Pre cut album import

An album that is already one file per track — a download you bought — has nothing to cut. This brings it into the library through the same tagging step a finished rip goes through, so everything in the library has been handled the same way.

Use it for a purchased download. Use Uploading a file instead when you have one long file that still needs cutting into tracks.

What it does

beets matches the album, replaygain sets the levels in album mode, and the cover is fetched and embedded — the same settings every other import uses. The files are moved into the library, not copied.

Running it

Open the Pre-cut tab.

1. Choose a download. It takes a .zip, which is what a download usually arrives as. The tracks and any cover image are taken out of it; anything else in the zip is ignored.
2. Upload. The progress bar fills, then it unpacks and asks beets what the album is.
3. Read the match. beets prints what it found — the album it matched, the release, and how close the match is. Nothing has moved at this point.
4. Import this release. Only now are the files tagged and filed.

The release shown in step 3 is the one used in step 4. It is pinned by id, so the run that files the album cannot settle on something different from the one you read.

If it is already in the library

Pick what should happen before you import: replace what is there, keep both, skip it, or merge them. This is the same choice the Importing dialog offers.

When beets will not settle

If beets offers several releases rather than choosing one, nothing is imported and it says so. That means the tags in the download are not enough to tell the editions apart. Either correct them before uploading, or import that album with beets directly, where you can pick from the list yourself.

Nothing is filed in that case — there is no way to force it from here, because picking one of several on your behalf is the decision this step exists to avoid.

What it does not do

It does not cut, and it does not find boundaries. There is no first pass, no waveform and no ear check, because the tracks are already separate files.

It is not a record: it gets no entry in the record picker, no spec and no plan, and it is not archived. The upload is scratch, and it is cleared once the library is confirmed to hold the tracks.

Limits

One album at a time. A second upload replaces the one in progress.

The zip must hold the tracks under names that are unique once the folders are ignored — a two-disc download with Disc 1/01.flac and Disc 2/01.flac is refused rather than silently losing one of them. Import that one with beets directly.

From the command line

There is no subcommand for this. beet import <directory> is the same job without the upload, and this tab exists so it does not have to be done from a shell.