Fetch album-level metadata in singleton imports

[ghost]

It appears beets will not add album information for a singleton, even though it
could.

For example you can run

beet import -s test.mp3

and no album info will be added, however if you instead run

beet import .

then album info will be added, where . contains test.mp3. Again, "Picard" treats both folders and individual files as "first class citizens".

[sampsyo]

What do you mean by "album information"? Yes, beets treats singleton tracks and albums as different kinds of things—but I don't see singletons as being second-class.

[ghost]

@sampsyo notice the difference between beet import -s test.mp3 and beet import .
You will see clearly that album information is not found with the singleton.

title           : Last Flight Out
artist          : Thunderball
track           : 0/0
disc            : 0/0
Acoustid Id     : 4b5f038e-c3b1-4449-90ae-104557d3b240
REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN: 0.00 dB
encoder         : Lavf54.63.104
MusicBrainz Artist Id: 8579d918-835b-4c1d-ac00-45a7f4a8763a
TCMP            : 0
Acoustid Fingerprint: AQADtJHCLJKSVEF_6EG5FnkE8w-OH5XYo9PqIO8gFj--4AepHH8OtTpOBu-J93h6QeGOe_jh_rCNrxo06QinG07LBaVwC3l3NJNTaNokEhcVCj0RJs-FLodDZ-hzHc849Eh9aI2YI3xawPnR9QuuTMTR_0gPvTlOGT986OjbISdKZseu4Ef4QxcNIjya4hKPZDnCX_hCPC6a6-iPksnR-HhZHNPhMT8qH-XxBO18XD8-ZQ-OR8rxdAi7QxceXjB
Artist Credit   : Thunderball
artist-sort     : Thunderball
REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK: 0.000000
REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK: 0.000000
TBPM            : 0
REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN: 0.00 dB

title           : Last Flight Out
artist          : Thunderball
track           : 12/12
album           : Cinescope
disc            : 1/1
date            : 2006-10-17
TMED            : CD
CATALOGNUMBER   : ESL101
Acoustid Id     : 4b5f038e-c3b1-4449-90ae-104557d3b240
Album Artist Credit: Thunderball
REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN: 0.00 dB
MusicBrainz Album Type: album
MusicBrainz Album Artist Id: 8579d918-835b-4c1d-ac00-45a7f4a8763a
encoder         : Lavf54.63.104
MusicBrainz Artist Id: 8579d918-835b-4c1d-ac00-45a7f4a8763a
TDOR            : 2004-01-27
Script          : Latn
ASIN            : B000HCPSXK
album_artist    : Thunderball
TCMP            : 0
Acoustid Fingerprint: AQADtJHCLJKSVEF_6EG5FnkE8w-OH5XYo9PqIO8gFj--4AepHH8OtTpOBu-J93h6QeGOe_jh_rCNrxo06QinG07LBaVwC3l3NJNTaNokEhcVCj0RJs-FLodDZ-hzHc849Eh9aI2YI3xawPnR9QuuTMTR_0gPvTlOGT986OjbISdKZseu4Ef4QxcNIjya4hKPZDnCX_hCPC6a6-iPksnR-HhZHNPhMT8qH-XxBO18XD8-ZQ-OR8rxdAi7QxceXjB
Artist Credit   : Thunderball
ALBUMARTISTSORT : Thunderball
MusicBrainz Release Group Id: 9f036c05-50a7-30a2-8179-c77f26c34b47
artist-sort     : Thunderball
REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK: 0.000000
REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK: 0.000000
MusicBrainz Album Id: fe447d50-2574-4057-86a1-c3375edb818b
publisher       : Eighteenth Street Lounge Music
TBPM            : 0
REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN: 0.00 dB
MusicBrainz Album Status: Official
MusicBrainz Album Release Country: US

[sampsyo]

Aha! I understand: you're talking about fetching album-level metadata from MusicBrainz for singleton tracks.

In the MusicBrainz data model, a recording can appear on multiple albums ("releases"). To do the above, we'd need to select one of those releases to fill in album-level metadata. Any ideas how that might work?

[ghost]

@sampsyo take the following file

~/foo/bar.mp3

You can add this correctly now using this command

beet import foo

You should be able to get the same results using this command

beet import -s foo/bar.mp3

The source file is the same, the only difference is the way beet is being
invoked. Album information shouldnt be excluded just because beet -s was used.

[sampsyo]

I understand the problem, but it doesn't seem right to treat singletons the as incomplete albums for this purpose—the distance metric isn't appropriate (all the other tracks on the album are counted against a match as "missing" tracks). We'd need special handling for this case to negate that effect. A better approach would acknowledge that we're tagging a singleton but somehow choose the right album also.

[duailibe]

I'm thinking about a separate import flow where after beets identifies the recording, optionally, it could ask to select the correct (or prefered?) album, based in the albums that recording is present.

[sampsyo]

Right, that selection step would seem to be necessary. I guess it can't hurt, but it seems like a lot of complexity for an edge case.

[ghost]

I wrote a Bash script that does what I need, for any interested. It requires

• fpcalc
• jq

works without beets

[weedy]

The reason I looked for something like beets is so I could start cleaning up my music collection.
I have some particularly heinous areas in my collection where albums might be mixed up or generic "unsorted" folders where beets curls up and dies on the entire "album". I can hit T and beets will breeze through with 97%+ matches with chroma and fromfilename enabled, but of course no album info and I still have to pull them into something else and manually fix them.

Am I missing a config option? Something besides group_albums? The website makes it sound like if I put a little effort in I can clean up ANY music archive no matter how ugly. In my case it only seems to help when things are already cleanish.

[honus100]

@svnpenn I know this is an old thread, but I have the same problem with singletons in Beets. When I follow your link it takes me to a script for creating a video from a song and picture. Is the link taking me to the wrong script?

Thank you.

[ghost]

@honus100 part of that script should work for your needs, maybe I could break it out into its own script.