can filter your music down to the second. Thanks todiscopatrick
.2506
2528
Date queries <datequery>
can also be relative. You can sayadded:-1w..
to match music added in the last week, for example. Thanks toeuri10
.2598
- A new
/plugins/gmusic
lets you interact with your Google Play Music library. Thanks totigranl
.2553
2586
/plugins/replaygain
: We now keep R128 data in separate tags from classic ReplayGain data for formats that need it (namely, Ogg Opus). A new r128 configuration option enables this behavior for specific formats. Thanks toautrimpo
.2557
2560
- The
move-cmd
command gained a new--export
flag, which copies files to an external location without changing their paths in the library database. Thanks toSpirosChadoulos
.435
2510
There are also some bug fixes:
/plugins/lastgenre
: Fix a crash when using the prefer_specific and canonical options together. Thanks toyacoob
.2459
2583
/plugins/web
: Fix a crash on Windows under Python 2 when serving non-ASCII filenames. Thanks torobot3498712
.2592
2593
/plugins/metasync
: Fix a crash in the Amarok backend when filenames contain quotes. Thanks toaranc23
.2595
2596
- More informative error messages are displayed when the file format is not recognized.
2599
This release built up a longer-than-normal list of nifty new features. We now support DSF audio files and the importer can hard-link your files, for example.
Here's a full list of new features:
- Added support for DSF files, once a future version of Mutagen is released that supports them. Thanks to
docbobo
.459
2379
- A new
hardlink
config option instructs the importer to create hard links on filesystems that support them. Thanks tojacobwgillespie
.2445
- A new
/plugins/kodiupdate
lets you keep your Kodi library in sync with beets. Thanks toPauligrinder
.2411
- A new
bell
configuration option under theimport
section enables a terminal bell when input is required. Thanks toSpirosChadoulos
.2366
2495
- A new field,
composer_sort
, is now supported and fetched from MusicBrainz. Thanks todosoe
.2519
2529
- The MusicBrainz backend and
/plugins/discogs
now both provide a new attribute calledtrack_alt
that stores more nuanced, possibly non-numeric track index data. For example, some vinyl or tape media will report the side of the record using a letter instead of a number in that field.1831
2363
/plugins/web
: Added a new endpoint,/item/path/foo
, which will return the item info for the file at the given path, or 404./plugins/web
: Added a new config option,include_paths
, which will cause paths to be included in item API responses if set to true.- The
%aunique
template function foraunique
now takes a third argument that specifies which brackets to use around the disambiguator value. The argument can be any two characters that represent the left and right brackets. It defaults to [] and can also be blank to turn off bracketing.2397
2399
- Added a
--move
or-m
option to the importer so that the files can be moved to the library instead of being copied or added "in place."2252
2429
/plugins/badfiles
: Added a--verbose
or-v
option. Results are now displayed only for corrupted files by default and for all the files when the verbose option is set.1654
2434
/plugins/embedart
: The explicitembedart
command now asks for confirmation before embedding art into music files. Thanks toStunner
.1999
- You can now run beets by typing python -m beets.
2453
/plugins/smartplaylist
: Different playlist specifications that generate identically-named playlist files no longer conflict; instead, the resulting lists of tracks are concatenated.2468
/plugins/missing
: A new mode lets you see missing albums from artists you have in your library. Thanks toqlyoung
.2481
/plugins/web
: Add new reverse_proxy config option to allow serving the web plugins under a reverse proxy.- Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the event based on your
preferred
countries.2501
/plugins/play
: A new-y
or--yes
parameter lets you skip the warning message if you enqueue more items than the warning threshold usually allows.- Fix a bug where commands which forked subprocesses would sometimes prevent further inputs. This bug mainly affected
/plugins/convert
. Thanks tojansol
.2488
2524
There are also quite a few fixes:
- In the
replace
configuration option, we now replace a leading hyphen (-) with an underscore.549
2509
/plugins/absubmit
: We no longer filter audio files for specific formats---we will attempt the submission process for all formats.2471
/plugins/mpdupdate
: Fix Python 3 compatibility.2381
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix Python 3 compatibility in thebs1770gain
backend.2382
/plugins/bpd
: Report playback times as integers.2394
/plugins/mpdstats
: Fix Python 3 compatibility. The plugin also now requires version 0.4.2 or later of thepython-mpd2
library.2405
/plugins/mpdstats
: Improve handling of MPD status queries./plugins/badfiles
: Fix Python 3 compatibility.- Fix some cases where album-level ReplayGain/SoundCheck metadata would be written to files incorrectly.
2426
/plugins/badfiles
: The command no longer bails out if the validator command is not found or exits with an error.2430
2433
/plugins/lyrics
: The Google search backend no longer crashes when the server responds with an error.2437
/plugins/discogs
: You can now authenticate with Discogs using a personal access token.2447
- Fix Python 3 compatibility when extracting rar archives in the importer. Thanks to
Lompik
.2443
2448
/plugins/duplicates
: Fix Python 3 compatibility when using thecopy
andmove
options.2444
/plugins/mbsubmit
: The tracks are now sorted properly. Thanks toawesomer
.2457
/plugins/thumbnails
: Fix a string-related crash on Python 3.2466
/plugins/beatport
: More than just 10 songs are now fetched per album.2469
- On Python 3, the
terminal_encoding
setting is respected again for output and printing will no longer crash on systems configured with a limited encoding. /plugins/convert
: The default configuration uses FFmpeg's built-in AAC codec instead of faac. Thanks tojansol
.2484
- Fix the importer's detection of multi-disc albums when other subdirectories are present.
2493
- Invalid date queries now print an error message instead of being silently ignored. Thanks to
discopatrick
.2513
2517
- When the SQLite database stops being accessible, we now print a friendly error message. Thanks to
Mary011196
.1676
2508
/plugins/web
: Avoid a crash when sending binary data, such as Chromaprint fingerprints, in music attributes.2542
2532
- Fix a hang when parsing templates that end in newlines.
2562
- Fix a crash when reading non-ASCII characters in configuration files on Windows under Python 3.
2456
2565
2566
We removed backends from two metadata plugins because of bitrot:
/plugins/lyrics
: The Lyrics.com backend has been removed. (It stopped working because of changes to the site's URL structure.)2548
2549
/plugins/fetchart
: The documentation no longer recommends iTunes Store artwork lookup because the unmaintained python-itunes is broken. Want to adopt it?2371
1610
Happy new year! This new version includes a cornucopia of new features from contributors, including new tags related to classical music and a new /plugins/absubmit
for performing acoustic analysis on your music. The /plugins/random
has a new mode that lets you generate time-limited music---for example, you might generate a random playlist that lasts the perfect length for your walk to work. We also access as many Web services as possible over secure connections now---HTTPS everywhere!
The most visible new features are:
- We now support the composer, lyricist, and arranger tags. The MusicBrainz data source will fetch data for these fields when the next version of python-musicbrainzngs is released. Thanks to
ibmibmibm
.506
507
1547
2333
- A new
/plugins/absubmit
lets you run acoustic analysis software and upload the results for others to use. Thanks toinytar
.2253
2342
/plugins/play
: The plugin now provides an importer prompt choice to play the music you're about to import. Thanks todiomekes
.2008
2360
- We now use SSL to access Web services whenever possible. That includes MusicBrainz itself, several album art sources, some lyrics sources, and other servers. Thanks to
tigranl
.2307
/plugins/random
: A new--time
option lets you generate a random playlist that takes a given amount of time. Thanks todiomekes
.2305
2322
Some smaller new features:
/plugins/zero
: A newzero
command manually triggers the zero plugin. Thanks toSJoshBrown
.2274
2329
/plugins/acousticbrainz
: The plugin will avoid re-downloading data for files that already have it by default. You can override this behavior using a newforce
option. Thanks toSusannaMaria
.2347
2349
/plugins/bpm
: Theimport.write
configuration option now decides whether or not to write tracks after updating their BPM.1992
And the fixes:
/plugins/bpd
: Fix a crash on non-ASCII MPD commands.2332
/plugins/scrub
: Avoid a crash when files cannot be read or written.2351
/plugins/scrub
: The image type values on scrubbed files are preserved instead of being reset to "other."2339
/plugins/web
: Fix a crash on Python 3 when serving files from the filesystem.2353
/plugins/discogs
: Improve the handling of releases that contain subtracks.2318
/plugins/discogs
: Fix a crash when a release does not contain format information, and increase robustness when other fields are missing.2302
/plugins/lyrics
: The plugin now reports a beets-specific User-Agent header when requesting lyrics.2357
/plugins/embyupdate
: The plugin now checks whether an API key or a password is provided in the configuration./plugins/play
: The misspelled configuration optionwarning_treshold
is no longer supported.
For plugin developers: when providing new importer prompt choices (see append_prompt_choices
), you can now provide new candidates for the user to consider. For example, you might provide an alternative strategy for picking between the available alternatives or for looking up a release on MusicBrainz.
This is just a little bug fix release. With 1.4.2, we're also confident enough to recommend that anyone who's interested give Python 3 a try: bugs may still lurk, but we've deemed things safe enough for broad adoption. If you can, please install beets with pip3
instead of pip2
this time and let us know how it goes!
Here are the fixes:
/plugins/badfiles
: Fix a crash on non-ASCII filenames.2299
- The
%asciify{}
path formatting function and theasciify-paths
setting properly substitute path separators generated by converting some Unicode characters, such as ½ and ¢, into ASCII. /plugins/convert
: Fix a logging-related crash when filenames contain curly braces. Thanks tokierdavis
.2323
- We've rolled back some changes to the included zsh completion script that were causing problems for some users.
2266
Also, we've removed some special handling for logging in the /plugins/discogs
that we believe was unnecessary. If spurious log messages appear in this version, please let us know by filing a bug.
Version 1.4 has alpha-level Python 3 support. Thanks to the heroic efforts of jrobeson
, beets should run both under Python 2.7, as before, and now under Python 3.4 and above. The support is still new: it undoubtedly contains bugs, so it may replace all your music with Limp Bizkit---but if you're brave and you have backups, please try installing on Python 3. Let us know how it goes.
If you package beets for distribution, here's what you'll want to know:
- This version of beets now depends on the six library.
- We also bumped our minimum required version of Mutagen to 1.33 (from 1.27).
- Please don't package beets as a Python 3 application yet, even though most things work under Python 3.4 and later.
This version also makes a few changes to the command-line interface and configuration that you may need to know about:
/plugins/duplicates
: Theduplicates
command no longer accepts multiple field arguments in the form-k title albumartist album
. Each argument must be prefixed with-k
, as in-k title -k albumartist -k album
.- The old top-level
colors
configuration option has been removed (the setting is now underui
). - The deprecated
list_format_album
andlist_format_item
configuration options have been removed (seeformat_album
andformat_item
).
The are a few new features:
/plugins/mpdupdate
,/plugins/mpdstats
: When thehost
option is not set, these plugins will now look for the$MPD_HOST
environment variable before falling back tolocalhost
. Thanks totarruda
.2175
/plugins/web
: Added anexpand
option to show the items of an album.2050
/plugins/embyupdate
: The plugin can now use an API key instead of a password to authenticate with Emby.2045
2117
/plugins/acousticbrainz
: The plugin now adds abpm
field.beet --version
now includes the Python version used to run beets./reference/pathformat
can now include unescaped commas (,
) when they are not part of a function call.2166
2213
- The
update-cmd
command takes a new-F
flag to specify the fields to update. Thanks todangmai
.2229
2231
And there are a few bug fixes too:
/plugins/convert
: The plugin no longer asks for confirmation if the query did not return anything to convert.2260
2262
/plugins/embedart
: The plugin now usesjpg
as an extension rather thanjpeg
, to ensure consistency with theplugins/fetchart
. Thanks totweitzel
.2254
2255
/plugins/embedart
: The plugin now works for all jpeg files, including those that are only recognizable by their magic bytes.1545
2255
/plugins/web
: The JSON output is no longer pretty-printed (for a space savings).2050
/plugins/permissions
: Fix a regression in the previous release where the plugin would always fail to set permissions (and log a warning).2089
/plugins/beatport
: Use track numbers from Beatport (instead of determining them from the order of tracks) and set the medium_index value.- With
per_disc_numbering
enabled, some metadata sources (notably, the/plugins/beatport
) would not set the track number at all. This is fixed.2085
/plugins/play
: Fix$args
getting passed verbatim to the play command if it was set in the configuration but-A
or--args
was omitted.- With
ignore_hidden
enabled, non-UTF-8 filenames would cause a crash. This is fixed.2168
/plugins/embyupdate
: Fixes authentication header problem that caused a problem that it was not possible to get tokens from the Emby API./plugins/lyrics
: Some titles use a colon to separate the main title from a subtitle. To find more matches, the plugin now also searches for lyrics using the part part preceding the colon character.2206
- Fix a crash when a query uses a date field and some items are missing that field.
1938
/plugins/discogs
: Subtracks are now detected and combined into a single track, two-sided mediums are treated as single discs, and tracks havemedia
,medium_total
andmedium
set correctly.2222
2228
./plugins/missing
:missing
is now treated as an integer, allowing the use of (for example) ranges in queries./plugins/smartplaylist
: Playlist names will be sanitized to ensure valid filenames.2258
- The ID3 APIC tag now uses the Latin-1 encoding when possible instead of a Unicode encoding. This should increase compatibility with other software, especially with iTunes and when using ID3v2.3. Thanks to
lazka
.899
2264
2270
The last release, 1.3.19, also erroneously reported its version as "1.3.18" when you typed beet version
. This has been corrected.
This is primarily a bug fix release: it cleans up a couple of regressions that appeared in the last version. But it also features the triumphant return of the /plugins/beatport
and a modernized /plugins/bpd
.
It's also the first version where beets passes all its tests on Windows! May this herald a new age of cross-platform reliability for beets.
New features:
/plugins/beatport
: This metadata source plugin has arisen from the dead! It now works with Beatport's new OAuth-based API. Thanks tojbaiter
.1989
2067
/plugins/bpd
: The plugin now uses the modern GStreamer 1.0 instead of the old 0.10. Thanks tophilippbeckmann
.2057
2062
- A new
--force
option for theremove-cmd
command allows removal of items without prompting beforehand.2042
- A new
duplicate_action
importer config option controls how duplicate albums or tracks treated in import task.185
Some fixes for Windows:
- Queries are now detected as paths when they contain backslashes (in addition to forward slashes). This only applies on Windows.
/plugins/embedart
: Image similarity comparison with ImageMagick should now work on Windows./plugins/fetchart
: The plugin should work more reliably with non-ASCII paths.
And other fixes:
/plugins/replaygain
: Thebs1770gain
backend now correctly calculates sample peak instead of true peak. This comes with a major speed increase.2031
/plugins/lyrics
: Avoid a crash and a spurious warning introduced in the last version about a Google API key, which appeared even when you hadn't enabled the Google lyrics source.- Fix a hard-coded path to
bash-completion
to work better with Homebrew installations. Thanks tobismark
.2038
- Fix a crash introduced in the previous version when the standard input was connected to a Unix pipe.
2041
- Fix a crash when specifying non-ASCII format strings on the command line with the
-f
option for many commands.2063
/plugins/fetchart
: Determine the file extension for downloaded images based on the image's magic bytes. The plugin prints a warning if result is not consistent with the server-suppliedContent-Type
header. In previous versions, the plugin would use a.jpg
extension for all images.2053
This update adds a new /plugins/hook
that lets you integrate beets with command-line tools and an /plugins/export
that can dump data from the beets database as JSON. You can also automatically translate lyrics using a machine translation service.
The echonest
plugin has been removed in this version because the API it used is shutting down. You might want to try the /plugins/acousticbrainz
instead.
Some of the larger new features:
- The new
/plugins/hook
lets you execute commands in response to beets events. - The new
/plugins/export
can export data from beets' database as JSON. Thanks toGuilhermeHideki
. /plugins/lyrics
: The plugin can now translate the fetched lyrics to your native language using the Bing translation API. Thanks toKraymer
./plugins/fetchart
: Album art can now be fetched from fanart.tv.
Smaller new things:
- There are two new functions available in templates:
%first
and%ifdef
. Seetemplate-functions
. /plugins/convert
: A new album_art_maxwidth setting lets you resize album art while copying it./plugins/convert
: The extension setting is now optional for conversion formats. By default, the extension is the same as the name of the configured format./plugins/importadded
: A new preserve_write_mtimes option lets you preserve mtime of files even when beets updates their metadata./plugins/fetchart
: The enforce_ratio option now lets you tolerate images that are almost square but differ slightly from an exact 1:1 aspect ratio./plugins/fetchart
: The plugin can now optionally save the artwork's source in an attribute in the database.- The
terminal_encoding
configuration option can now also override the input encoding. (Previously, it only affected the encoding of the standard output stream.) - A new
ignore_hidden
configuration option lets you ignore files that your OS marks as invisible. /plugins/web
: A new values endpoint lets you get the distinct values of a field. Thanks tosumpfralle
.2010
Fixes:
- Fix a problem with the
stats-cmd
command in exact mode when filenames on Windows use non-ASCII characters.1891
- Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data.
