You want to manage multiple versions of your audio files with beets? Your favorite iPlayer has limited space and does not support Ogg Vorbis? You want to keep lossless versions on a large external drive? You want to symlink your audio to other locations?
With this beets plugin every file in you music library have multiple alternate versions in separate locations.
If you’re interested in contributing to this project, check out the developer documentation.
Install the plugin and make sure you using at least version 1.6.0 of beets and Python 3.8.
pip install --upgrade beets>=1.6.0 beets-alternatives
Then, enable the plugin. You may use the beet config --edit
command to add the alternatives plugin to the configuration.
plugins:
- ...
- alternatives
Now, you can get rolling with one of the use cases below.
Suppose your favorite portable player only supports MP3 and MP4, has
limited disk space and is mounted at /player
. Instead of selecting
its content manually and using the convert
plugin to transcode it, you
want to sync it automatically. First we give this external collection
the name ‘myplayer’ and start configuring beets.
alternatives:
myplayer:
directory: /player
paths:
default: $album/$title
formats: aac mp3
query: "onplayer:true"
removable: true
The first two options determine the location of the external files and
correspond to the global directory
and
paths
settings. The format
option specifies the
formats we transcode the files to (more on that below). Finally, the
query
option tells the plugin which files you want to put in the
external location. The value is a query string as used for the
beets command line. In our case we use a flexible attribute to make the
selection transparent.
Let’s add some files to our selection by setting the flexible attribute
from the query
option. (Since we use boolean values for the
‘onplayer’ field it might be a good idea to set the type of this field
to bool
using the types plugin)
beet modify onplayer=true artist:Bach
The configured query also matches all tracks that are part of an album
where the onplayer
attribute is ‘true’. We could also use
beet modify -a onplayer=true albumartist:Bach
We then tell beets to create the external files.
$ beet alt update myplayer
Collection at '/player' does not exists. Maybe you forgot to mount it.
Do you want to create the collection? (y/N)
The question makes sure that you don’t recreate a external collection if the device is not mounted. Since this is our first go, we answer the question with yes.
The command will copy all files with the artist ‘Bach’ and format either ‘AAC’
or ‘MP3’ to the /player
directory. All other formats will be transcodec to the
‘AAC’ format unsing the convert plugin. The transcoding
process can be configured through convert’s configuration.
If you update some tracks in your main collection, the alt update
command will propagate the changes to your external collection. Since
we don’t need to convert the files but just update the tags, this will
be much faster the second time.
beet modify composer="Johann Sebastian Bach" artist:Bach
beet alt update myplayer
After going for a run you mitght realize that Bach is probably not the right thing to work out to. So you decide to put Beethoven on your player.
beet modify onplayer! artist:Bach
beet modify onplayer=true artist:Beethoven
beet alt update myplayer
This removes all Bach tracks from the player and adds Beethoven’s.
Instead of copying and converting files this plugin can also create symbolic links to the files in your library. For example you want to have a directory containing all music sorted by year and album.
directory: /music
paths:
default: $artist/$album/$title
alternatives:
by-year:
directory: by-year
paths:
default: $year/$album/$title
formats: link
The first thing to note here is the link
format. Instead of
converting the files this tells the plugin to create symbolic links to
the original audio file. We also note that the directory is a relative
path: it will be resolved with respect to the global directory
option. We could also omit the directory configuration as it defaults
to the collection’s name. Finally, we omitted the query
option. This
means that we want to create symlinks for all files. Of course you can
still add a query to select only parts of your collection.
The beet alt update by-year
command will now create the symlinks. For
example
/music/by-year/1982/Thriller/Beat It.mp3
-> /music/Michael Jackson/Thriller/Beat It.mp3
You can also specify if you want absolute symlinks (default) or relative ones
with link_type
. The option link_type
must be absolute
or relative
alternatives:
by-year:
directory: by-year
paths:
default: $year/$album/$title
formats: link
link_type: relative
With this config, the beet alt update by-year
command will create relative symlinks. E.g:
/music/by-year/1982/Thriller/Beat It.mp3
-> ../../../Michael Jackson/Thriller/Beat It.mp3
Now, if you move the /music/
folder to another location, the links
will continue working
beet alt update [--create|--no-create] NAME
Updates the external collection configured under alternatives.NAME
.
-
Add missing files. Convert them to the configured format or copy them.
-
Remove files that don’t match the query but are still in the external collection
-
Move files to the path determined from the
paths
configuration. -
Update tags if the modification time of the external file is older than that of the source file from the library.
The command accepts the following option.
--[no-]create
If theremovable
configuration option is set and the external base directory does not exist, then the command will ask you to confirm the creation of the external collection. These options specify the answer as a cli option.
beet alt update [--create|--no-create] --all
Update all external collections defined in alternatives
configuration.
beet alt list-tracks [--format=FORMAT] NAME
Lists all tracks that are currently included in the collection.
The --format
option accepts a beets path format string that is
used to format each track.
An external collection is configured as a name-settings-pair under the
alternatives
configuration. The name is used to reference the
collection from the command line. The settings is a map of the
following settings.
-
directory
The root directory to store the external files under. Relative paths are resolved with respect to the globaldirectory
configuration. If omitted it defaults to the name of the collection and is therefore relative to the library directory. (optional) -
paths
Path templates for audio files underdirectory
. Configured like the global paths option and defaults to it if not given. (optional) -
query
A query string that determine which tracks belong to the collection. A track belongs to the collection if itself or the album it is part of matches the query. To match all items, specify an empty string. (required) -
formats
A list of space separated strings that determine the audio file formats in the external collection. If the ‘format’ field of a track is included in the list, the file is copied. Otherwise, the file is transcoded to the first format in the list. The name of the first format must correpond to a key in theconvert.formats
configuration. This configuration controls the transcoding process.The special format ‘link’ is used to create symbolic links instead of transcoding the file. It can not be combined with other formats.
By default no transcoding is done.
-
removable
If this istrue
(the default) anddirectory
does not exist, theupdate
command will ask you to confirm the creation of the external collection. (optional) -
link_type
Can beabsolute
(default) orrelative
. Ifformats
islink
, it sets the type of links to create. For differences between link types and examples see Symlink Views.
If you have an idea or a use case this plugin is missing, feel free to open an issue.
The following is a list of things I might add in the feature.
- Symbolic links for each artist in a multiple artists release (see the beets issue)
Copyright (c) 2014-2023 Thomas Scholtes.
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