Skip to content

Files

Latest commit

 

History

History
5261 lines (4659 loc) · 262 KB

changelog.rst

File metadata and controls

5261 lines (4659 loc) · 262 KB

Changelog

Changelog goes here! Please add your entry to the bottom of one of the lists below!

Unreleased

Beets now requires Python 3.9 or later since support for EOL Python 3.8 has been dropped.

New features:

  • :doc:`plugins/lastgenre`: The new configuration option, keep_existing, provides more fine-grained control over how pre-populated genre tags are handled. The force option now behaves in a more conventional manner. 🐛`4982`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Add new configuration option dist_thresh to control the maximum allowed distance between the lyrics search result and the tagged item's artist and title. This is useful for preventing false positives when fetching lyrics.
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Rewrite lyrics translation functionality to use Azure AI Translator API and add relevant instructions to the documentation.

Bug fixes:

  • :doc:`plugins/fetchart`: Fix fetchart bug where a tempfile could not be deleted due to never being properly closed. 🐛`5521`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: LRCLib will fallback to plain lyrics if synced lyrics are not found and synced flag is set to yes.
  • Synchronise files included in the source distribution with what we used to have before the introduction of Poetry. 🐛`5531` 🐛`5526`
  • :ref:`write-cmd`: Fix the issue where for certain files differences in mb_artistid, mb_albumartistid and albumtype fields are shown on every attempt to write tags. Note: your music needs to be reimported with beet import -LI or synchronised with beet mbsync in order to fix this! 🐛`5265` 🐛`5371` 🐛`4715`
  • :ref:`import-cmd`: Fix MemoryError and improve performance tagging large albums by replacing munkres library with lap.lapjv. 🐛`5207`
  • :ref:`query-sort`: Fix a bug that would raise an exception when sorting on a non-string field that is not populated in all items. 🐛`5512`
  • :doc:`plugins/lastgenre`: Fix track-level genre handling. Now when an album-level genre is set already, single tracks don't fall back to the album's genre and request their own last.fm genre. Also log messages regarding what's been tagged are now more polished. 🐛`5582`
  • Fix ambiguous column name sqlite3.OperationalError that occured in album queries that filtered album track titles, for example beet list -a keyword title:foo.
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Rewrite lyrics tests using pytest to provide isolated configuration for each test case. This fixes the issue where some tests failed because they read developers' local lyrics configuration. 🐛`5133`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Do not attempt to search for lyrics if either the artist or title is missing and ignore artist_sort value if it is empty. 🐛`2635`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Fix fetching lyrics from lrclib source. If we cannot find lyrics for a specific album, artist, title combination, the plugin now tries to search for the artist and title and picks the most relevant result. Update the default sources configuration to prioritize lrclib over other sources since it returns reliable results quicker than others. 🐛`5102`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Fix the issue with genius backend not being able to match lyrics when there is a slight variation in the artist name. 🐛`4791`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Fix plugin crash when genius backend returns empty lyrics. 🐛`5583`
  • ImageMagick 7.1.1-44 is now supported.

For packagers:

  • The minimum supported Python version is now 3.9.
  • External plugin developers: beetsplug/__init__.py file can be removed from your plugin as beets now uses native/implicit namespace package setup.

Other changes:

  • Release workflow: fix the issue where the new release tag is created for the wrong (outdated) commit. Now the tag is created in the same workflow step right after committing the version update. 🐛`5539`
  • Added some typehints: ImportSession and Pipeline have typehints now. Should improve useability for new developers.
  • :doc:`/plugins/smartplaylist`: URL-encode additional item fields within generated EXTM3U playlists instead of JSON-encoding them.

2.2.0 (December 02, 2024)

New features:

  • :doc:`/plugins/substitute`: Allow the replacement string to use capture groups from the match. It is thus possible to create more general rules, applying to many different artists at once.

Bug fixes:

  • Check if running python from the Microsoft Store and provide feedback to install from python.org. 🐛`5467`
  • Fix bug where matcher doesn't consider medium number when importing. This makes it difficult to import hybrid SACDs and other releases with duplicate tracks. 🐛`5148`
  • Bring back test files and the manual to the source distribution tarball. 🐛`5513`

Other changes:

  • Changed bitesize label to good first issue. Our contribute page is now automatically populated with these issues. 🐛`4855`

2.1.0 (November 22, 2024)

New features:

  • New template function added: %capitalize. Converts the first letter of the text to uppercase and the rest to lowercase.
  • Ability to query albums with track db fields and vice-versa, for example beet list -a title:something or beet list artpath:cover. Consequently album queries involving path field have been sped up, like beet list -a path:/path/.
  • :doc:`plugins/ftintitle`: New keep_in_artist option for the plugin, which allows keeping the "feat." part in the artist metadata while still changing the title.
  • :doc:`plugins/autobpm`: Add new configuration option beat_track_kwargs which enables adjusting keyword arguments supplied to librosa's beat_track function call.
  • Beets now uses platformdirs to determine the default music directory. This location varies between systems -- for example, users can configure it on Unix systems via user-dirs.dirs(5).