1895
/plugins/mbcollection
: The plugin now redacts your MusicBrainz password in thebeet config
output.1907
/plugins/scrub
: Fix an occasional problem where scrubbing on import could undo theid3v23
setting.1903
/plugins/lyrics
: Add compatibility with some changes to the LyricsWiki page markup.1912
1909
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix retrieval from Musixmatch by improving the way we guess the URL for lyrics on that service.1880
/plugins/edit
: Fail gracefully when the configured text editor command can't be invoked.1927
/plugins/fetchart
: Fix a crash in the Wikipedia backend on non-ASCII artist and album names.1960
/plugins/convert
: Change the default ogg encoding quality from 2 to 3 (to fit the default from the oggenc(1) manpage).1982
/plugins/convert
: The never_convert_lossy_files option now considers AIFF a lossless format.2005
/plugins/web
: A proper 404 error, instead of an internal exception, is returned when missing album art is requested. Thanks tosumpfralle
.2011
- Tolerate more malformed floating-point numbers in metadata tags.
2014
- The
ignore
configuration option now includes thelost+found
directory by default. /plugins/acousticbrainz
: AcousticBrainz lookups are now done over HTTPS. Thanks toFreso
.2007
This release introduces one new plugin to fetch audio information from the AcousticBrainz project and another plugin to make it easier to submit your handcrafted metadata back to MusicBrainz. The importer also gained two oft-requested features: a way to skip the initial search process by specifying an ID ahead of time, and a way to manually provide metadata in the middle of the import process (via the /plugins/edit
).
Also, as of this release, the beets project has some new Internet homes! Our new domain name is beets.io, and we have a shiny new GitHub organization: beetbox.
Here are the big new features:
- A new
/plugins/acousticbrainz
fetches acoustic-analysis information from the AcousticBrainz project. Thanks toopatel99
, and thanks to Google Code-In!1784
- A new
/plugins/mbsubmit
lets you print music's current metadata in a format that the MusicBrainz data parser can understand. You can trigger it during an interactive import session.1779
- A new
--search-id
importer option lets you manually specify IDs (i.e., MBIDs or Discogs IDs) for imported music. Doing this skips the initial candidate search, which can be important for huge albums where this initial lookup is slow. Also, theenter Id
prompt choice now accepts several IDs, separated by spaces.1808
/plugins/edit
: You can now edit metadata on the fly during the import process. The plugin provides two new interactive options: one to edit your music's metadata, and one to edit the matched metadata retrieved from MusicBrainz (or another data source). This feature is still in its early stages, so please send feedback if you find anything missing.1846
396
There are even more new features:
/plugins/fetchart
: The Google Images backend has been restored. It now requires an API key from Google. Thanks tolcharlick
.1778
/plugins/info
: A new option will print only fields' names and not their values. Thanks toGuilhermeHideki
.1812
- The
fields-cmd
command now displays flexible attributes. Thanks toGuilhermeHideki
.1818
- The
modify-cmd
command lets you interactively select which albums or items you want to change.1843
- The
move-cmd
command gained a new--timid
flag to print and confirm which files you want to move.1843
- The
move-cmd
command no longer prints filenames for files that don't actually need to be moved.1583
Fixes:
/plugins/play
: Fix a regression in the last version where there was no default command.1793
/plugins/lastimport
: The plugin now works again after being broken by some unannounced changes to the Last.fm API.1574
/plugins/play
: Fixed a typo in a configuration option. The option is nowwarning_threshold
instead ofwarning_treshold
, but we kept the old name around for compatibility. Thanks toJesseWeinstein
.1802
1803
/plugins/edit
: Editing metadata now moves files, when appropriate (like themodify-cmd
command).1804
- The
stats-cmd
command no longer crashes when files are missing or inaccessible.1806
/plugins/fetchart
: Possibly fix a Unicode-related crash when using some versions of pyOpenSSL.1805
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix an intermittent crash with the GStreamer backend.1855
/plugins/lastimport
: The plugin now works with the beets API key by default. You can still provide a different key the configuration./plugins/replaygain
: Fix a crash using the Python Audio Tools backend.1873
The big news in this release is a new interactive editor plugin
</plugins/edit>
. It's really nifty: you can now change your music's metadata by making changes in a visual text editor, which can sometimes be far more efficient than the built-in modify-cmd
command. No more carefully retyping the same artist name with slight capitalization changes.
This version also adds an oft-requested "not" operator to beets' queries, so you can exclude music from any operation. It also brings friendlier formatting (and querying!) of song durations.
The big new stuff:
- A new
/plugins/edit
lets you manually edit your music's metadata using your favorite text editor.164
1706
- Queries can now use "not" logic. Type a
^
before part of a query to exclude matching music from the results. For example,beet list -a beatles ^album:1
will find all your albums by the Beatles except for their singles compilation, "1." Seenot_query
.819
1728
- A new
/plugins/embyupdate
can trigger a library refresh on an Emby server when your beets database changes. - Track length is now displayed as "M:SS" rather than a raw number of seconds. Queries on track length also accept this format: for example,
beet list length:5:30..
will find all your tracks that have a duration over 5 minutes and 30 seconds. You can turn off this new behavior using theformat_raw_length
configuration option.1749
Smaller changes:
- Three commands,
modify
,update
, andmbsync
, would previously move files by default after changing their metadata. Now, these commands will only move files if you have theconfig-import-copy
orconfig-import-move
options enabled in your importer configuration. This way, if you configure the importer not to touch your filenames, other commands will respect that decision by default too. Each command also sprouted a--move
command-line option to override this default (in addition to the--nomove
flag they already had).1697
- A new configuration option,
va_name
, controls the album artist name for various-artists albums. The setting defaults to "Various Artists," the MusicBrainz standard. In order to match MusicBrainz, the/plugins/discogs
also adopts the same setting. /plugins/info
: Theinfo
command now accepts a-f/--format
option for customizing how items are displayed, just like the built-inlist
command.1737
Some changes for developers:
- Two new
plugin hooks <plugin_events>
,albuminfo_received
andtrackinfo_received
, let plugins intercept metadata as soon as it is received, before it is applied to music in the database.872
- Plugins can now add options to the interactive importer prompts. See
append_prompt_choices
.1758
Fixes:
/plugins/plexupdate
: Fix a crash when Plex libraries use non-ASCII collection names.1649
/plugins/discogs
: Maybe fix a crash when using some versions of therequests
library.1656
- Fix a race in the importer when importing two albums with the same artist and name in quick succession. The importer would fail to detect them as duplicates, claiming that there were "empty albums" in the database even when there were not.
1652
plugins/lastgenre
: Clean up the reggae-related genres somewhat. Thanks toFreso
.1661
- The importer now correctly moves album art files when re-importing.
314
/plugins/fetchart
: In auto mode, the plugin now skips albums that already have art attached to them so as not to interfere with re-imports.314
plugins/fetchart
: The plugin now only resizes album art if necessary, rather than always by default.1264
plugins/fetchart
: Fix a bug where a database reference to a non-existent album art file would prevent the command from fetching new art.1126
/plugins/thumbnails
: Fix a crash with Unicode paths.1686
/plugins/embedart
: Theremove_art_file
option now works on import (as well as with the explicit command).1662
1675
/plugins/metasync
: Fix a crash when syncing with recent versions of iTunes.1700
/plugins/duplicates
: Fix a crash when merging items.1699
/plugins/smartplaylist
: More gracefully handle malformed queries and missing configuration.- Fix a crash with some files with unreadable iTunes SoundCheck metadata.
1666
/plugins/thumbnails
: Fix a nasty segmentation fault crash that arose with some library versions.1433
/plugins/convert
: Fix a crash with Unicode paths in--pretend
mode.1735
- Fix a crash when sorting by nonexistent fields on queries.
1734
- Probably fix some mysterious errors when dealing with images using ImageMagick on Windows.
1721
- Fix a crash when writing some Unicode comment strings to MP3s that used older encodings. The encoding is now always updated to UTF-8.
879
/plugins/fetchart
: The Google Images backend has been removed. It used an API that has been shut down.1760
/plugins/lyrics
: Fix a crash in the Google backend when searching for bands with regular-expression characters in their names, like Sunn O))).1673
/plugins/scrub
: Inauto
mode, the plugin now actually only scrubs files on import, as the documentation always claimed it did---not every time files were written, as it previously did.1657
/plugins/scrub
: Also inauto
mode, album art is now correctly restored.1657
- Possibly allow flexible attributes to be used with the
%aunique
template function.1775
/plugins/lyrics
: The Genius backend is now more robust to communication errors. The backend has also been disabled by default, since the API it depends on is currently down.1770
This release adds a new plugin for checking file quality and a new source for lyrics. The larger features are:
- A new
/plugins/badfiles
helps you scan for corruption in your music collection. Thanks tofxthomas
.1568
/plugins/lyrics
: You can now fetch lyrics from Genius.com. Thanks tosadatay
.1626
1639
/plugins/zero
: The plugin can now use a "whitelist" policy as an alternative to the (default) "blacklist" mode. Thanks toadkow
.1621
1641
And there are smaller new features too:
- Add new color aliases for standard terminal color names (e.g., cyan and magenta). Thanks to
mathstuf
.1548
/plugins/play
: A new--args
option lets you specify options for the player command.1532
/plugins/play
: A newraw
configuration option lets the command work with players (such as VLC) that expect music filenames as arguments, rather than in a playlist. Thanks tonathdwek
.1578
/plugins/play
: You can now configure the number of tracks that trigger a "lots of music" warning.1577
/plugins/embedart
: A newremove_art_file
option lets you clean up if you prefer only embedded album art. Thanks tojackwilsdon
.1591
733
/plugins/plexupdate
: A newlibrary_name
option allows you to select which Plex library to update.1572
1595
- A new
include
option lets you import external configuration files.
This release has plenty of fixes:
/plugins/lastgenre
: Fix a bug that prevented tag popularity from being considered. Thanks tosvoos
.1559
- Fixed a bug where plugins wouldn't be notified of the deletion of an item's art, for example with the
clearart
command from the/plugins/embedart
. Thanks tonathdwek
.1565
/plugins/fetchart
: The Google Images source is disabled by default (as it was before beets 1.3.9), as is the Wikipedia source (which was causing lots of unnecessary delays due to DBpedia downtime). To re-enable these sources, addwikipedia google
to yoursources
configuration option.- The
list-cmd
command's help output now has a small query and format string example. Thanks topkess
.1582
/plugins/fetchart
: The plugin now fetches PNGs but not GIFs. (It still fetches JPEGs.) This avoids an error when trying to embed images, since not all formats support GIFs.1588
- Date fields are now written in the correct order (year-month-day), which eliminates an intermittent bug where the latter two fields would not get written to files. Thanks to
jdetrey
.1303
1589
/plugins/replaygain
: Avoid a crash when the PyAudioTools backend encounters an error.1592
- The case sensitivity of path queries is more useful now: rather than just guessing based on the platform, we now check the case sensitivity of your filesystem.
1586
- Case-insensitive path queries might have returned nothing because of a wrong SQL query.
- Fix a crash when a query contains a "+" or "-" alone in a component.
1605
- Fixed unit of file size to powers of two (MiB, GiB, etc.) instead of powers of ten (MB, GB, etc.).
1623
This is mainly a bugfix release, but we also have a nifty new plugin for ipfs and a bunch of new configuration options.
The new features:
- A new
/plugins/ipfs
lets you share music via a new, global, decentralized filesystem.1397
/plugins/duplicates
: You can now merge duplicate track metadata (when detecting duplicate items), or duplicate album tracks (when detecting duplicate albums)./plugins/duplicates
: Duplicate resolution now uses an ordering to prioritize duplicates. By default, it prefers music with more complete metadata, but you can configure it to use any list of attributes./plugins/metasync
: Added a new backend to fetch metadata from iTunes. This plugin is still in an experimental phase.1450
- The move command has a new
--pretend
option, making the command show how the items will be moved without actually changing anything. - The importer now supports matching of "pregap" or HTOA (hidden track-one audio) tracks when they are listed in MusicBrainz. (This feature depends on a new version of the python-musicbrainzngs library that is not yet released, but will start working when it is available.) Thanks to
ruippeixotog
.1104
1493
/plugins/plexupdate
: A newtoken
configuration option lets you specify a key for Plex Home setups. Thanks toedcarroll
.1494
Fixes:
/plugins/fetchart
: Complain when the enforce_ratio or min_width options are enabled but no local imaging backend is available to carry them out.1460
/plugins/importfeeds
: Avoid generating incorrect m3u filename when both of the m3u and m3u_multi options are enabled.1490
/plugins/duplicates
: Avoid a crash when misconfigured.1457
/plugins/mpdstats
: Avoid a crash when the music played is not in the beets library. Thanks toCodyReichert
.1443
- Fix a crash with ArtResizer on Windows systems (affecting
/plugins/embedart
,/plugins/fetchart
, and/plugins/thumbnails
).1448
/plugins/permissions
: Fix an error with non-ASCII paths.1449
- Fix sorting by paths when the
sort_case_insensitive
option is enabled.1451
/plugins/embedart
: Avoid an error when trying to embed invalid images into MPEG-4 files./plugins/fetchart
: The Wikipedia source can now better deal artists that use non-standard capitalization (e.g., alt-J, dEUS)./plugins/web
: Fix searching for non-ASCII queries. Thanks tooldtopman
.1470
/plugins/mpdupdate
: We now recommend the newerpython-mpd2
library instead of its unmaintained parent. Thanks toSomasis
.1472
- The importer interface and log file now output a useful list of files (instead of the word "None") when in album-grouping mode.
1475
825
- Fix some logging errors when filenames and other user-provided strings contain curly braces.
1481
- Regular expression queries over paths now work more reliably with non-ASCII characters in filenames.
1482
- Fix a bug where the autotagger's
ignored
setting was sometimes, well, ignored.1487
- Fix a bug with Unicode strings when generating image thumbnails.
1485
/plugins/keyfinder
: Fix handling of Unicode paths.1502
/plugins/fetchart
: When album art is already present, the message is now printed in thetext_highlight_minor
color (light gray). Thanks toSomasis
.1512
- Some messages in the console UI now use plural nouns correctly. Thanks to
JesseWeinstein
.1521
- Sorting numerical fields (such as track) now works again.
1511
/plugins/replaygain
: Missing GStreamer plugins now cause a helpful error message instead of a crash.1518
- Fix an edge case when producing sanitized filenames where the maximum path length conflicted with the
replace
rules. Thanks to Ben Ockmore.496
1361
- Fix an incompatibility with OS X 10.11 (where
/usr/sbin
seems not to be on the user's path by default). - Fix an incompatibility with certain JPEG files. Here's a relevant Python bug. Thanks to
nathdwek
.1545
- Fix the
group_albums
importer mode so that it works correctly when files are not already in order by album.1550
- The
fields
command no longer separates built-in fields from plugin-provided ones. This distinction was becoming increasingly unreliable. /plugins/duplicates
: Fix a Unicode warning when paths contained non-ASCII characters.1551
/plugins/fetchart
: Work around a urllib3 bug that could cause a crash.1555
1556
- When you edit the configuration file with
beet config -e
and the file does not exist, beets creates an empty file before editing it. This fixes an error on OS X, where theopen
command does not work with non-existent files.1480
/plugins/convert
: Fix a problem with filename encoding on Windows under Python 3.2515
2516
This is a tiny bug-fix release. It copes with a dependency upgrade that broke beets. There are just two fixes:
- Fix compatibility with Jellyfish version 0.5.0.
/plugins/embedart
: Inauto
mode (the import hook), the plugin now respects thewrite
config option underimport
. If this is disabled, album art is no longer embedded on import in order to leave files untouched---in effect,auto
is implicitly disabled.1427
This little update makes queries more powerful, sorts music more intelligently, and removes a performance bottleneck. There's an experimental new plugin for synchronizing metadata with music players.
Packagers should also note a new dependency in this version: the Jellyfish Python library makes our text comparisons (a big part of the auto-tagging process) go much faster.
New features:
- Queries can now use "or" logic: if you use a comma to separate parts of a query, items and albums will match either side of the comma. For example,
beet ls foo , bar
will get all the items matching foo or matching bar. Seecombiningqueries
.1423
- The autotagger's matching algorithm is faster. We now use the Jellyfish library to compute string similarity, which is better optimized than our hand-rolled edit distance implementation.
1389
- Sorting is now case insensitive by default. This means that artists will be sorted lexicographically regardless of case. For example, the artist alt-J will now properly sort before YACHT. (Previously, it would have ended up at the end of the list, after all the capital-letter artists.) You can turn this new behavior off using the
sort_case_insensitive
configuration option. Seequery-sort
.1429
- An experimental new
/plugins/metasync
lets you get metadata from your favorite music players, starting with Amarok.1386
/plugins/fetchart
: There are new settings to control what constitutes "acceptable" images. The minwidth option constrains the minimum image width in pixels and the enforce_ratio option requires that images be square.1394
Little fixes and improvements:
/plugins/fetchart
: Remove a hard size limit when fetching from the Cover Art Archive.- The output of the
fields-cmd
command is now sorted. Thanks tomultikatt
.1402
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix a number of issues with the newbs1770gain
backend on Windows. Also, fix missing debug output in import mode.1398
- Beets should now be better at guessing the appropriate output encoding on Windows. (Specifically, the console output encoding is guessed separately from the encoding for command-line arguments.) A bug was also fixed where beets would ignore the locale settings and use UTF-8 by default.
1419
/plugins/discogs
: Better error handling when we can't communicate with Discogs on setup.1417
/plugins/importadded
: Fix a crash when importing singletons in-place.1416
/plugins/fuzzy
: Fix a regression causing a crash in the last release.1422
- Fix a crash when the importer cannot open its log file. Thanks to
barsanuphe
.1426
- Fix an error when trying to write tags for items with flexible fields called date and original_date (which are not built-in beets fields).
1404
In this release, we refactored the logging system to be more flexible and more useful. There are more granular levels of verbosity, the output from plugins should be more consistent, and several kinds of logging bugs should be impossible in the future.
There are also two new plugins: one for filtering the files you import and an evolved plugin for using album art as directory thumbnails in file managers. There's a new source for album art, and the importer now records the source of match data. This is a particularly huge release---there's lots more below.
There's one big change with this release: Python 2.6 is no longer supported. You'll need Python 2.7. Please trust us when we say this let us remove a surprising number of ugly hacks throughout the code.
Major new features and bigger changes:
- There are now multiple levels of output verbosity. On the command line, you can make beets somewhat verbose with
-v
or very verbose with-vv
. For the importer especially, this makes the first verbose mode much more manageable, while still preserving an option for overwhelmingly verbose debug output.1244
- A new
/plugins/filefilter
lets you write regular expressions to automatically avoid importing certain files. Thanks tomried
.1186
- A new
/plugins/thumbnails
generates cover-art thumbnails for album folders for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. (This replaces the/plugins/freedesktop
, which only worked with the Dolphin file manager.) /plugins/replaygain
: There is a new backend that uses the bs1770gain analysis tool. Thanks tojmwatte
.1343
- A new
filesize
field on items indicates the number of bytes in the file.1291
- A new
searchlimit
configuration option allows you to specify how many search results you wish to see when looking up releases at MusicBrainz during import.1245
- The importer now records the data source for a match in a new flexible attribute
data_source
on items and albums.1311
- The colors used in the terminal interface are now configurable via the new config option
colors
, nested under the optionui
. (Also, the color config option has been moved from top-level to underui
. Beets will respect the old color setting, but will warn the user with a deprecation message.)1238
/plugins/fetchart
: There's a new Wikipedia image source that uses DBpedia to find albums. Thanks to Tom Jaspers.1194
- In the
config-cmd
command, the output is now redacted by default. Sensitive information like passwords and API keys is not included. The new--clear
option disables redaction.1376
You should probably also know about these core changes to the way beets works:
- As mentioned above, Python 2.6 is no longer supported.
- The
tracktotal
attribute is now a track-level field instead of an album-level one. This field stores the total number of tracks on the album, or if theper_disc_numbering
config option is set, the total number of tracks on a particular medium (i.e., disc). The field was causing problems with thatper_disc_numbering
mode: different discs on the same album needed different track totals. The field can now work correctly in either mode. - To replace
tracktotal
as an album-level field, there is a newalbumtotal
computed attribute that provides the total number of tracks on the album. (Theper_disc_numbering
option has no influence on this field.) - The list_format_album and list_format_item configuration keys now affect (almost) every place where objects are printed and logged. (Previously, they only controlled the
list-cmd
command and a few other scattered pieces.)1269
- Relatedly, the
beet
program now accept top-level options--format-item
and--format-album
before any subcommand to control how items and albums are displayed.1271
- list_format_album and list_format_album have respectively been renamed
format_album
andformat_item
. The old names still work but each triggers a warning message.1271
Path queries <pathquery>
are automatically triggered only if the path targeted by the query exists. Previously, just having a slash somewhere in the query was enough, sobeet ls AC/DC
wouldn't work to refer to the artist.
There are also lots of medium-sized features in this update:
/plugins/duplicates
: The command has a new--strict
option that will only report duplicates if all attributes are explicitly set.1000
/plugins/smartplaylist
: Playlist updating should now be faster: the plugin detects, for each playlist, whether it needs to be regenerated, instead of obliviously regenerating all of them. Thesplupdate
command can now also take additional parameters that indicate the names of the playlists to regenerate./plugins/play
: The command shows the output of the underlying player command and lets you interact with it.1321
- The summary shown to compare duplicate albums during import now displays the old and new filesizes.
1291
/plugins/lastgenre
: Add comedy, humor, and stand-up as well as a longer list of classical music genre tags to the built-in whitelist and canonicalization tree.1206
1239
1240
/plugins/web
: Add support for cross-origin resource sharing for more flexible in-browser clients. Thanks to Andre Miller.1236
1237
plugins/mbsync
: A new-f/--format
option controls the output format when listing unrecognized items. The output is also now more helpful by default.1246
/plugins/fetchart
: A new option,-n
, extracts the cover art of all matched albums into their respective directories. Another new flag,-a
, associates the extracted files with the albums in the database.1261
/plugins/info
: A new option,-i
, can display only a specified subset of properties.1287
- The number of missing/unmatched tracks is shown during import.
1088
/plugins/permissions
: The plugin now also adjusts the permissions of the directories. (Previously, it only affected files.)1308
1324
/plugins/ftintitle
: You can now configure the format that the plugin uses to add the artist to the title. Thanks toamishb
.1377
And many little fixes and improvements:
/plugins/replaygain
: Stop applying replaygain directly to source files when using the mp3gain backend.1316
- Path queries are case-sensitive on non-Windows OSes.
1165
/plugins/lyrics
: Silence a warning about insecure requests in the new MusixMatch backend.1204
- Fix a crash when
beet
is invoked without arguments.1205
1207
/plugins/fetchart
: Do not attempt to import directories as album art.1177
1211
/plugins/mpdstats
: Avoid double-counting some play events.773
1212
- Fix a crash when the importer deals with Unicode metadata in
--pretend
mode.1214
/plugins/smartplaylist
: Fixalbum_query
so that individual files are added to the playlist instead of directories.1225
- Remove the
beatport
plugin. Beatport has shut off public access to their API and denied our request for an account. We have not heard from the company since 2013, so we are assuming access will not be restored. - Incremental imports now (once again) show a "skipped N directories" message.
/plugins/embedart
: Handle errors in ImageMagick's output.1241
/plugins/keyfinder
: Parse the underlying tool's output more robustly.1248
/plugins/embedart
: We now show a comprehensible error message whenbeet embedart -f FILE
is given a non-existent path.1252
- Fix a crash when a file has an unrecognized image type tag. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer.
1260
/plugins/importfeeds
and/plugins/smartplaylist
: Automatically create parent directories for playlist files (instead of crashing when the parent directory does not exist).1266
- The
write-cmd
command no longer tries to "write" non-writable fields, such as the bitrate.1268
- The error message when MusicBrainz is not reachable on the network is now much clearer. Thanks to Tom Jaspers.
1190
1272
- Improve error messages when parsing query strings with shlex.
1290
/plugins/embedart
: Fix a crash that occurred when used together with the check plugin.1241
/plugins/scrub
: Log an error instead of stopping when thebeet scrub
command cannot write a file. Also, avoid problems on Windows with Unicode filenames.1297
/plugins/discogs
: Handle and log more kinds of communication errors.1299
1305
/plugins/lastgenre
: Bugs in the pylast library can no longer crash beets./plugins/convert
: You can now configure the temporary directory for conversions. Thanks toautochthe
.1382
1383
/plugins/rewrite
: Fix a regression that prevented the plugin's rewriting from applying to album-level fields like$albumartist
.1393
/plugins/play
: The plugin now sorts items according to the configuration in album mode./plugins/fetchart
: The name for extracted art files is taken from theart_filename
configuration option.1258
- When there's a parse error in a query (for example, when you type a malformed date in a
date query <datequery>
), beets now stops with an error instead of silently ignoring the query component. /plugins/smartplaylist
: Stream-friendly smart playlists. Thesplupdate
command can now also add a URL-encodable prefix to every path in the playlist file.
For developers:
- The
database_change
event now sends the item or album that is subject to a change. - The
OptionParser
is now aCommonOptionsParser
that offers facilities for adding usual options (--album
,--path
and--format
). Seeadd_subcommands
.1271
- The logging system in beets has been overhauled. Plugins now each have their own logger, which helps by automatically adjusting the verbosity level in import mode and by prefixing the plugin's name. Logging levels are dynamically set when a plugin is called, depending on how it is called (import stage, event or direct command). Finally, logging calls can (and should!) use modern
{}
-style string formatting lazily. Seeplugin-logging
in the plugin API docs. - A new
import_task_created
event lets you manipulate import tasks immediately after they are initialized. It's also possible to replace the originally created tasks by returning new ones using this event.
This version adds a healthy helping of new features and fixes a critical MPEG-4--related bug. There are more lyrics sources, there new plugins for managing permissions and integrating with Plex, and the importer has a new --pretend
flag that shows which music would be imported.
One backwards-compatibility note: the /plugins/lyrics
now requires the requests library. If you use this plugin, you will need to install the library by typing pip install requests
or the equivalent for your OS.
Also, as an advance warning, this will be one of the last releases to support Python 2.6. If you have a system that cannot run Python 2.7, please consider upgrading soon.
The new features are:
- A new
/plugins/permissions
makes it easy to fix permissions on music files as they are imported. Thanks toxsteadfastx
.1098
- A new
/plugins/plexupdate
lets you notify a Plex server when the database changes. Thanks again to xsteadfastx.1120
- The
import-cmd
command now has a--pretend
flag that lists the files that will be imported. Thanks tomried
.1162
/plugins/lyrics
: Add Musixmatch source and introduce a newsources
config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for lyrics and in which order./plugins/lyrics
: Add Brazilian and Spanish sources to Google custom search engine.- Add a warning when importing a directory that contains no music.
1116
1127
/plugins/zero
: Can now remove embedded images.1129
1100
- The
config-cmd
command can now be used to edit the configuration even when it has syntax errors.1123
1128
/plugins/lyrics
: Added a newforce
config option.1150
As usual, there are loads of little fixes and improvements:
- Fix a new crash with the latest version of Mutagen (1.26).
/plugins/lyrics
: Avoid fetching truncated lyrics from the Google backed by merging text blocks separated by empty<div>
tags before scraping.- We now print a better error message when the database file is corrupted.
/plugins/discogs
: Only prompt for authentication when running theimport-cmd
command.1123
- When deleting fields with the
modify-cmd
command, do not crash when the field cannot be removed (i.e., when it does not exist, when it is a built-in field, or when it is a computed field).1124
- The deprecated
echonest_tempo
plugin has been removed. Please use theechonest
plugin instead. echonest
plugin: Fingerprint-based lookup has been removed in accordance with API changes.1121
echonest
plugin: Avoid a crash when the song has no duration information.896
/plugins/lyrics
: Avoid a crash when retrieving non-ASCII lyrics from the Google backend.1135
1136
/plugins/smartplaylist
: Sort specifiers are now respected in queries. Thanks todjl
.1138
1137
/plugins/ftintitle
and/plugins/lyrics
: Featuring artists can now be detected when they use the Spanish word con.1060
1143
/plugins/mbcollection
: Fix an "HTTP 400" error caused by a change in the MusicBrainz API.1152
- The
%
and_
characters in path queries do not invoke their special SQL meaning anymore.1146
/plugins/convert
: Command-line argument construction now works on Windows. Thanks tomluds
.1026
1157
1158
/plugins/embedart
: Fix an erroneous missing-art error on Windows. Thanks tomluds
.1163
/plugins/importadded
: Now works with in-place and symlinked imports.1170
/plugins/ftintitle
: The plugin is now quiet when it runs as part of the import process. Thanks toFreso
.1176
1172
/plugins/ftintitle
: Fix weird behavior when the same artist appears twice in the artist string. Thanks to Marc Addeo.1179
1181
/plugins/lastgenre
: Match songs more robustly when they contain dashes. Thanks todjl
.1156
- The
config-cmd
command can now use$EDITOR
variables with arguments.
This release adds two new standard plugins to beets: one for synchronizing Last.fm listening data and one for integrating with Linux desktops. And at long last, imports can now create symbolic links to music files instead of copying or moving them. We also gained the ability to search for album art on the iTunes Store and a new way to compute ReplayGain levels.
The major new features are:
- A new
/plugins/lastimport
lets you download your play count data from Last.fm into a flexible attribute. Thanks to Rafael Bodill. - A new
/plugins/freedesktop
creates metadata files for Freedesktop.org--compliant file managers. Thanks tokerobaros
.1056
,707
- A new
link
option in theimport
section creates symbolic links during import instead of moving or copying. Thanks to Rovanion Luckey.710
,114
/plugins/fetchart
: You can now search for art on the iTunes Store. There's also a newsources
config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for images and in which order./plugins/replaygain
: A new Python Audio Tools backend was added. Thanks to Francesco Rubino.1070
/plugins/embedart
: You can now automatically check that new art looks similar to existing art---ensuring that you only get a better "version" of the art you already have. Seeimage-similarity-check
./plugins/ftintitle
: The plugin now runs automatically on import. To disable this, unset theauto
config flag.
There are also core improvements and other substantial additions:
- The
media
attribute is now a track-level field instead of an album-level one. This field stores the delivery mechanism for the music, so in its album-level incarnation, it could not represent heterogeneous releases---for example, an album consisting of a CD and a DVD. Now, tracks accurately indicate the media they appear on. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger. - Re-imports of your existing music (see
reimport
) now preserve its added date and flexible attributes. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen. - Slow queries, such as those over flexible attributes, should now be much faster when used with certain commands---notably, the
/plugins/play
. /plugins/bpd
: Add a new configuration option for setting the default volume. Thanks to IndiGit./plugins/embedart
: A newifempty
config option lets you only embed album art when no album art is present. Thanks to kerobaros./plugins/discogs
: Authenticate with the Discogs server. The plugin now requires a Discogs account due to new API restrictions. Thanks tomultikatt
.1027
,1040
And countless little improvements and fixes:
- Standard cover art in APEv2 metadata is now supported. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer.
1042
/plugins/convert
: Avoid a crash when embedding cover art fails./plugins/mpdstats
: Fix an error on start (introduced in the previous version). Thanks to Zach Denton./plugins/convert
: The--yes
command-line flag no longer expects an argument./plugins/play
: Remove the temporary .m3u file after sending it to the player.- The importer no longer tries to highlight partial differences in numeric quantities (track numbers and durations), which was often confusing.
- Date-based queries that are malformed (not parse-able) no longer crash beets and instead fail silently.
/plugins/duplicates
: Emit an error when thechecksum
config option is set incorrectly.- The migration from pre-1.1, non-YAML configuration files has been removed. If you need to upgrade an old config file, use an older version of beets temporarily.
/plugins/discogs
: Recover from HTTP errors when communicating with the Discogs servers. Thanks to Dustin Rodriguez./plugins/embedart
: Do not log "embedding album art into..." messages during the import process.- Fix a crash in the autotagger when files had only whitespace in their metadata.
/plugins/play
: Fix a potential crash when the command outputs special characters.1041
/plugins/web
: Queries typed into the search field are now treated as separate query components.1045
- Date tags that use slashes instead of dashes as separators are now interpreted correctly. And WMA (ASF) files now map the
comments
field to the "Description" tag (in addition to "WM/Comments"). Thanks to Matthias Kiefer.1043
/plugins/embedart
: Avoid resizing the image multiple times when embedding into an album. Thanks tokerobaros
.1028
,1036
/plugins/discogs
: Avoid a situation where a trailing comma could be appended to some artist names.1049
- The output of the
stats-cmd
command is slightly different: the approximate size is now marked as such, and the total number of seconds only appears in exact mode. /plugins/convert
: A newcopy_album_art
option puts images alongside converted files. Thanks to Ángel Alonso.1050
,1055
- There is no longer a "conflict" between two plugins that declare the same field with the same type. Thanks to Peter Schnebel.
1059
1061
/plugins/chroma
: Limit the number of releases and recordings fetched as the result of an Acoustid match to avoid extremely long processing times for very popular music.1068
- Fix an issue where modifying an album's field without actually changing it would not update the corresponding tracks to bring differing tracks back in line with the album.
856
echonest
plugin: When communicating with the Echo Nest servers fails repeatedly, log an error instead of exiting.1096
/plugins/lyrics
: Avoid an error when the Google source returns a result without a title. Thanks to Alberto Leal.1097
- Importing an archive will no longer leave temporary files behind in
/tmp
. Thanks tomultikatt
.1067
,1091
This release has two big new chunks of functionality. Queries now support sorting and user-defined fields can now have types.