Bug fixes:

  • :doc:`plugins/ftintitle`: The detection of a "feat. X" part in a song title does not produce any false positives caused by words like "and" or "with" anymore. 🐛`5441`
  • :doc:`plugins/ftintitle`: The detection of a "feat. X" part now also matches such parts if they are in parentheses or brackets. 🐛`5436`
  • Improve naming of temporary files by separating the random part with the file extension.
  • Fix the auto value for the :ref:`reflink` config option.
  • Fix lyrics plugin only getting part of the lyrics from Genius.com 🐛`4815`
  • Album flexible fields are now correctly saved. For instance MusicBrainz external links such as bandcamp_album_id will be available on albums in addition to tracks. For albums already in your library, a re-import is required for the fields to be added. Such a re-import can be done with, in this case, beet import -L data_source:=MusicBrainz.
  • :doc:`plugins/autobpm`: Fix the TypeError where tempo was being returned as a numpy array. Update librosa dependency constraint to prevent similar issues in the future. 🐛`5289`
  • :doc:`plugins/discogs`: Fix the TypeError when there is no description.
  • Use single quotes in all SQL queries 🐛`4709`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Update tekstowo backend to fetch lyrics directly since recent updates to their website made it unsearchable. 🐛`5456`
  • :doc:`plugins/convert`: Fixed the convert plugin no_convert option so that it no longer treats "and" and "or" queries the same. To maintain previous behaviour add commas between your query keywords. For help see :ref:`combiningqueries`.
  • Fix the TypeError when :ref:`set_fields` is provided non-string values. 🐛`4840`

For packagers:

  • The minimum supported Python version is now 3.8.
  • The beet script has been removed from the repository.
  • The typing_extensions is required for Python 3.10 and below.

Other changes:

  • :doc:`contributing`: The project now uses poetry for packaging and dependency management. This change affects project management and mostly affects beets developers. Please see updates in :ref:`getting-the-source` and :ref:`testing` for more information.
  • :doc:`contributing`: Since poetry now manages local virtual environments, tox has been replaced by a task runner poethepoet. This change affects beets developers and contributors. Please see updates in the :ref:`development-tools` section for more details. Type poe while in the project directory to see the available commands.
  • Installation instructions have been made consistent across plugins documentation. Users should simply install beets with an extra of the corresponding plugin name in order to install extra dependencies for that plugin.
  • GitHub workflows have been reorganised for clarity: style, linting, type and docs checks now live in separate jobs and are named accordingly.
  • Added caching for dependency installation in all CI jobs which speeds them up a bit, especially the tests.
  • The linting workflow has been made to run only when Python files or documentation is changed, and they only check the changed files. When dependencies are updated (poetry.lock), then the entire code base is checked.
  • The long-deprecated beets.util.confit module has been removed. This may cause extremely outdated external plugins to fail to load.
  • :doc:`plugins/autobpm`: Add plugin dependencies to pyproject.toml under the autobpm extra and update the plugin installation instructions in the docs. Since importing the bpm calculation functionality from librosa takes around 4 seconds, update the plugin to only do so when it actually needs to calculate the bpm. Previously this import was being done immediately, so every beet invocation was being delayed by a couple of seconds. 🐛`5185`

2.0.0 (May 30, 2024)

With this release, beets now requires Python 3.7 or later (it removes support for Python 3.6).

Major new features:

New features:

Bug fixes:

  • Improve ListenBrainz error handling. 🐛`5459`
  • :doc:`/plugins/deezer`: Improve requests error handling.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastimport`: Improve error handling in the process_tracks function and enable it to be used with other plugins.
  • :doc:`/plugins/spotify`: Improve handling of ConnectionError.
  • :doc:`/plugins/deezer`: Improve Deezer plugin error handling and set requests timeout to 10 seconds. 🐛`4983`
  • :doc:`/plugins/spotify`: Add bad gateway (502) error handling.
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/scrub`: Fixed the import behavior where scrubbed database tags were restored to newly imported tracks with config settings scrub.auto: yes and import.write: no. 🐛`4326`
  • :doc:`/plugins/deezer`: Fixed the error where Deezer plugin would crash if non-Deezer id is passed during import.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Fix fetching from Cover Art Archive when the maxwidth option is set to one of the supported Cover Art Archive widths.
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Set default max_bitrate value to None to avoid transcoding when this parameter is not set. 🐛`4472`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Resize album art when embedding 🐛`2116`
  • :doc:`/plugins/deezer`: Fix auto tagger pagination issues (fetch beyond the first 25 tracks of a release).
  • :doc:`/plugins/spotify`: Fix auto tagger pagination issues (fetch beyond the first 50 tracks of a release).
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: Fix Genius search by using query params instead of body.
  • :doc:`/plugins/unimported`: The new ignore_subdirectories configuration option added in 1.6.0 now has a default value if it hasn't been set.
  • :doc:`/plugins/deezer`: Tolerate missing fields when searching for singleton tracks. 🐛`4116`
  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: The type of the internal r128_track_gain and r128_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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Deleting the original files during conversion no longer logs output when the quiet flag is enabled.
  • :doc:`plugins/web`: Fix handling of "query" requests. Previously queries consisting of more than one token (separated by a slash) always returned an empty result.
  • :doc:`/plugins/discogs`: Skip Discogs query on insufficiently tagged files (artist and album tags missing) to prevent arbitrary candidate results. 🐛`4227`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Fixed issues with the Tekstowo.pl and Genius backends where some non-lyrics content got included in the lyrics
  • :doc:`plugins/limit`: Better header formatting to improve index
  • :doc:`plugins/replaygain`: Correctly handle the overwrite config option, which forces recomputing ReplayGain values on import even for tracks that already have the tags.
  • :doc:`plugins/embedart`: Fix a crash when using recent versions of ImageMagick and the compare_threshold option. 🐛`4272`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Fixed issue with Genius header being included in lyrics, added test case of up-to-date Genius html
  • :doc:`plugins/importadded`: Fix a bug with recently added reflink import option that causes a crash when ImportAdded plugin enabled. 🐛`4389`
  • :doc:`plugins/convert`: Fix a bug with the wma format alias.
  • :doc:`/plugins/web`: Fix get file from item.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Fix a duplicated entry for trip hop in the default genre list. 🐛`4510`
  • :doc:`plugins/lyrics`: Fixed issue with Tekstowo backend not actually checking if the found song matches. 🐛`4406`
  • :doc:`plugins/embedart`: Add support for ImageMagick 7.1.1-12 🐛`4836`
  • :doc:`/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 the albumtypes 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 using beet 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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Correctly select the cover art from fanart.tv with the highest number of likes
  • :doc:`/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 to :ref:`modify <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`
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/web`: Fix range request support, allowing to play large audio/ opus files using e.g. a browser/firefox or gstreamer/mopidy directly.
  • Fix bug where zsh completion script made assumptions about the specific variant of awk installed and required specific settings for sqlite3 and caching in zsh. 🐛`3546`
  • Remove unused functions 🐛`5103`
  • Fix bug where all media types are reported as the first media type when importing with MusicBrainz as the data source 🐛`4947`
  • Fix bug where unimported plugin would not ignore children directories of ignored directories. 🐛`5130`
  • Fix bug where some plugin commands hang indefinitely due to a missing requests timeout.
  • Fix cover art resizing logic to support multiple steps of resizing 🐛`5151`
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Fix attempt to convert and perform side-effects if library file is not readable.

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`
  • Allow reuse of some parts of beets' testing components. This may ease the work for externally developed plugins or related software (e.g. the beets plugin for Mopidy), if they need to create an in-memory instance of a beets music library for their tests.

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 :pypi:`mediafile` is now 0.9.0.

Other changes:

1.6.0 (November 27, 2021)

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:

Other new things:

  • :doc:`/plugins/permissions`: The plugin now sets cover art permissions to match the audio file permissions.
  • :doc:`/plugins/unimported`: A new configuration option supports excluding specific subdirectories in library.
  • :doc:`/plugins/info`: Add support for an --album flag.
  • :doc:`/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 :user:`catap`. 🐛`4060`
  • :doc:`/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. Set deinterlace: yes in your configuration to enable this conversion.
  • :doc:`/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:

For plugin developers:

  • :py:meth:`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`

1.5.0 (August 19, 2021)