If you want to see all your songs in reverse chronological order, just type beet list year-
. It couldn't be easier. For details, see query-sort
.
Flexible field types mean that some functionality that has previously only worked for built-in fields, like range queries, can now work with plugin- and user-defined fields too. For starters, the echonest
plugin and /plugins/mpdstats
now mark the types of the fields they provide---so you can now say, for example, beet ls liveness:0.5..1.5
for the Echo Nest "liveness" attribute. The /plugins/types
makes it easy to specify field types in your config file.
One upgrade note: if you use the /plugins/discogs
, you will need to upgrade the Discogs client library to use this version. Just type pip install -U discogs-client
.
Other new features:
/plugins/info
: Target files can now be specified through library queries (in addition to filenames). The--library
option prints library fields instead of tags. Multiple files can be summarized together with the new--summarize
option./plugins/mbcollection
: A new option lets you automatically update your collection on import. Thanks to Olin Gay./plugins/convert
: A newnever_convert_lossy_files
option can prevent lossy transcoding. Thanks to Simon Kohlmeyer./plugins/convert
: A new--yes
command-line flag skips the confirmation.
Still more fixes and little improvements:
- Invalid state files don't crash the importer.
/plugins/lyrics
: Only strip featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes if no lyrics for the original artist and title were found.- Fix a crash when reading some files with missing tags.
/plugins/discogs
: Compatibility with the new 2.0 version of the discogs_client Python library. If you were using the old version, you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the library to use the correspondingly new version of the plugin (e.g., withpip install -U discogs-client
). Thanks to Andriy Kohut.- Fix a crash when writing files that can't be read. Thanks to Jocelyn De La Rosa.
- The
stats-cmd
command now counts album artists. The album count also more accurately reflects the number of albums in the database. /plugins/convert
: Avoid crashes when tags cannot be written to newly converted files.- Formatting templates with item data no longer confusingly shows album-level data when the two are inconsistent.
- Resuming imports and beginning incremental imports should now be much faster when there is a lot of previously-imported music to skip.
/plugins/lyrics
: Remove<script>
tags from scraped lyrics. Thanks to Bombardment./plugins/play
: Add arelative_to
config option. Thanks to BrainDamage.- Fix a crash when a MusicBrainz release has zero tracks.
- The
--version
flag now works as an alias for theversion
command. /plugins/lastgenre
: Remove some unhelpful genres from the default whitelist. Thanks to gwern./plugins/importfeeds
: A newecho
output mode prints files' paths to standard error. Thanks to robotanarchy./plugins/replaygain
: Restore some error handling whenmp3gain
output cannot be parsed. The verbose log now contains the bad tool output in this case./plugins/convert
: Fix filename extensions when converting automatically.- The
write
plugin event allows plugins to change the tags that are written to a media file. /plugins/zero
: Do not delete database values; only media file tags are affected.
This release of beets fixes all the bugs, and you can be confident that you will never again find any bugs in beets, ever. It also adds support for plain old AIFF files and adds three more plugins, including a nifty one that lets you measure a song's tempo by tapping out the beat on your keyboard. The importer deals more elegantly with duplicates and you can broaden your cover art search to the entire web with Google Image Search.
The big new features are:
- Support for AIFF files. Tags are stored as ID3 frames in one of the file's IFF chunks. Thanks to Evan Purkhiser for contributing support to Mutagen.
- The new
/plugins/importadded
reads files' modification times to set their "added" date. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen. - The new
/plugins/bpm
lets you manually measure the tempo of a playing song. Thanks to aroquen. - The new
/plugins/spotify
generates playlists for your Spotify account. Thanks to Olin Gay. - A new
required
configuration option for the importer skips matches that are missing certain data. Thanks to oprietop. - When the importer detects duplicates, it now shows you some details about the potentially-replaced music so you can make an informed decision. Thanks to Howard Jones.
/plugins/fetchart
: You can now optionally search for cover art on Google Image Search. Thanks to Lemutar.- A new
asciify-paths
configuration option replaces all non-ASCII characters in paths.
And the multitude of little improvements and fixes:
- Compatibility with the latest version of Mutagen, 1.23.
/plugins/web
: Lyrics now display readably with correct line breaks. Also, the detail view scrolls to reveal all of the lyrics. Thanks to Meet Udeshi./plugins/play
: Thecommand
config option can now contain arguments (rather than just an executable). Thanks to Alessandro Ghedini.- Fix an error when using the
modify-cmd
command to remove a flexible attribute. Thanks to Pierre Rust. /plugins/info
: The command now shows audio properties (e.g., bitrate) in addition to metadata. Thanks Alessandro Ghedini.- Avoid a crash on Windows when writing to files with special characters in their names.
/plugins/play
: Playing albums now generates filenames by default (as opposed to directories) for better compatibility. Theuse_folders
option restores the old behavior. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.- Fix an error when importing an empty directory with the
--flat
option. /plugins/mpdstats
: The last song in a playlist is now correctly counted as played. Thanks to Johann Klähn./plugins/zero
: Prevent accidental nulling of dangerous fields (IDs and paths). Thanks to brunal.- The
remove-cmd
command now shows the paths of files that will be deleted. Thanks again to brunal. - Don't display changes for fields that are not in the restricted field set. This fixes
write-cmd
showing changes for fields that are not written to the file. - The
write-cmd
command avoids displaying the item name if there are no changes for it. - When using both the
/plugins/convert
and the/plugins/scrub
, avoid scrubbing the source file of conversions. (Fix a regression introduced in the previous release.) /plugins/replaygain
: Logging is now quieter during import. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman./plugins/fetchart
: When loading art from the filesystem, we now prioritize covers with more keywords in them. This means thatcover-front.jpg
will now be taken beforecover-back.jpg
because it contains two keywords rather than one. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte./plugins/lastgenre
: Remove duplicates from canonicalized genre lists. Thanks again to Fabrice Laporte.- The importer now records its progress when skipping albums. This means that incremental imports will no longer try to import albums again after you've chosen to skip them, and erroneous invitations to resume "interrupted" imports should be reduced. Thanks to jcassette.
/plugins/bucket
: You can now customize the definition of alphanumeric "ranges" using regular expressions. And the heuristic for detecting years has been improved. Thanks to sotho.- Already-imported singleton tracks are skipped when resuming an import.
/plugins/chroma
: A newauto
configuration option disables fingerprinting on import. Thanks to ddettrittus./plugins/convert
: A new--format
option to can select the transcoding preset from the command-line./plugins/convert
: Transcoding presets can now omit their filename extensions (extensions default to the name of the preset)./plugins/convert
: A new--pretend
option lets you preview the commands the plugin will execute without actually taking any action. Thanks to Dietrich Daroch.- Fix a crash when a float-valued tag field only contained a
+
or-
character. - Fixed a regression in the core that caused the
/plugins/scrub
not to work inauto
mode. Thanks to Harry Khanna. - The
write-cmd
command now has a--force
flag. Thanks again to Harry Khanna. /plugins/mbsync
: Track alignment now works with albums that have multiple copies of the same recording. Thanks to Rui Gonçalves.
This is primarily a bugfix release, but it also brings two new plugins: one for playing music in desktop players and another for organizing your directories into "buckets." It also brings huge performance optimizations to queries---your beet ls
commands will now go much faster.
New features:
- The new
/plugins/play
lets you start your desktop music player with the songs that match a query. Thanks to David Hamp-Gonsalves. - The new
/plugins/bucket
provides a%bucket{}
function for path formatting to generate folder names representing ranges of years or initial letter. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte. - Item and album queries are much faster.
/plugins/ftintitle
: A new option lets you remove featured artists entirely instead of moving them to the title. Thanks to SUTJael.
And those all-important bug fixes:
/plugins/mbsync
: Fix a regression in 1.3.5 that broke the plugin entirely.Shell completion <completion>
now searches more common paths for itsbash_completion
dependency.- Fix encoding-related logging errors in
/plugins/convert
and/plugins/replaygain
. /plugins/replaygain
: Suppress a deprecation warning emitted by later versions of PyGI.- Fix a crash when reading files whose iTunes SoundCheck tags contain non-ASCII characters.
- The
%if{}
template function now appropriately interprets the condition as false when it contains the string "false". Thanks to Ayberk Yilmaz. /plugins/convert
: Fix conversion for files that include a video stream by ignoring it. Thanks to brunal./plugins/fetchart
: Log an error instead of crashing when tag manipulation fails./plugins/convert
: Log an error instead of crashing when embedding album art fails./plugins/convert
: Embed cover art into converted files. Previously they were embedded into the source files.- New plugin event: before_item_moved. Thanks to Robert Speicher.
This is a short-term release that adds some great new stuff to beets. There's support for tracking and calculating musical keys, the ReplayGain plugin was expanded to work with more music formats via GStreamer, we can now import directly from compressed archives, and the lyrics plugin is more robust.
One note for upgraders and packagers: this version of beets has a new dependency in enum34, which is a backport of the new enum standard library module.
The major new features are:
- Beets can now import zip, tar, and rar archives. Just type
beet import music.zip
to have beets transparently extract the files to import. /plugins/replaygain
: Added support for calculating ReplayGain values with GStreamer as well the mp3gain program. This enables ReplayGain calculation for any audio format. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman./plugins/lyrics
: Lyrics should now be found for more songs. Searching is now sensitive to featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes. When a song has multiple titles, lyrics from all the named songs are now concatenated. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte and Paul Phillips.
In particular, a full complement of features for supporting musical keys are new in this release:
- A new initial_key field is available in the database and files' tags. You can set the field manually using a command like
beet modify initial_key=Am
. - The
echonest
plugin sets the initial_key field if the data is available. - A new
/plugins/keyfinder
runs a command-line tool to get the key from audio data and store it in the initial_key field.
There are also many bug fixes and little enhancements:
echonest
plugin: Truncate files larger than 50MB before uploading for analysis./plugins/fetchart
: Fix a crash when the server does not specify a content type. Thanks to Lee Reinhardt./plugins/convert
: The--keep-new
flag now works correctly and the library includes the converted item.- The importer now logs a message instead of crashing when errors occur while opening the files to be imported.
/plugins/embedart
: Better error messages in exceptional conditions.- Silenced some confusing error messages when searching for a non-MusicBrainz ID. Using an invalid ID (of any kind---Discogs IDs can be used there too) at the "Enter ID:" importer prompt now just silently returns no results. More info is in the verbose logs.
/plugins/mbsync
: Fix application of album-level metadata. Due to a regression a few releases ago, only track-level metadata was being updated.- On Windows, paths on network shares (UNC paths) no longer cause "invalid filename" errors.
/plugins/replaygain
: Fix crashes when attempting to log errors.- The
modify-cmd
command can now accept query arguments that contain = signs. An argument is considered a query part when a : appears before any =s. Thanks to mook.
This release brings a hodgepodge of medium-sized conveniences to beets. A new config-cmd
command manages your configuration, we now have bash
completion <completion>
, and the modify-cmd
command can delete attributes. There are also some significant performance optimizations to the autotagger's matching logic.
One note for upgraders: if you use the /plugins/fetchart
, it has a new dependency, the requests module.
New stuff:
- Added a
config-cmd
command to manage your configuration. It can show you what you currently have in your config file, point you at where the file should be, or launch your text editor to let you modify the file. Thanks to geigerzaehler. - Beets now ships with a shell command completion script! See
completion
. Thanks to geigerzaehler. - The
modify-cmd
command now allows removing flexible attributes. For example,beet modify artist:beatles oldies!
deletes theoldies
attribute from matching items. Thanks to brilnius. - Internally, beets has laid the groundwork for supporting multi-valued fields. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
- The importer interface now shows the URL for MusicBrainz matches. Thanks to johtso.
/plugins/smartplaylist
: Playlists can now be generated from multiple queries (combined with "or" logic). Album-level queries are also now possible and automatic playlist regeneration can now be disabled. Thanks to brilnius.echonest
plugin: Echo Nest similarity now weights the tempo in better proportion to other metrics. Also, options were added to specify custom thresholds and output formats. Thanks to Adam M.- Added the
after_write <plugin_events>
plugin event. /plugins/lastgenre
: Separator in genre lists can now be configured. Thanks to brilnius.- We now only use "primary" aliases for artist names from MusicBrainz. This eliminates some strange naming that could occur when the languages config option was set. Thanks to Filipe Fortes.
- The performance of the autotagger's matching mechanism is vastly improved. This should be noticeable when matching against very large releases such as box sets.
- The
import-cmd
command can now accept individual files as arguments even in non-singleton mode. Files are imported as one-track albums.
Fixes:
- Error messages involving paths no longer escape non-ASCII characters (for legibility).
- Fixed a regression that made it impossible to use the
modify-cmd
command to add new flexible fields. Thanks to brilnius. echonest
plugin: Avoid crashing when the audio analysis fails. Thanks to Pedro Silva./plugins/duplicates
: Fix checksumming command execution for files with quotation marks in their names. Thanks again to Pedro Silva.- Fix a crash when importing with both of the
group_albums
andincremental
options enabled. Thanks to geigerzaehler. - Give a sensible error message when
BEETSDIR
points to a file. Thanks again to geigerzaehler. - Fix a crash when reading WMA files whose boolean-valued fields contain strings. Thanks to johtso.
/plugins/fetchart
: The plugin now sends "beets" as the User-Agent when making scraping requests. This helps resolve some blocked requests. The plugin now also depends on the requests Python library.- The
write-cmd
command now only shows the changes to fields that will actually be written to a file. /plugins/duplicates
: Spurious reports are now avoided for tracks with missing values (e.g., no MBIDs). Thanks to Pedro Silva.- The default
replace
sanitation options now remove leading whitespace by default. Thanks to brilnius. /plugins/importfeeds
: Fix crash when importing albums containing/
with them3u_multi
format.- Avoid crashing on Mutagen bugs while writing files' tags.
/plugins/convert
: Display a useful error message when the FFmpeg executable can't be found.
Version 1.3.3 brings a bunch changes to how item and album fields work internally. Along with laying the groundwork for some great things in the future, this brings a number of improvements to how you interact with beets. Here's what's new with fields in particular:
- Plugin-provided fields can now be used in queries. For example, if you use the
/plugins/inline
to define a field calledera
, you can now filter your library based on that field by typing something likebeet list era:goldenage
. - Album-level flexible attributes and plugin-provided attributes can now be used in path formats (and other item-level templates).
Date-based queries <datequery>
are now possible. Try getting every track you added in February 2014 withbeet ls added:2014-02
or in the whole decade withadded:2010..
. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.- The
modify-cmd
command is now better at parsing and formatting fields. You can assign to boolean fields likecomp
, for example, using either the words "true" or "false" or the numerals 1 and 0. Any boolean-esque value is normalized to a real boolean. Theupdate-cmd
andwrite-cmd
commands also got smarter at formatting and colorizing changes.
For developers, the short version of the story is that Item and Album objects provide uniform access across fixed, flexible, and computed attributes. You can write item.foo
to access the foo
field without worrying about where the data comes from.
Unrelated new stuff:
- The importer has a new interactive option (G for "Group albums"), command-line flag (
--group-albums
), and config option (group_albums
) that lets you split apart albums that are mixed together in a single directory. Thanks to geigerzaehler. - A new
--config
command-line option lets you specify an additional configuration file. This option combines config settings with your default config file. (As part of this change, theBEETSDIR
environment variable no longer combines---it replaces your default config file.) Thanks again to geigerzaehler. /plugins/ihate
: The plugin's configuration interface was overhauled. Its configuration is now much simpler---it uses beets queries instead of an ad-hoc per-field configuration. This is backwards-incompatible---if you use this plugin, you will need to update your configuration. Thanks to BrainDamage.
Other little fixes:
echonest
plugin: Tempo (BPM) is now always stored as an integer. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.- Fix Python 2.6 compatibility in some logging statements in
/plugins/chroma
and/plugins/lastgenre
. - Prevent some crashes when things go really wrong when writing file metadata at the end of the import process.
- New plugin events:
item_removed
(thanks to Romuald Conty) anditem_copied
(thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen). - The
pluginpath
config option can now point to the directory containing plugin code. (Previously, it awkwardly needed to point at a directory containing abeetsplug
directory, which would then contain your code. This is preserved as an option for backwards compatibility.) This change should also work around a long-standing issue when usingpluginpath
when beets is installed using pip. Many thanks to geigerzaehler. /plugins/web
: The/item/
and/album/
API endpoints now produce full details about albums and items, not just lists of IDs. Thanks to geigerzaehler.- Fix a potential crash when using image resizing with the
/plugins/fetchart
or/plugins/embedart
without ImageMagick installed. - Also, when invoking
convert
for image resizing fails, we now log an error instead of crashing. /plugins/fetchart
: Thebeet fetchart
command can now associate local images with albums (unless--force
is provided). Thanks to brilnius./plugins/fetchart
: Command output is now colorized. Thanks again to brilnius.- The
modify-cmd
command avoids writing files and committing to the database when nothing has changed. Thanks once more to brilnius. - The importer now uses the album artist field when guessing existing metadata for albums (rather than just the track artist field). Thanks to geigerzaehler.
/plugins/fromfilename
: Fix a crash when a filename contained only a track number (e.g.,02.mp3
)./plugins/convert
: Transcoding should now work on Windows./plugins/duplicates
: Themove
andcopy
destination arguments are now treated as directories. Thanks to Pedro Silva.- The
modify-cmd
command now skips confirmation and prints a message if no changes are necessary. Thanks to brilnius. /plugins/fetchart
: When using theremote_priority
config option, local image files are no longer completely ignored.echonest
plugin: Fix an issue causing the plugin to appear twice in the output of thebeet version
command./plugins/lastgenre
: Fix an occasional crash when no tag weight was returned by Last.fm./plugins/mpdstats
: Restore thelast_played
field. Thanks to Johann Klähn.- The
modify-cmd
command's output now clearly shows when a file has been deleted. - Album art in files with Vorbis Comments is now marked with the "front cover" type. Thanks to Jason Lefley.
This update brings new plugins for fetching acoustic metrics and listening statistics, many more options for the duplicate detection plugin, and flexible options for fetching multiple genres.
The "core" of beets gained a new built-in command: beet write
<write-cmd>
updates the metadata tags for files, bringing them back into sync with your database. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.
We added some plugins and overhauled some existing ones:
- The new
echonest
plugin plugin can fetch a wide range of acoustic attributes from The Echo Nest, including the "speechiness" and "liveness" of each track. The new plugin supersedes an older version (echonest_tempo
) that only fetched the BPM field. Thanks to Pedro Silva and Peter Schnebel. - The
/plugins/duplicates
got a number of new features, thanks to Pedro Silva:- The
keys
option lets you specify the fields used detect duplicates. - You can now use checksumming (via an external command) to find duplicates instead of metadata via the
checksum
option. - The plugin can perform actions on the duplicates it find. The new
copy
,move
,delete
,delete_file
, andtag
options perform those actions.
- The
- The new
/plugins/mpdstats
collects statistics about your listening habits from MPD. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and Johann Klähn. /plugins/lastgenre
: The newmultiple
option has been replaced with thecount
option, which lets you limit the number of genres added to your music. (No more thousand-character genre fields!) Also, themin_weight
field filters out nonsense tags to make your genres more relevant. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and rashley60./plugins/lyrics
: A new--force
option optionally re-downloads lyrics even when files already have them. Thanks to Bitdemon.
As usual, there are also innumerable little fixes and improvements:
- When writing ID3 tags for ReplayGain normalization, tags are written with both upper-case and lower-case TXXX frame descriptions. Previous versions of beets used only the upper-case style, which seems to be more standard, but some players (namely, Quod Libet and foobar2000) seem to only use lower-case names.
/plugins/missing
: Avoid a possible error when an album'stracktotal
field is missing./plugins/ftintitle
: Fix an error when the sort artist is missing.echonest_tempo
: The plugin should now match songs more reliably (i.e., fewer "no tempo found" messages). Thanks to Peter Schnebel./plugins/convert
: Fix an "Item has no library" error when using theauto
config option./plugins/convert
: Fix an issue where files of the wrong format would have their transcoding skipped (and files with the right format would be needlessly transcoded). Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer.- Fix an issue that caused the
id3v23
option to work only occasionally. - Also fix using
id3v23
in conjunction with thescrub
andembedart
plugins. Thanks to Chris Cogburn. /plugins/ihate
: Fix an error when importing singletons. Thanks to Mathijs de Bruin.- The
clutter
option can now be a whitespace-separated list in addition to a YAML list. - Values for the
replace
option can now be empty (i.e., null is equivalent to the empty string). /plugins/lastgenre
: Fix a conflict between canonicalization and multiple genres.- When a match has a year but not a month or day, the autotagger now "zeros out" the month and day fields after applying the year.
- For plugin developers: added an
optparse
callback utility function for performing actions based on arguments. Thanks to Pedro Silva. /plugins/scrub
: Fix scrubbing of MPEG-4 files. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
This release boasts a host of new little features, many of them contributed by beets' amazing and prolific community. It adds support for Opus files, transcoding to any format, and two new plugins: one that guesses metadata for "blank" files based on their filenames and one that moves featured artists into the title field.
Here's the new stuff:
- Add Opus audio support. Thanks to Rowan Lewis.
/plugins/convert
: You can now transcode files to any audio format, rather than just MP3. Thanks again to Rowan Lewis.- The new
/plugins/fromfilename
guesses tags from the filenames during import when metadata tags themselves are missing. Thanks to Jan-Erik Dahlin. - The
/plugins/ftintitle
, by @Verrus, is now distributed with beets. It helps you rewrite tags to move "featured" artists from the artist field to the title field. - The MusicBrainz data source now uses track artists over recording artists. This leads to better metadata when tagging classical music. Thanks to Henrique Ferreiro.
/plugins/lastgenre
: You can now get multiple genres per album or track using themultiple
config option. Thanks to rashley60 on GitHub.- A new
id3v23
config option makes beets write MP3 files' tags using the older ID3v2.3 metadata standard. Use this if you want your tags to be visible to Windows and some older players.
And some fixes:
/plugins/fetchart
: Better error message when the image file has an unrecognized type./plugins/mbcollection
: Detect, log, and skip invalid MusicBrainz IDs (instead of failing with an API error)./plugins/info
: Fail gracefully when used erroneously with a directory.echonest_tempo
: Fix an issue where the plugin could use the tempo from the wrong song when the API did not contain the requested song.- Fix a crash when a file's metadata included a very large number (one wider than 64 bits). These huge numbers are now replaced with zeroes in the database.
- When a track on a MusicBrainz release has a different length from the underlying recording's length, the track length is now used instead.
- With
per_disc_numbering
enabled, thetracktotal
field is now set correctly (i.e., to the number of tracks on the disc). /plugins/scrub
: Thescrub
command now restores album art in addition to other (database-backed) tags./plugins/mpdupdate
: Domain sockets can now begin with a tilde (which is correctly expanded to$HOME
) as well as a slash. Thanks to Johann Klähn./plugins/lastgenre
: Fix a regression that could cause new genres found during import not to be persisted.- Fixed a crash when imported album art was also marked as "clutter" where the art would be deleted before it could be moved into place. This led to a "image.jpg not found during copy" error. Now clutter is removed (and directories pruned) much later in the process, after the
import_task_files
hook. /plugins/missing
: Fix an error when printing missing track names. Thanks to Pedro Silva.- Fix an occasional KeyError in the
update-cmd
command introduced in 1.3.0. /plugins/scrub
: Avoid preserving certain non-standard ID3 tags such as NCON.
Albums and items now have flexible attributes. This means that, when you want to store information about your music in the beets database, you're no longer constrained to the set of fields it supports out of the box (title, artist, track, etc.). Instead, you can use any field name you can think of and treat it just like the built-in fields.
For example, you can use the modify-cmd
command to set a new field on a track:
$ beet modify mood=sexy artist:miguel
and then query your music based on that field:
$ beet ls mood:sunny
or use templates to see the value of the field:
$ beet ls -f '$title: $mood'
While this feature is nifty when used directly with the usual command-line suspects, it's especially useful for plugin authors and for future beets features. Stay tuned for great things built on this flexible attribute infrastructure.
One side effect of this change: queries that include unknown fields will now match nothing instead of everything. So if you type beet ls fieldThatDoesNotExist:foo
, beets will now return no results, whereas previous versions would spit out a warning and then list your entire library.
There's more detail than you could ever need on the beets blog.
This is a bugfix release. We're in the midst of preparing for a large change in beets 1.3, so 1.2.2 resolves some issues that came up over the last few weeks. Stay tuned!
The improvements in this release are:
- A new plugin event,
item_moved
, is sent when files are moved on disk. Thanks to dsedivec. /plugins/lyrics
: More improvements to the Google backend by Fabrice Laporte./plugins/bpd
: Fix for a crash when searching, thanks to Simon Chopin.- Regular expression queries (and other query types) over paths now work. (Previously, special query types were ignored for the
path
field.) /plugins/fetchart
: Look for images in the Cover Art Archive for the release group in addition to the specific release. Thanks to Filipe Fortes.- Fix a race in the importer that could cause files to be deleted before they were imported. This happened when importing one album, importing a duplicate album, and then asking for the first album to be replaced with the second. The situation could only arise when importing music from the library directory and when the two albums are imported close in time.
This release introduces a major internal change in the way that similarity scores are handled. It means that the importer interface can now show you exactly why a match is assigned its score and that the autotagger gained a few new options that let you customize how matches are prioritized and recommended.
The refactoring work is due to the continued efforts of Tai Lee. The changes you'll notice while using the autotagger are:
- The top 3 distance penalties are now displayed on the release listing, and all album and track penalties are now displayed on the track changes list. This should make it clear exactly which metadata is contributing to a low similarity score.
- When displaying differences, the colorization has been made more consistent and helpful: red for an actual difference, yellow to indicate that a distance penalty is being applied, and light gray for no penalty (e.g., case changes) or disambiguation data.
There are also three new (or overhauled) configuration options that let you customize the way that matches are selected:
- The
ignored
setting lets you instruct the importer not to show you matches that have a certain penalty applied. - The
preferred
collection of settings specifies a sorted list of preferred countries and media types, or prioritizes releases closest to the original year for an album. - The
max_rec
settings can now be used for any distance penalty component. The recommendation will be downgraded if a non-zero penalty is being applied to the specified field.
And some little enhancements and bug fixes:
- Multi-disc directory names can now contain "disk" (in addition to "disc"). Thanks to John Hawthorn.
/plugins/web
: Item and album counts are now exposed through the API for use with the Tomahawk resolver. Thanks to Uwe L. Korn.- Python 2.6 compatibility for
beatport
,/plugins/missing
, and/plugins/duplicates
. Thanks to Wesley Bitter and Pedro Silva. - Don't move the config file during a null migration. Thanks to Theofilos Intzoglou.
- Fix an occasional crash in the
beatport
when a length field was missing from the API response. Thanks to Timothy Appnel. /plugins/scrub
: Handle and log I/O errors./plugins/lyrics
: The Google backend should now turn up more results. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte./plugins/random
: Fix compatibility with Python 2.6. Thanks to Matthias Drochner.
There's a lot of new stuff in this release: new data sources for the autotagger, new plugins to look for problems in your library, tracking the date that you acquired new music, an awesome new syntax for doing queries over numeric fields, support for ALAC files, and major enhancements to the importer's UI and distance calculations. A special thanks goes out to all the contributors who helped make this release awesome.
For the first time, beets can now tag your music using additional data sources to augment the matches from MusicBrainz. When you enable either of these plugins, the importer will start showing you new kinds of matches:
- New
/plugins/discogs
: Get matches from the Discogs database. Thanks to Artem Ponomarenko and Tai Lee. - New
beatport
plugin: Get matches from the Beatport database. Thanks to Johannes Baiter.
We also have two other new plugins that can scan your library to check for common problems, both by Pedro Silva:
- New
/plugins/duplicates
: Find tracks or albums in your library that are duplicated. - New
/plugins/missing
: Find albums in your library that are missing tracks.
There are also three more big features added to beets core:
- Your library now keeps track of when music was added to it. The new
added
field is a timestamp reflecting when each item and album was imported and the new%time{}
template function lets you format this timestamp for humans. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe. - When using queries to match on quantitative fields, you can now use numeric ranges. For example, you can get a list of albums from the '90s by typing
beet ls year:1990..1999
or find high-bitrate music withbitrate:128000..
. Seenumericquery
. Thanks to Michael Schuerig. - ALAC files are now marked as ALAC instead of being conflated with AAC audio. Thanks to Simon Luijk.
In addition, the importer saw various UI enhancements, thanks to Tai Lee:
- More consistent format and colorization of album and track metadata.
- Display data source URL for matches from the new data source plugins. This should make it easier to migrate data from Discogs or Beatport into MusicBrainz.
- Display album disambiguation and disc titles in the track listing, when available.
- Track changes are highlighted in yellow when they indicate a change in format to or from the style of
per_disc_numbering
. (As before, no penalty is applied because the track number is still "correct", just in a different format.) - Sort missing and unmatched tracks by index and title and group them together for better readability.
- Indicate MusicBrainz ID mismatches.
The calculation of the similarity score for autotagger matches was also improved, again thanks to Tai Lee. These changes, in general, help deal with the new metadata sources and help disambiguate between similar releases in the same MusicBrainz release group:
- Strongly prefer releases with a matching MusicBrainz album ID. This helps beets re-identify the same release when re-importing existing files.
- Prefer releases that are closest to the tagged
year
. Tolerate files tagged with release or original year. - The new
preferred_media
config option lets you prefer a certain media type when themedia
field is unset on an album. - Apply minor penalties across a range of fields to differentiate between nearly identical releases:
disctotal
,label
,catalognum
,country
andalbumdisambig
.
As usual, there were also lots of other great littler enhancements:
/plugins/random
: A new-e
option gives an equal chance to each artist in your collection to avoid biasing random samples to prolific artists. Thanks to Georges Dubus.- The
modify-cmd
now correctly converts types when modifying non-string fields. You can now safely modify the "comp" flag and the "year" field, for example. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe. /plugins/convert
: You can now configure the path formats for converted files separately from your main library. Thanks again to Lucas Duailibe.- The importer output now shows the number of audio files in each album. Thanks to jayme on GitHub.
- Plugins can now provide fields for both Album and Item templates, thanks to Pedro Silva. Accordingly, the
/plugins/inline
can also now define album fields. For consistency, thepathfields
configuration section has been renameditem_fields
(although the old name will still work for compatibility). - Plugins can also provide metadata matches for ID searches. For example, the new Discogs plugin lets you search for an album by its Discogs ID from the same prompt that previously just accepted MusicBrainz IDs. Thanks to Johannes Baiter.
- The
fields-cmd
command shows template fields provided by plugins. Thanks again to Pedro Silva. /plugins/mpdupdate
: You can now communicate with MPD over a Unix domain socket. Thanks to John Hawthorn.
And a batch of fixes:
- Album art filenames now respect the
replace
configuration. - Friendly error messages are now printed when trying to read or write files that go missing.
- The
modify-cmd
command can now change albums' album art paths (i.e.,beet modify artpath=...
works). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe. /plugins/zero
: Fix a crash when nulling out a field that contains None.- Templates can now refer to non-tag item fields (e.g.,
$id
and$album_id
). /plugins/lyrics
: Lyrics searches should now turn up more results due to some fixes in dealing with special characters.
This final release of 1.1 brings a little polish to the betas that introduced the new configuration system. The album art and lyrics plugins also got a little love.
If you're upgrading from 1.0.0 or earlier, this release (like the 1.1 betas) will automatically migrate your configuration to the new system.
/plugins/embedart
: Theembedart
command now embeds each album's associated art by default. The--file
option invokes the old behavior, in which a specific image file is used./plugins/lyrics
: A new (optional) Google Custom Search backend was added for finding lyrics on a wide array of sites. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.- When automatically detecting the filesystem's maximum filename length, never guess more than 200 characters. This prevents errors on systems where the maximum length was misreported. You can, of course, override this default with the
max_filename_length
option. /plugins/fetchart
: Two new configuration options were added:cover_names
, the list of keywords used to identify preferred images, andcautious
, which lets you avoid falling back to images that don't contain those keywords. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.- Avoid some error cases in the
update
command and theembedart
andmbsync
plugins. Invalid or missing files now cause error logs instead of crashing beets. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe. /plugins/lyrics
: Searches now strip "featuring" artists when searching for lyrics, which should increase the hit rate for these tracks. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.- When listing the items in an album, the items are now always in track-number order. This should lead to more predictable listings from the
/plugins/importfeeds
. /plugins/smartplaylist
: Queries are now split using shell-like syntax instead of just whitespace, so you can now construct terms that contain spaces./plugins/lastgenre
: Theforce
config option now defaults to true and controls the behavior of the import hook. (Previously, new genres were always forced during import.)/plugins/web
: Fix an error when specifying the hostname on the command line./plugins/web
: The underlying API was expanded slightly to support Tomahawk collections. And file transfers now have a "Content-Length" header. Thanks to Uwe L. Korn./plugins/lastgenre
: Fix an error when using genre canonicalization.
This third beta of beets 1.1 brings a hodgepodge of little new features (and internal overhauls that will make improvements easier in the future). There are new options for getting metadata in a particular language and seeing more detail during the import process. There's also a new plugin for synchronizing your metadata with MusicBrainz. Under the hood, plugins can now extend the query syntax.
New configuration options:
languages
controls the preferred languages when selecting an alias from MusicBrainz. This feature requires python-musicbrainzngs 0.3 or later. Thanks to Sam Doshi.detail
enables a mode where all tracks are listed in the importer UI, as opposed to only changed tracks.- The
--flat
option to thebeet import
command treats an entire directory tree of music files as a single album. This can help in situations where a multi-disc album is split across multiple directories. /plugins/importfeeds
: An option was added to use absolute, rather than relative, paths. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
Other stuff:
- A new
/plugins/mbsync
provides a command that looks up each item and track in MusicBrainz and updates your library to reflect it. This can help you easily correct errors that have been fixed in the MB database. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer. /plugins/fuzzy
: Thefuzzy
command was removed and replaced with a new query type. To perform fuzzy searches, use the~
prefix withlist-cmd
or other commands. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.- As part of the above, plugins can now extend the query syntax and new kinds of matching capabilities to beets. See
extend-query
. Thanks again to Philippe Mongeau. /plugins/convert
: A new--keep-new
option lets you store transcoded files in your library while backing up the originals (instead of vice-versa). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe./plugins/convert
: Also, a newauto
config option will transcode audio files automatically during import. Thanks again to Lucas Duailibe./plugins/chroma
: A newfingerprint
command lets you generate and store fingerprints for items that don't yet have them. One more round of applause for Lucas Duailibe.echonest_tempo
: API errors now issue a warning instead of exiting with an exception. We also avoid an error when track metadata contains newlines.- When the importer encounters an error (insufficient permissions, for example) when walking a directory tree, it now logs an error instead of crashing.
- In path formats, null database values now expand to the empty string instead of the string "None".
- Add "System Volume Information" (an internal directory found on some Windows filesystems) to the default ignore list.
- Fix a crash when ReplayGain values were set to null.
- Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data.
- Fix an error when the configuration file (
config.yaml
) is completely empty. - Fix an error introduced in 1.1b1 when importing using timid mode. Thanks to Sam Doshi.
/plugins/convert
: Fix a bug when creating files with Unicode pathnames.- Fix a spurious warning from the Unidecode module when matching albums that are missing all metadata.
- Fix Unicode errors when a directory or file doesn't exist when invoking the import command. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
/plugins/mbcollection
: Show friendly, human-readable errors when MusicBrainz exceptions occur.echonest_tempo
: Catch socket errors that are not handled by the Echo Nest library./plugins/chroma
: Catch Acoustid Web service errors when submitting fingerprints.
The second beta of beets 1.1 uses the fancy new configuration infrastructure to add many, many new config options. The import process is more flexible; filenames can be customized in more detail; and more. This release also supports Windows Media (ASF) files and iTunes Sound Check volume normalization.
This version introduces one change to the default behavior that you should be aware of. Previously, when importing new albums matched in MusicBrainz, the date fields (year
, month
, and day
) would be set to the release date of the original version of the album, as opposed to the specific date of the release selected. Now, these fields reflect the specific release and original_year
, etc., reflect the earlier release date. If you want the old behavior, just set original_date
to true in your config file.
New configuration options:
default_action
lets you determine the default (just-hit-return) option is when considering a candidate.none_rec_action
lets you skip the prompt, and automatically choose an action, when there is no good candidate. Thanks to Tai Lee.max_rec
lets you define a maximum recommendation for albums with missing/extra tracks or differing track lengths/numbers. Thanks again to Tai Lee.original_date
determines whether, when importing new albums, theyear
,month
, andday
fields should reflect the specific (e.g., reissue) release date or the original release date. Note that the original release date is always available asoriginal_year
, etc.clutter
controls which files should be ignored when cleaning up empty directories. Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson./plugins/lastgenre
: A new configuration option lets you choose to retrieve artist-level tags as genres instead of album- or track-level tags. Thanks to Peter Fern and Peter Schnebel.max_filename_length
controls truncation of long filenames. Also, beets now tries to determine the filesystem's maximum length automatically if you leave this option unset./plugins/fetchart
: Theremote_priority
option searches remote (Web) art sources even when local art is present.- You can now customize the character substituted for path separators (e.g., /) in filenames via
path_sep_replace
. The default is an underscore. Use this setting with caution.
Other new stuff:
- Support for Windows Media/ASF audio files. Thanks to Dave Hayes.
- New
/plugins/smartplaylist
: generate and maintain m3u playlist files based on beets queries. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai. - ReplayGain tags on MPEG-4/AAC files are now supported. And, even more astonishingly, ReplayGain values in MP3 and AAC files are now compatible with iTunes Sound Check. Thanks to Dave Hayes.
- Track titles in the importer UI's difference display are now either aligned vertically or broken across two lines for readability. Thanks to Tai Lee.
- Albums and items have new fields reflecting the original release date (
original_year
,original_month
, andoriginal_day
). Previously, when tagging from MusicBrainz, only the original date was stored; now, the old fields refer to the specific release date (e.g., when the album was reissued). - Some changes to the way candidates are recommended for selection, thanks to Tai Lee:
- According to the new
max_rec
configuration option, partial album matches are downgraded to a "low" recommendation by default. - When a match isn't great but is either better than all the others or the only match, it is given a "low" (rather than "medium") recommendation.
- There is no prompt default (i.e., input is required) when matches are bad: "low" or "none" recommendations or when choosing a candidate other than the first.
- According to the new
- The importer's heuristic for coalescing the directories in a multi-disc album has been improved. It can now detect when two directories alongside each other share a similar prefix but a different number (e.g., "Album Disc 1" and "Album Disc 2") even when they are not alone in a common parent directory. Thanks once again to Tai Lee.
- Album listings in the importer UI now show the release medium (CD, Vinyl, 3xCD, etc.) as well as the disambiguation string. Thanks to Peter Schnebel.
/plugins/lastgenre
: The plugin can now get different genres for individual tracks on an album. Thanks to Peter Schnebel.- When getting data from MusicBrainz, the album disambiguation string (
albumdisambig
) now reflects both the release and the release group. /plugins/mpdupdate
: Sends an update message whenever anything in the database changes---not just when importing. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.- When the importer UI shows a difference in track numbers or durations, they are now colorized based on the suffixes that differ. For example, when showing the difference between 2:01 and 2:09, only the last digit will be highlighted.
- The importer UI no longer shows a change when the track length difference is less than 10 seconds. (This threshold was previously 2 seconds.)
- Two new plugin events were added: database_change and cli_exit. Thanks again to Dang Mai Hai.
- Plugins are now loaded in the order they appear in the config file. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.
/plugins/bpd
: Browse by album artist and album artist sort name. Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson.echonest_tempo
: Don't attempt a lookup when the artist or track title is missing.- Fix an error when migrating the
.beetsstate
file on Windows. - A nicer error message is now given when the configuration file contains tabs. (YAML doesn't like tabs.)
- Fix the
-l
(log path) command-line option for theimport
command.
This release entirely revamps beets' configuration system. The configuration file is now a YAML document and is located, along with other support files, in a common directory (e.g., ~/.config/beets
on Unix-like systems).
- Renamed plugins: The
rdm
plugin has been renamed torandom
andfuzzy_search
has been renamed tofuzzy
. - Renamed config options: Many plugins have a flag dictating whether their action runs at import time. This option had many names (
autofetch
,autoembed
, etc.) but is now consistently calledauto
. - Reorganized import config options: The various
import_*
options are now organized under animport:
heading and their prefixes have been removed. - New default file locations: The default filename of the library database is now
library.db
in the same directory as the config file, as opposed to~/.beetsmusic.blb
previously. Similarly, the runtime state file is now calledstate.pickle
in the same directory instead of~/.beetsstate
.
It also adds some new features:
/plugins/inline
: Inline definitions can now contain statements or blocks in addition to just expressions. Thanks to Florent Thoumie.- Add a configuration option,
terminal_encoding
, controlling the text encoding used to print messages to standard output. - The MusicBrainz hostname (and rate limiting) are now configurable. See
musicbrainz-config
. - You can now configure the similarity thresholds used to determine when the autotagger automatically accepts a metadata match. See
match-config
. /plugins/importfeeds
: Added a new configuration option that controls the base for relative paths used in m3u files. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
After fifteen betas and two release candidates, beets has finally hit one-point-oh. Congratulations to everybody involved. This version of beets will remain stable and receive only bug fixes from here on out. New development is ongoing in the betas of version 1.1.
/plugins/scrub
: Fix an incompatibility with Python 2.6./plugins/lyrics
: Fix an issue that failed to find lyrics when metadata contained "real" apostrophes./plugins/replaygain
: On Windows, emit a warning instead of crashing when analyzing non-ASCII filenames.- Silence a spurious warning from version 0.04.12 of the Unidecode module.
This second release candidate follows quickly after rc1 and fixes a few small bugs found since that release. There were a couple of regressions and some bugs in a newly added plugin.
echonest_tempo
: If the Echo Nest API limit is exceeded or a communication error occurs, the plugin now waits and tries again instead of crashing. Thanks to Zach Denton./plugins/fetchart
: Fix a regression that caused crashes when art was not available from some sources.- Fix a regression on Windows that caused all relative paths to be "not found".
The first release candidate for beets 1.0 includes a deluge of new features contributed by beets users. The vast majority of the credit for this release goes to the growing and vibrant beets community. A million thanks to everybody who contributed to this release.
There are new plugins for transcoding music, fuzzy searches, tempo collection, and fiddling with metadata. The ReplayGain plugin has been rebuilt from scratch. Album art images can now be resized automatically. Many other smaller refinements make things "just work" as smoothly as possible.
With this release candidate, beets 1.0 is feature-complete. We'll be fixing bugs on the road to 1.0 but no new features will be added. Concurrently, work begins today on features for version 1.1.
- New plugin:
/plugins/convert
transcodes music and embeds album art while copying to a separate directory. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer and Andrew G. Dunn. - New plugin:
/plugins/fuzzy
lets you find albums and tracks using fuzzy string matching so you don't have to type (or even remember) their exact names. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau. - New plugin:
echonest_tempo
fetches tempo (BPM) information from The Echo Nest. Thanks to David Brenner. - New plugin:
/plugins/the
adds a template function that helps format text for nicely-sorted directory listings. Thanks to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr. - New plugin:
/plugins/zero
filters out undesirable fields before they are written to your tags. Thanks again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr. - New plugin:
/plugins/ihate
automatically skips (or warns you about) importing albums that match certain criteria. Thanks once again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr. /plugins/replaygain
: This plugin has been completely overhauled to use the mp3gain or aacgain command-line tools instead of the failure-prone Gstreamer ReplayGain implementation. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte./plugins/fetchart
and/plugins/embedart
: Both plugins can now resize album art to avoid excessively large images. Use themaxwidth
config option with either plugin. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte./plugins/scrub
: Scrubbing now removes all types of tags from a file rather than just one. For example, if your FLAC file has both ordinary FLAC tags and ID3 tags, the ID3 tags are now also removed.stats-cmd
command: New--exact
switch to make the file size calculation more accurate (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).list-cmd
command: Templates given with-f
can now show items' and albums' paths (using$path
).- The output of the
update-cmd
,remove-cmd
, andmodify-cmd
commands now respects thelist_format_album
andlist_format_item
config options. Thanks to Mike Kazantsev. - The
art-filename
option can now be a template rather than a simple string. Thanks to Jarrod Beardwood. - Fix album queries for
artpath
and other non-item fields. - Null values in the database can now be matched with the empty-string regular expression,
^$
. - Queries now correctly match non-string values in path format predicates.
- When autotagging a various-artists album, the album artist field is now used instead of the majority track artist.
/plugins/lastgenre
: Use the albums' existing genre tags if they pass the whitelist (thanks to Fabrice Laporte)./plugins/lastgenre
: Add alastgenre
command for fetching genres post facto (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer)./plugins/fetchart
: Local image filenames are now used in alphabetical order./plugins/fetchart
: Fix a bug where cover art filenames could lack a.jpg
extension./plugins/lyrics
: Fix an exception with non-ASCII lyrics./plugins/web
: The API now reports file sizes (for use with the Tomahawk resolver)./plugins/web
: Files now download with a reasonable filename rather than just being called "file" (thanks to Zach Denton)./plugins/importfeeds
: Fix error in symlink mode with non-ASCII filenames./plugins/mbcollection
: Fix an error when submitting a large number of releases (we now submit only 200 releases at a time instead of 350). Thanks to Jonathan Towne./plugins/embedart
: Made the method for embedding art into FLAC files standard-compliant. Thanks to Daniele Sluijters.- Add the track mapping dictionary to the
album_distance
plugin function. - When an exception is raised while reading a file, the path of the file in question is now logged (thanks to Mike Kazantsev).
- Truncate long filenames based on their bytes rather than their Unicode characters, fixing situations where encoded names could be too long.
- Filename truncation now incorporates the length of the extension.
- Fix an assertion failure when the MusicBrainz main database and search server disagree.
- Fix a bug that caused the
/plugins/lastgenre
and other plugins not to modify files' tags even when they successfully change the database. - Fix a VFS bug leading to a crash in the
/plugins/bpd
when files had non-ASCII extensions. - Fix for changing date fields (like "year") with the
modify-cmd
command. - Fix a crash when input is read from a pipe without a specified encoding.
- Fix some problem with identifying files on Windows with Unicode directory names in their path.
- Fix a crash when Unicode queries were used with
import -L
re-imports. - Fix an error when fingerprinting files with Unicode filenames on Windows.
- Warn instead of crashing when importing a specific file in singleton mode.
- Add human-readable error messages when writing files' tags fails or when a directory can't be created.
- Changed plugin loading so that modules can be imported without unintentionally loading the plugins they contain.
The fifteenth (!) beta of beets is compendium of small fixes and features, most of which represent long-standing requests. The improvements include matching albums with extra tracks, per-disc track numbering in multi-disc albums, an overhaul of the album art downloader, and robustness enhancements that should keep beets running even when things go wrong. All these smaller changes should help us focus on some larger changes coming before 1.0.
Please note that this release contains one backwards-incompatible change: album art fetching, which was previously baked into the import workflow, is now encapsulated in a plugin (the /plugins/fetchart
). If you want to continue fetching cover art for your music, enable this plugin after upgrading to beets 1.0b15.
- The autotagger can now find matches for albums when you have extra tracks on your filesystem that aren't present in the MusicBrainz catalog. Previously, if you tried to match album with 15 audio files but the MusicBrainz entry had only 14 tracks, beets would ignore this match. Now, beets will show you matches even when they are "too short" and indicate which tracks from your disk are unmatched.
- Tracks on multi-disc albums can now be numbered per-disc instead of per-album via the
per_disc_numbering
config option. - The default output format for the
beet list
command is now configurable via thelist_format_item
andlist_format_album
config options. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte. - Album cover art fetching is now encapsulated in the
/plugins/fetchart
. Be sure to enable this plugin if you're using this functionality. As a result of this new organization, the new plugin has gained a few new features:- "As-is" and non-autotagged imports can now have album art imported from the local filesystem (although Web repositories are still not searched in these cases).
- A new command,
beet fetchart
, allows you to download album art post-import. If you only want to fetch art manually, not automatically during import, set the new plugin'sautofetch
option tono
. - New album art sources have been added.
- Errors when communicating with MusicBrainz now log an error message instead of halting the importer.
- Similarly, filesystem manipulation errors now print helpful error messages instead of a messy traceback. They still interrupt beets, but they should now be easier for users to understand. Tracebacks are still available in verbose mode.
- New metadata fields for artist credits:
artist_credit
andalbumartist_credit
can now contain release- and recording-specific variations of the artist's name. Seeitemfields
. - Revamped the way beets handles concurrent database access to avoid nondeterministic SQLite-related crashes when using the multithreaded importer. On systems where SQLite was compiled without
usleep(3)
support, multithreaded database access could cause an internal error (with the message "database is locked"). This release synchronizes access to the database to avoid internal SQLite contention, which should avoid this error. - Plugins can now add parallel stages to the import pipeline. See
writing-plugins
. - Beets now prints out an error when you use an unrecognized field name in a query: for example, when running
beet ls -a artist:foo
(becauseartist
is an item-level field). - New plugin events:
import_task_choice
is called after an import task has an action assigned.import_task_files
is called after a task's file manipulation has finished (copying or moving files, writing metadata tags).library_opened
is called when beets starts up and opens the library database.
/plugins/lastgenre
: Fixed a problem where path formats containing$genre
would use the old genre instead of the newly discovered one.- Fix a crash when moving files to a Samba share.
/plugins/mpdupdate
: Fix TypeError crash (thanks to Philippe Mongeau).- When re-importing files with
import_copy
enabled, only files inside the library directory are moved. Files outside the library directory are still copied. This solves a problem (introduced in 1.0b14) where beets could crash after adding files to the library but before finishing copying them; during the next import, the (external) files would be moved instead of copied. - Artist sort names are now populated correctly for multi-artist tracks and releases. (Previously, they only reflected the first artist.)
- When previewing changes during import, differences in track duration are now shown as "2:50 vs. 3:10" rather than separated with
->
like track numbers. This should clarify that beets isn't doing anything to modify lengths. - Fix a problem with query-based path format matching where a field-qualified pattern, like
albumtype_soundtrack
, would match everything. /plugins/chroma
: Fix matching with ambiguous Acoustids. Some Acoustids are identified with multiple recordings; beets now considers any associated recording a valid match. This should reduce some cases of errant track reordering when using chroma.- Fix the ID3 tag name for the catalog number field.
/plugins/chroma
: Fix occasional crash at end of fingerprint submission and give more context to "failed fingerprint generation" errors.- Interactive prompts are sent to stdout instead of stderr.
/plugins/embedart
: Fix crash when audio files are unreadable./plugins/bpd
: Fix crash when sockets disconnect (thanks to Matteo Mecucci).- Fix an assertion failure while importing with moving enabled when the file was already at its destination.
- Fix Unicode values in the
replace
config option (thanks to Jakob Borg). - Use a nicer error message when input is requested but stdin is closed.
- Fix errors on Windows for certain Unicode characters that can't be represented in the MBCS encoding. This required a change to the way that paths are represented in the database on Windows; if you find that beets' paths are out of sync with your filesystem with this release, delete and recreate your database with
beet import -AWC /path/to/music
. - Fix
import
with relative path arguments on Windows.
The centerpiece of this beets release is the graceful handling of similarly-named albums. It's now possible to import two albums with the same artist and title and to keep them from conflicting in the filesystem. Many other awesome new features were contributed by the beets community, including regular expression queries, artist sort names, moving files on import. There are three new plugins: random song/album selection; MusicBrainz "collection" integration; and a plugin for interoperability with other music library systems.
A million thanks to the (growing) beets community for making this a huge release.
- The importer now gives you choices when duplicates are detected. Previously, when beets found an existing album or item in your library matching the metadata on a newly-imported one, it would just skip the new music to avoid introducing duplicates into your library. Now, you have three choices: skip the new music (the previous behavior), keep both, or remove the old music. See the
guide-duplicates
section in the autotagging guide for details. - Beets can now avoid storing identically-named albums in the same directory. The new
%aunique{}
template function, which is included in the default path formats, ensures that Crystal Castles' albums will be placed into different directories. Seeaunique
for details. - Beets queries can now use regular expressions. Use an additional
:
in your query to enable regex matching. Seeregex
for the full details. Thanks to Matteo Mecucci. - Artist sort names are now fetched from MusicBrainz. There are two new data fields,
artist_sort
andalbumartist_sort
, that contain sortable artist names like "Beatles, The". These fields are also used to sort albums and items when using thelist
command. Thanks to Paul Provost. - Many other new metadata fields were added, including ASIN, label catalog number, disc title, encoder, and MusicBrainz release group ID. For a full list of fields, see
itemfields
. /plugins/chroma
: A new command,beet submit
, will submit fingerprints to the Acoustid database. Submitting your library helps increase the coverage and accuracy of Acoustid fingerprinting. The Chromaprint fingerprint and Acoustid ID are also now stored for all fingerprinted tracks. This version of beets requires at least version 0.6 of pyacoustid for fingerprinting to work.- The importer can now move files. Previously, beets could only copy files and delete the originals, which is inefficient if the source and destination are on the same filesystem. Use the
import_move
configuration option and see/reference/config
for more details. Thanks to Domen Kožar. - New
/plugins/random
: Randomly select albums and tracks from your library. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau. - The
/plugins/mbcollection
by Jeffrey Aylesworth was added to the core beets distribution. - New
/plugins/importfeeds
: Catalog imported files inm3u
playlist files or as symlinks for easy importing to other systems. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte. - The
-f
(output format) option to thebeet list
command can now contain template functions as well as field references. Thanks to Steve Dougherty. - A new command
beet fields
displays the available metadata fields (thanks to Matteo Mecucci). - The
import
command now has a--noincremental
or-I
flag to disable incremental imports (thanks to Matteo Mecucci). - When the autotagger fails to find a match, it now displays the number of tracks on the album (to help you guess what might be going wrong) and a link to the FAQ.
- The default filename character substitutions were changed to be more conservative. The Windows "reserved characters" are substituted by default even on Unix platforms (this causes less surprise when using Samba shares to store music). To customize your character substitutions, see
the replace config option <replace>
. /plugins/lastgenre
: Added a "fallback" option when no suitable genre can be found (thanks to Fabrice Laporte)./plugins/rewrite
: Unicode rewriting rules are now allowed (thanks to Nicolas Dietrich).- Filename collisions are now avoided when moving album art.
/plugins/bpd
: Print messages to show when directory tree is being constructed./plugins/bpd
: Use Gstreamer'splaybin2
element instead of the deprecatedplaybin
./plugins/bpd
: Random and repeat modes are now supported (thanks to Matteo Mecucci)./plugins/bpd
: Listings are now sorted (thanks once again to Matteo Mecucci).- Filenames are normalized with Unicode Normal Form D (NFD) on Mac OS X and NFC on all other platforms.
- Significant internal restructuring to avoid SQLite locking errors. As part of these changes, the not-very-useful "save" plugin event has been removed.
Beets 1.0b13 consists of a plethora of small but important fixes and refinements. A lyrics plugin is now included with beets; new audio properties are catalogged; the list
command has been made more powerful; the autotagger is more tolerant of different tagging styles; and importing with original file deletion now cleans up after itself more thoroughly. Many, many bugs—including several crashers—were fixed. This release lays the foundation for more features to come in the next couple of releases.
- The
/plugins/lyrics
, originally by Peter Brunner, is revamped and included with beets, making it easy to fetch song lyrics. - Items now expose their audio sample rate, number of channels, and bits per sample (bitdepth). See
/reference/pathformat
for a list of all available audio properties. Thanks to Andrew Dunn. - The
beet list
command now accepts a "format" argument that lets you show specific information about each album or track. For example, runbeet ls -af '$album: $tracktotal' beatles
to see how long each Beatles album is. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau. - The autotagger now tolerates tracks on multi-disc albums that are numbered per-disc. For example, if track 24 on a release is the first track on the second disc, then it is not penalized for having its track number set to 1 instead of 24.
- The autotagger sets the disc number and disc total fields on autotagged albums.
- The autotagger now also tolerates tracks whose track artists tags are set to "Various Artists".
- Terminal colors are now supported on Windows via Colorama (thanks to Karl).
- When previewing metadata differences, the importer now shows discrepancies in track length.
- Importing with
import_delete
enabled now cleans up empty directories that contained deleting imported music files. - Similarly,
import_delete
now causes original album art imported from the disk to be deleted. - Plugin-supplied template values, such as those created by
rewrite
, are now properly sanitized (for example,AC/DC
properly becomesAC_DC
). - Filename extensions are now always lower-cased when copying and moving files.
- The
inline
plugin now prints a more comprehensible error when exceptions occur in Python snippets. - The
replace
configuration option can now remove characters entirely (in addition to replacing them) if the special string<strip>
is specified as the replacement. - New plugin API: plugins can now add fields to the MediaFile tag abstraction layer. See
writing-plugins
. - A reasonable error message is now shown when the import log file cannot be opened.
- The import log file is now flushed and closed properly so that it can be used to monitor import progress, even when the import crashes.
- Duplicate track matches are no longer shown when autotagging singletons.
- The
chroma
plugin now logs errors when fingerprinting fails. - The
lastgenre
plugin suppresses more errors when dealing with the Last.fm API. - Fix a bug in the
rewrite
plugin that broke the use of multiple rules for a single field. - Fix a crash with non-ASCII characters in bytestring metadata fields (e.g., MusicBrainz IDs).
- Fix another crash with non-ASCII characters in the configuration paths.
- Fix a divide-by-zero crash on zero-length audio files.
- Fix a crash in the
chroma
plugin when the Acoustid database had no recording associated with a fingerprint. - Fix a crash when an autotagging with an artist or album containing "AND" or "OR" (upper case).
- Fix an error in the
rewrite
andinline
plugins when the corresponding config sections did not exist. - Fix bitrate estimation for AAC files whose headers are missing the relevant data.
- Fix the
list
command in BPD (thanks to Simon Chopin).
This release focuses on making beets' path formatting vastly more powerful. It adds a function syntax for transforming text. Via a new plugin, arbitrary Python code can also be used to define new path format fields. Each path format template can now be activated conditionally based on a query. Character set substitutions are also now configurable.
In addition, beets avoids problematic filename conflicts by appending numbers to filenames that would otherwise conflict. Three new plugins (inline
, scrub
, and rewrite
) are included in this release.
- Functions in path formats provide a simple way to write complex file naming rules: for example,
%upper{%left{$artist,1}}
will insert the capitalized first letter of the track's artist. For more details, see/reference/pathformat
. If you're interested in adding your own template functions via a plugin, seewriting-plugins
. - Plugins can also now define new path fields in addition to functions.
- The new
/plugins/inline
lets you use Python expressions to customize path formats by defining new fields in the config file. - The configuration can condition path formats based on queries. That is, you can write a path format that is only used if an item matches a given query. (This supersedes the earlier functionality that only allowed conditioning on album type; if you used this feature in a previous version, you will need to replace, for example,
soundtrack:
withalbumtype_soundtrack:
.) Seepath-format-config
. - Filename substitutions are now configurable via the
replace
config value. You can choose which characters you think should be allowed in your directory and music file names. See/reference/config
. - Beets now ensures that files have unique filenames by appending a number to any filename that would otherwise conflict with an existing file.
- The new
/plugins/scrub
can remove extraneous metadata either manually or automatically. - The new
/plugins/rewrite
can canonicalize names for path formats. - The autotagging heuristics have been tweaked in situations where the MusicBrainz database did not contain track lengths. Previously, beets penalized matches where this was the case, leading to situations where seemingly good matches would have poor similarity. This penalty has been removed.
- Fix an incompatibility in BPD with libmpc (the library that powers mpc and ncmpc).
- Fix a crash when importing a partial match whose first track was missing.
- The
lastgenre
plugin now correctly writes discovered genres to imported files (when tag-writing is enabled). - Add a message when skipping directories during an incremental import.
- The default ignore settings now ignore all files beginning with a dot.
- Date values in path formats (
$year
,$month
, and$day
) are now appropriately zero-padded. - Removed the
--path-format
global flag forbeet
. - Removed the
lastid
plugin, which was deprecated in the previous version.
This version of beets focuses on transitioning the autotagger to the new version of the MusicBrainz database (called NGS). This transition brings with it a number of long-overdue improvements: most notably, predictable behavior when tagging multi-disc albums and integration with the new Acoustid acoustic fingerprinting technology.
The importer can also now tag incomplete albums when you're missing a few tracks from a given release. Two other new plugins are also included with this release: one for assigning genres and another for ReplayGain analysis.
- Beets now communicates with MusicBrainz via the new Next Generation Schema (NGS) service via python-musicbrainzngs. The bindings are included with this version of beets, but a future version will make them an external dependency.
- The importer now detects multi-disc albums and tags them together. Using a heuristic based on the names of directories, certain structures are classified as multi-disc albums: for example, if a directory contains subdirectories labeled "disc 1" and "disc 2", these subdirectories will be coalesced into a single album for tagging.
- The new
/plugins/chroma
uses the Acoustid open-source acoustic fingerprinting service. This replaces the oldlastid
plugin, which used Last.fm fingerprinting and is now deprecated. Fingerprinting with this library should be faster and more reliable. - The importer can now perform partial matches. This means that, if you're missing a few tracks from an album, beets can still tag the remaining tracks as a single album. (Thanks to Simon Chopin.)
- The new
/plugins/lastgenre
automatically assigns genres to imported albums and items based on Last.fm tags and an internal whitelist. (Thanks to KraYmer.) - The
/plugins/replaygain
, written by Peter Brunner, has been merged into the core beets distribution. Use it to analyze audio and adjust playback levels in ReplayGain-aware music players. - Albums are now tagged with their original release date rather than the date of any reissue, remaster, "special edition", or the like.
- The config file and library databases are now given better names and locations on Windows. Namely, both files now reside in
%APPDATA%
; the config file is namedbeetsconfig.ini
and the database is calledbeetslibrary.blb
(neither has a leading dot as on Unix). For backwards compatibility, beets will check the old locations first. - When entering an ID manually during tagging, beets now searches for anything that looks like an MBID in the entered string. This means that full MusicBrainz URLs now work as IDs at the prompt. (Thanks to derwin.)
- The importer now ignores certain "clutter" files like
.AppleDouble
directories and._*
files. The list of ignored patterns is configurable via theignore
setting; see/reference/config
. - The database now keeps track of files' modification times so that, during an
update
, unmodified files can be skipped. (Thanks to Jos van der Til.) - The album art fetcher now uses albumart.org as a fallback when the Amazon art downloader fails.
- A new
timeout
config value avoids database locking errors on slow systems. - Fix a crash after using the "as Tracks" option during import.
- Fix a Unicode error when tagging items with missing titles.
- Fix a crash when the state file (
~/.beetsstate
) became emptied or corrupted.
This version of beets focuses on making it easier to manage your metadata after you've imported it. A bumper crop of new commands has been added: a manual tag editor (modify
), a tool to pick up out-of-band deletions and modifications (update
), and functionality for moving and copying files around (move
). Furthermore, the concept of "re-importing" is new: you can choose to re-run beets' advanced autotagger on any files you already have in your library if you change your mind after you finish the initial import.
As a couple of added bonuses, imports can now automatically skip previously-imported directories (with the -i
flag) and there's an experimental Web interface </plugins/web>
to beets in a new standard plugin.
- A new
beet modify
command enables manual, command-line-based modification of music metadata. Pass it a query along withfield=value
pairs that specify the changes you want to make. - A new
beet update
command updates the database to reflect changes in the on-disk metadata. You can now use an external program to edit tags on files, remove files and directories, etc., and then runbeet update
to make sure your beets library is in sync. This will also rename files to reflect their new metadata. - A new
beet move
command can copy or move files into your library directory or to another specified directory. - When importing files that are already in the library database, the items are no longer duplicated---instead, the library is updated to reflect the new metadata. This way, the import command can be transparently used as a re-import.
- Relatedly, the
-L
flag to the "import" command makes it take a query as its argument instead of a list of directories. The matched albums (or items, depending on the-s
flag) are then re-imported. - A new flag
-i
to the import command runs incremental imports, keeping track of and skipping previously-imported directories. This has the effect of making repeated import commands pick up only newly-added directories. Theimport_incremental
config option makes this the default. - When pruning directories, "clutter" files such as
.DS_Store
andThumbs.db
are ignored (and removed with otherwise-empty directories). - The
/plugins/web
encapsulates a simple Web-based GUI for beets. The current iteration can browse the library and play music in browsers that support HTML5 Audio. - When moving items that are part of an album, the album art implicitly moves too.
- Files are no longer silently overwritten when moving and copying files.
- Handle exceptions thrown when running Mutagen.
- Fix a missing
__future__
import inembed art
on Python 2.5. - Fix ID3 and MPEG-4 tag names for the album-artist field.
- Fix Unicode encoding of album artist, album type, and label.
- Fix crash when "copying" an art file that's already in place.
This release focuses on a large number of small fixes and improvements that turn beets into a well-oiled, music-devouring machine. See the full release notes, below, for a plethora of new features.
- Queries can now contain whitespace. Spaces passed as shell arguments are now preserved, so you can use your shell's escaping syntax (quotes or backslashes, for instance) to include spaces in queries. For example, typing
beet ls "the knife"
orbeet ls the\ knife
. Read more in/reference/query
. - Queries can match items from the library by directory. A
path:
prefix is optional; any query containing a path separator (/ on POSIX systems) is assumed to be a path query. Runningbeet ls path/to/music
will show all the music in your library under the specified directory. The/reference/query
reference again has more details. - Local album art is now automatically discovered and copied from the imported directories when available.
- When choosing the "as-is" import album (or doing a non-autotagged import), every album either has an "album artist" set or is marked as a compilation (Various Artists). The choice is made based on the homogeneity of the tracks' artists. This prevents compilations that are imported as-is from being scattered across many directories after they are imported.
- The release label for albums and tracks is now fetched from !MusicBrainz, written to files, and stored in the database.
- The "list" command now accepts a
-p
switch that causes it to show paths instead of titles. This makes the output ofbeet ls -p
suitable for piping into another command such as xargs. - Release year and label are now shown in the candidate selection list to help disambiguate different releases of the same album.
- Prompts in the importer interface are now colorized for easy reading. The default option is always highlighted.
- The importer now provides the option to specify a MusicBrainz ID manually if the built-in searching isn't working for a particular album or track.
$bitrate
in path formats is now formatted as a human-readable kbps value instead of as a raw integer.- The import logger has been improved for "always-on" use. First, it is now possible to specify a log file in .beetsconfig. Also, logs are now appended rather than overwritten and contain timestamps.
- Album art fetching and plugin events are each now run in separate pipeline stages during imports. This should bring additional performance when using album art plugins like embedart or beets-lyrics.
- Accents and other Unicode decorators on characters are now treated more fairly by the autotagger. For example, if you're missing the acute accent on the "e" in "café", that change won't be penalized. This introduces a new dependency on the unidecode Python module.
- When tagging a track with no title set, the track's filename is now shown (instead of nothing at all).
- The bitrate of lossless files is now calculated from their file size (rather than being fixed at 0 or reflecting the uncompressed audio bitrate).
- Fixed a problem where duplicate albums or items imported at the same time would fail to be detected.
- BPD now uses a persistent "virtual filesystem" in order to fake a directory structure. This means that your path format settings are respected in BPD's browsing hierarchy. This may come at a performance cost, however. The virtual filesystem used by BPD is available for reuse by plugins (e.g., the FUSE plugin).
- Singleton imports (
beet import -s
) can now take individual files as arguments as well as directories. - Fix Unicode queries given on the command line.
- Fix crasher in quiet singleton imports (
import -qs
). - Fix crash when autotagging files with no metadata.
- Fix a rare deadlock when finishing the import pipeline.
- Fix an issue that was causing mpdupdate to run twice for every album.
- Fix a bug that caused release dates/years not to be fetched.
- Fix a crasher when setting MBIDs on MP3s file metadata.
- Fix a "broken pipe" error when piping beets' standard output.
- A better error message is given when the database file is unopenable.
- Suppress errors due to timeouts and bad responses from MusicBrainz.
- Fix a crash on album queries with item-only field names.
This release of beets brings two significant new features. First, beets now has first-class support for "singleton" tracks. Previously, it was only really meant to manage whole albums, but many of us have lots of non-album tracks to keep track of alongside our collections of albums. So now beets makes it easy to tag, catalog, and manipulate your individual tracks. Second, beets can now (optionally) embed album art directly into file metadata rather than only storing it in a "file on the side." Check out the /plugins/embedart
for that functionality.
- Better support for singleton (non-album) tracks. Whereas beets previously only really supported full albums, now it can also keep track of individual, off-album songs. The "singleton" path format can be used to customize where these tracks are stored. To import singleton tracks, provide the -s switch to the import command or, while doing a normal full-album import, choose the "as Tracks" (T) option to add singletons to your library. To list only singleton or only album tracks, use the new
singleton:
query term: the querysingleton:true
matches only singleton tracks;singleton:false
matches only album tracks. Thelastid
plugin has been extended to support matching individual items as well. - The importer/autotagger system has been heavily refactored in this release. If anything breaks as a result, please get in touch or just file a bug.
- Support for album art embedded in files. A new
/plugins/embedart
implements this functionality. Enable the plugin to automatically embed downloaded album art into your music files' metadata. The plugin also provides the "embedart" and "extractart" commands for moving image files in and out of metadata. See the wiki for more details. (Thanks, daenney!) - The "distance" number, which quantifies how different an album's current and proposed metadata are, is now displayed as "similarity" instead. This should be less noisy and confusing; you'll now see 99.5% instead of 0.00489323.
- A new "timid mode" in the importer asks the user every time, even when it makes a match with very high confidence. The
-t
flag on the command line and theimport_timid
config option control this mode. (Thanks to mdecker on GitHub!) - The multithreaded importer should now abort (either by selecting aBort or by typing ^C) much more quickly. Previously, it would try to get a lot of work done before quitting; now it gives up as soon as it can.
- Added a new plugin event,
album_imported
, which is called every time an album is added to the library. (Thanks, Lugoues!) - A new plugin method,
register_listener
, is an imperative alternative to the@listen
decorator (Thanks again, Lugoues!) - In path formats,
$albumartist
now falls back to$artist
(as well as the other way around). - The importer now prints "(unknown album)" when no tags are present.
- When autotagging, "and" is considered equal to "&".
- Fix some crashes when deleting files that don't exist.
- Fix adding individual tracks in BPD.
- Fix crash when
~/.beetsconfig
does not exist.
Beta 7's focus is on better support for "various artists" releases. These albums can be treated differently via the new [paths]
config section and the autotagger is better at handling them. It also includes a number of oft-requested improvements to the beet
command-line tool, including several new configuration options and the ability to clean up empty directory subtrees.
- "Various artists" releases are handled much more gracefully. The autotagger now sets the
comp
flag on albums whenever the album is identified as a "various artists" release by !MusicBrainz. Also, there is now a distinction between the "album artist" and the "track artist", the latter of which is never "Various Artists" or other such bogus stand-in. (Thanks to Jonathan for the bulk of the implementation work on this feature!) - The directory hierarchy can now be customized based on release type. In particular, the
path_format
setting in .beetsconfig has been replaced with a new[paths]
section, which allows you to specify different path formats for normal and "compilation" (various artists) releases as well as for each album type (see below). The default path formats have been changed to use$albumartist
instead of$artist
. - A new ``albumtype`` field reflects the release type as specified by MusicBrainz.
- When deleting files, beets now appropriately "prunes" the directory tree---empty directories are automatically cleaned up. (Thanks to wlof on GitHub for this!)
- The tagger's output now always shows the album directory that is currently being tagged. This should help in situations where files' current tags are missing or useless.
- The logging option (
-l
) to theimport
command now logs duplicate albums. - A new
import_resume
configuration option can be used to disable the importer's resuming feature or force it to resume without asking. This option may be eitheryes
,no
, orask
, with the obvious meanings. The-p
and-P
command-line flags override this setting and correspond to the "yes" and "no" settings. - Resuming is automatically disabled when the importer is in quiet (
-q
) mode. Progress is still saved, however, and the-p
flag (above) can be used to force resuming. - The
BEETSCONFIG
environment variable can now be used to specify the location of the config file that is at ~/.beetsconfig by default. - A new
import_quiet_fallback
config option specifies what should happen in quiet mode when there is no strong recommendation. The options areskip
(the default) and "asis". - When importing with the "delete" option and importing files that are already at their destination, files could be deleted (leaving zero copies afterward). This is fixed.
- The
version
command now lists all the loaded plugins. - A new plugin, called
info
, just prints out audio file metadata. - Fix a bug where some files would be erroneously interpreted as MPEG-4 audio.
- Fix permission bits applied to album art files.
- Fix malformed !MusicBrainz queries caused by null characters.
- Fix a bug with old versions of the Monkey's Audio format.
- Fix a crash on broken symbolic links.
- Retry in more cases when !MusicBrainz servers are slow/overloaded.
- The old "albumify" plugin for upgrading databases was removed.
This version consists primarily of bug fixes and other small improvements. It's in preparation for a more feature-ful release in beta 7. The most important issue involves correct ordering of autotagged albums.
- Quiet import: a new "-q" command line switch for the import command suppresses all prompts for input; it pessimistically skips all albums that the importer is not completely confident about.
- Added support for the WavPack and Musepack formats. Unfortunately, due to a limitation in the Mutagen library (used by beets for metadata manipulation), Musepack SV8 is not yet supported. Here's the upstream bug in question.
- BPD now uses a pure-Python socket library and no longer requires eventlet/greenlet (the latter of which is a C extension). For the curious, the socket library in question is called Bluelet.
- Non-autotagged imports are now resumable (just like autotagged imports).
- Fix a terrible and long-standing bug where track orderings were never applied. This manifested when the tagger appeared to be applying a reasonable ordering to the tracks but, later, the database reflects a completely wrong association of track names to files. The order applied was always just alphabetical by filename, which is frequently but not always what you want.
- We now use Windows' "long filename" support. This API is fairly tricky, though, so some instability may still be present---please file a bug if you run into pathname weirdness on Windows. Also, filenames on Windows now never end in spaces.
- Fix crash in lastid when the artist name is not available.
- Fixed a spurious crash when
LANG
or a related environment variable is set to an invalid value (such as'UTF-8'
on some installations of Mac OS X). - Fixed an error when trying to copy a file that is already at its destination.
- When copying read-only files, the importer now tries to make the copy writable. (Previously, this would just crash the import.)
- Fixed an
UnboundLocalError
when no matches are found during autotag. - Fixed a Unicode encoding error when entering special characters into the "manual search" prompt.
- Added
beet version
command that just shows the current release version.
This version of beets focuses on increasing the accuracy of the autotagger. The main addition is an included plugin that uses acoustic fingerprinting to match based on the audio content (rather than existing metadata). Additional heuristics were also added to the metadata-based tagger as well that should make it more reliable. This release also greatly expands the capabilities of beets' plugin API </plugins/index>
. A host of other little features and fixes are also rolled into this release.
- The
lastid
plugin adds Last.fm acoustic fingerprinting support to the autotagger. Similar to the PUIDs used by !MusicBrainz Picard, this system allows beets to recognize files that don't have any metadata at all. You'll need to install some dependencies for this plugin to work. - To support the above, there's also a new system for extending the autotagger via plugins. Plugins can currently add components to the track and album distance functions as well as augment the MusicBrainz search. The new API is documented at
/plugins/index
. - String comparisons in the autotagger have been augmented to act more intuitively. Previously, if your album had the title "Something (EP)" and it was officially called "Something", then beets would think this was a fairly significant change. It now checks for and appropriately reweights certain parts of each string. As another example, the title "The Great Album" is considered equal to "Great Album, The".
- New event system for plugins (thanks, Jeff!). Plugins can now get callbacks from beets when certain events occur in the core. Again, the API is documented in
/plugins/index
. - The BPD plugin is now disabled by default. This greatly simplifies installation of the beets core, which is now 100% pure Python. To use BPD, though, you'll need to set
plugins: bpd
in your .beetsconfig. - The
import
command can now remove original files when it copies items into your library. (This might be useful if you're low on disk space.) Set theimport_delete
option in your .beetsconfig toyes
. - Importing without autotagging (
beet import -A
) now prints out album names as it imports them to indicate progress. - The new
/plugins/mpdupdate
will automatically update your MPD server's index whenever your beets library changes. - Efficiency tweak should reduce the number of !MusicBrainz queries per autotagged album.
- A new
-v
command line switch enables debugging output. - Fixed bug that completely broke non-autotagged imports (
import -A
). - Fixed bug that logged the wrong paths when using
import -l
. - Fixed autotagging for the creatively-named band !!!.
- Fixed normalization of relative paths.
- Fixed escaping of
/
characters in paths on Windows.
This thrilling new release of beets focuses on making the tagger more usable in a variety of ways. First and foremost, it should now be much faster: the tagger now uses a multithreaded algorithm by default (although, because the new tagger is experimental, a single-threaded version is still available via a config option). Second, the tagger output now uses a little bit of ANSI terminal coloring to make changes stand out. This way, it should be faster to decide what to do with a proposed match: the more red you see, the worse the match is. Finally, the tagger can be safely interrupted (paused) and restarted later at the same point. Just enter b
for aBort at any prompt to stop the tagging process and save its progress. (The progress-saving also works in the unthinkable event that beets crashes while tagging.)
Among the under-the-hood changes in 1.0b4 is a major change to the way beets handles paths (filenames). This should make the whole system more tolerant to special characters in filenames, but it may break things (especially databases created with older versions of beets). As always, let me know if you run into weird problems with this release.
Finally, this release's setup.py
should install a beet.exe
startup stub for Windows users. This should make running beets much easier: just type beet
if you have your PATH
environment variable set up correctly. The /guides/main
guide has some tips on installing beets on Windows.
Here's the detailed list of changes:
- Parallel tagger. The autotagger has been reimplemented to use multiple threads. This means that it can concurrently read files from disk, talk to the user, communicate with MusicBrainz, and write data back to disk. Not only does this make the tagger much faster because independent work may be performed in parallel, but it makes the tagging process much more pleasant for large imports. The user can let albums queue up in the background while making a decision rather than waiting for beets between each question it asks. The parallel tagger is on by default but a sequential (single- threaded) version is still available by setting the
threaded
config value tono
(because the parallel version is still quite experimental). - Colorized tagger output. The autotagger interface now makes it a little easier to see what's going on at a glance by highlighting changes with terminal colors. This feature is on by default, but you can turn it off by setting
color
tono
in your.beetsconfig
(if, for example, your terminal doesn't understand colors and garbles the output). - Pause and resume imports. The
import
command now keeps track of its progress, so if you're interrupted (beets crashes, you abort the process, an alien devours your motherboard, etc.), beets will try to resume from the point where you left off. The next time you runimport
on the same directory, it will ask if you want to resume. It accomplishes this by "fast-forwarding" through the albums in the directory until it encounters the last one it saw. (This means it might fail if that album can't be found.) Also, you can now abort the tagging process by enteringb
(for aBort) at any of the prompts. - Overhauled methods for handling filesystem paths to allow filenames that have badly encoded special characters. These changes are pretty fragile, so please report any bugs involving
UnicodeError
or SQLiteProgrammingError
messages in this version. - The destination paths (the library directory structure) now respect album-level metadata. This means that if you have an album in which two tracks have different album-level attributes (like year, for instance), they will still wind up in the same directory together. (There's currently not a very smart method for picking the "correct" album-level metadata, but we'll fix that later.)
- Fixed a bug where the CLI would fail completely if the
LANG
environment variable was not set. - Fixed removal of albums (
beet remove -a
): previously, the album record would stay around although the items were deleted. - The setup script now makes a
beet.exe
startup stub on Windows; Windows users can now just typebeet
at the prompt to run beets. - Fixed an occasional bug where Mutagen would complain that a tag was already present.
- Fixed a bug with reading invalid integers from ID3 tags.
- The tagger should now be a little more reluctant to reorder tracks that already have indices.
This release features two major additions to the autotagger's functionality: album art fetching and MusicBrainz ID tags. It also contains some important under-the-hood improvements: a new plugin architecture is introduced and the database schema is extended with explicit support for albums.
This release has one major backwards-incompatibility. Because of the new way beets handles albums in the library, databases created with an old version of beets might have trouble with operations that deal with albums (like the -a
switch to beet list
and beet remove
, as well as the file browser for BPD). To "upgrade" an old database, you can use the included albumify
plugin (see the fourth bullet point below).
- Album art. The tagger now, by default, downloads album art from Amazon that is referenced in the MusicBrainz database. It places the album art alongside the audio files in a file called (for example)
cover.jpg
. Theimport_art
config option controls this behavior, as do the-r
and-R
options to the import command. You can set the name (minus extension) of the album art file with theart_filename
config option. (See/reference/config
for more information about how to configure the album art downloader.) - Support for MusicBrainz ID tags. The autotagger now keeps track of the MusicBrainz track, album, and artist IDs it matched for each file. It also looks for album IDs in new files it's importing and uses those to look up data in MusicBrainz. Furthermore, track IDs are used as a component of the tagger's distance metric now. (This obviously lays the groundwork for a utility that can update tags if the MB database changes, but that's for the future.) Tangentially, this change required the database code to support a lightweight form of migrations so that new columns could be added to old databases--this is a delicate feature, so it would be very wise to make a backup of your database before upgrading to this version.
- Plugin architecture. Add-on modules can now add new commands to the beets command-line interface. The
bpd
anddadd
commands were removed from the beets core and turned into plugins; BPD is loaded by default. To load the non-default plugins, use the config optionsplugins
(a space-separated list of plugin names) andpluginpath
(a colon-separated list of directories to search beyondsys.path
). Plugins are just Python modules under thebeetsplug
namespace package containing subclasses ofbeets.plugins.BeetsPlugin
. See the beetsplug directory for examples or/plugins/index
for instructions. - As a consequence of adding album art, the database was significantly refactored to keep track of some information at an album (rather than item) granularity. Databases created with earlier versions of beets should work fine, but they won't have any "albums" in them--they'll just be a bag of items. This means that commands like
beet ls -a
andbeet rm -a
won't match anything. To "upgrade" your database, you can use the includedalbumify
plugin. Runningbeets albumify
with the plugin activated (setplugins=albumify
in your config file) will group all your items into albums, making beets behave more or less as it did before. - Fixed some bugs with encoding paths on Windows. Also,
:
is now replaced with-
in path names (instead of_
) for readability. MediaFile
s now have aformat
attribute, so you can use$format
in your library path format strings like$artist - $album ($format)
to get directories with names likePaul Simon - Graceland (FLAC)
.
Beets also now has its first third-party plugin: beetfs, by Martin Eve! It exposes your music in a FUSE filesystem using a custom directory structure. Even cooler: it lets you keep your files intact on-disk while correcting their tags when accessed through FUSE. Check it out!
This release focuses on high-priority fixes and conspicuously missing features. Highlights include support for two new audio formats (Monkey's Audio and Ogg Vorbis) and an option to log untaggable albums during import.
- Support for Ogg Vorbis and Monkey's Audio files and their tags. (This support should be considered preliminary: I haven't tested it heavily because I don't use either of these formats regularly.)
- An option to the
beet import
command for logging albums that are untaggable (i.e., are skipped or taken "as-is"). Usebeet import -l LOGFILE PATHS
. The log format is very simple: it's just a status (either "skip" or "asis") followed by the path to the album in question. The idea is that you can tag a large collection and automatically keep track of the albums that weren't found in MusicBrainz so you can come back and look at them later. - Fixed a
UnicodeEncodeError
on terminals that don't (or don't claim to) support UTF-8. - Importing without autotagging (
beet import -A
) is now faster and doesn't print out a bunch of whitespace. It also lets you specify single files on the command line (rather than just directories). - Fixed importer crash when attempting to read a corrupt file.
- Reorganized code for CLI in preparation for adding pluggable subcommands. Also removed dependency on the aging
cmdln
module in favor of a hand-rolled solution.
Initial release.