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 the :ref:`path-format-config`, which matches individual items to decide which path to use. Thanks to :user:`FichteFoll`. 🐛`2797` 🐛`2988`
  • A new :ref:`reflink` config option instructs the importer to create fast, copy-on-write file clones on filesystems that support them. Thanks to :user:`rubdos`.
  • A new :doc:`/plugins/unimported` lets you find untracked files in your library directory.
  • The :doc:`/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), and work_disambig (the disambiguation string). Thanks to :user:`dosoe`. 🐛`2580` 🐛`3272`
  • A new :doc:`/plugins/parentwork` gets information about the original work, which is useful for classical music. Thanks to :user:`dosoe`. 🐛`2580` 🐛`3279`
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/deezer` can autotag tracks and albums using the Deezer database. Thanks to :user:`rhlahuja`. 🐛`3355`
  • A new :doc:`/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 with :ref:`list-cmd` or other commands. 🐛`3882`
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: The plugin can now get album art from last.fm. 🐛`3530`
  • :doc:`/plugins/web`: The API now supports the HTTP DELETE and PATCH methods for modifying items. They are disabled by default; set readonly: no in your configuration file to enable modification via the API. 🐛`3870`

Other new things:

Fixes:

For plugin developers:

  • MediaFile has been split into a standalone project. Where you used to do from beets import mediafile, now just do import 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 do import 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 the stdout attribute on the return value. Thanks to :user:`zsinskri`. 🐛`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 :doc:`/plugins/spotify` and the :doc:`/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, use Item.get(key, with_album=False). 🐛`2988`
  • Item.keys also has a with_album argument now, defaulting to True.
  • A revision attribute has been added to Database. It is increased on every transaction that mutates it. 🐛`2988`
  • The classes AlbumInfo and TrackInfo now convey arbitrary attributes instead of a fixed, built-in set of field names (which was important to address 🐛`1547`). Thanks to :user:`dosoe`.
  • Two new events, mb_album_extract and mb_track_extract, let plugins add new fields based on MusicBrainz data. Thanks to :user:`dosoe`.

For packagers:

  • Beets' library for manipulating media file metadata has now been split to a standalone project called MediaFile, released as :pypi:`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 :doc:`/plugins/scrub`).
  • Beets' library for configuration has been split into a standalone project called Confuse, released as :pypi:`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.

1.4.9 (May 30, 2019)

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:

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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/gmusic`: The oauth_file config option now supports more flexible path values, including ~ for the home directory. 🐛`3270`
  • :doc:`/plugins/gmusic`: Fix a crash when using version 12.0.0 or later of the gmusicapi module. 🐛`3270`
  • Fix an incompatibility with Python 3.8's AST changes. 🐛`3278`

Here's a note for packagers:

1.4.8 (May 16, 2019)

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 :ref:`config-aunique` configuration option allows setting default options for the :ref:`aunique` template function.
  • The albumdisambig field no longer includes the MusicBrainz release group disambiguation comment. A new releasegroupdisambig field has been added. 🐛`3024`
  • The :ref:`modify-cmd` command now allows resetting fixed attributes. For example, beet modify -a artist:beatles artpath! resets artpath attribute from matching albums back to the default value. 🐛`2497`
  • A new importer option, :ref:`ignore_data_tracks`, lets you skip audio tracks contained in data files. 🐛`3021`

There are some new plugins:

And many improvements to existing plugins:

Some improvements have been focused on improving beets' performance:

Several improvements are related to usability:

Many fixes have been focused on issues where beets would previously crash:

There are many fixes related to compatibility with our dependencies including addressing changes interfaces:

And there are many other fixes:

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 :doc:`/plugins/playlist` supports queries like playlist:name although there is no field named playlist. See :ref:`extend-query` for details.

And some messages for packagers:

1.4.7 (May 29, 2018)

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:

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 toward 🐛`406`. Thanks to :user:`Rawrmonkeys`.
  • A new importer configuration option, :ref:`artist_credit`, will tell beets to prefer the artist credit over the artist when autotagging. 🐛`1249`

And there are even more new features:

There are lots and lots of fixes:

  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: Fix a corner-case with the bs1770gain backend where ReplayGain values were assigned to the wrong files. The plugin now requires version 0.4.6 or later of the bs1770gain tool. 🐛`2777`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: Handle network and API errors when communicating with Genius. 🐛`2771`
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: The lyrics command previously wrote ReST files by default, even when you didn't ask for them. This default has been fixed.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: When writing ReST files, the lyrics command now groups lyrics by the albumartist field, rather than artist. 🐛`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 :doc:`/plugins/edit` provides show up more reliably after doing a secondary import search. 🐛`2441` 🐛`2731`
  • :doc:`/plugins/importadded`: Fix a crash on non-autotagged imports. Thanks to :user:`m42i`. 🐛`2601` 🐛`1918`
  • :doc:`/plugins/plexupdate`: The Plex token is now redacted in configuration output. Thanks to :user:`Kovrinic`. 🐛`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`
  • :doc:`/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 to :user:`autrimpo`. 🐛`2814`
  • :doc:`/plugins/ftintitle`: The drop 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 :ref:`preferred` countries rather than the order of release events in MusicBrainz. 🐛`2816`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/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 :user:`jhermann`. 🐛`2836` 🐛`2837`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/discogs`: Fix the medium and medium_index values, which were occasionally incorrect for releases with two-sided mediums such as vinyl. Also fix the medium_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 to :user:`dbogdanov`. 🐛`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 :user:`jdetrey`. 🐛`1638`
  • :doc:`/plugins/keyfinder`: Avoid a crash when trying to process unmatched tracks. 🐛`2537`
  • :doc:`/plugins/mbsync`: Support MusicBrainz recording ID changes, relying on release track IDs instead. Thanks to :user:`jdetrey`. 🐛`1234`
  • :doc:`/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 plain import_stages to request this behavior. 🐛`2814`
  • We again properly send albuminfo_received and trackinfo_received in all cases, most notably when using the mbsync plugin. This was a regression since version 1.4.1. 🐛`2921`

1.4.6 (December 21, 2017)

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:

There are also somewhat littler, but still great, new features:

There are lots and lots of bug fixes:

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`

1.4.5 (June 20, 2017)

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:

There are also some bug fixes:

1.4.4 (June 10, 2017)

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:

There are also quite a few fixes:

We removed backends from two metadata plugins because of bitrot:

1.4.3 (January 9, 2017)

Happy new year! This new version includes a cornucopia of new features from contributors, including new tags related to classical music and a new :doc:`/plugins/absubmit` for performing acoustic analysis on your music. The :doc:`/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:

Some smaller new features:

And the fixes:

For plugin developers: when providing new importer prompt choices (see :ref:`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.

1.4.2 (December 16, 2016)

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:

Also, we've removed some special handling for logging in the :doc:`/plugins/discogs` that we believe was unnecessary. If spurious log messages appear in this version, please let us know by filing a bug.

1.4.1 (November 25, 2016)

Version 1.4 has alpha-level Python 3 support. Thanks to the heroic efforts of :user:`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:

  • :doc:`/plugins/duplicates`: The duplicates 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 under ui).
  • The deprecated list_format_album and list_format_item configuration options have been removed (see :ref:`format_album` and :ref:`format_item`).

The are a few new features:

And there are a few bug fixes too:

The last release, 1.3.19, also erroneously reported its version as "1.3.18" when you typed beet version. This has been corrected.

1.3.19 (June 25, 2016)

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 :doc:`/plugins/beatport` and a modernized :doc:`/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:

Some fixes for Windows:

  • Queries are now detected as paths when they contain backslashes (in addition to forward slashes). This only applies on Windows.
  • :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: Image similarity comparison with ImageMagick should now work on Windows.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: The plugin should work more reliably with non-ASCII paths.

And other fixes:

  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: The bs1770gain backend now correctly calculates sample peak instead of true peak. This comes with a major speed increase. 🐛`2031`
  • :doc:`/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 to :user:`bismark`. 🐛`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`
  • :doc:`/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-supplied Content-Type header. In previous versions, the plugin would use a .jpg extension for all images. 🐛`2053`

1.3.18 (May 31, 2016)

This update adds a new :doc:`/plugins/hook` that lets you integrate beets with command-line tools and an :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/acousticbrainz` instead.

Some of the larger new features:

Smaller new things:

Fixes:

1.3.17 (February 7, 2016)

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 :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/acousticbrainz` fetches acoustic-analysis information from the AcousticBrainz project. Thanks to :user:`opatel99`, and thanks to Google Code-In! 🐛`1784`
  • A new :doc:`/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, the enter Id prompt choice now accepts several IDs, separated by spaces. 🐛`1808`
  • :doc:`/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:

Fixes:

1.3.16 (December 28, 2015)

The big news in this release is a new :doc:`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 :ref:`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 :doc:`/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." See :ref:`not_query`. 🐛`819` 🐛`1728`
  • A new :doc:`/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 the format_raw_length configuration option. 🐛`1749`

Smaller changes:

  • Three commands, modify, update, and mbsync, would previously move files by default after changing their metadata. Now, these commands will only move files if you have the :ref:`config-import-copy` or :ref:`config-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 :doc:`/plugins/discogs` also adopts the same setting.
  • :doc:`/plugins/info`: The info command now accepts a -f/--format option for customizing how items are displayed, just like the built-in list command. 🐛`1737`

Some changes for developers:

Fixes:

1.3.15 (October 17, 2015)

This release adds a new plugin for checking file quality and a new source for lyrics. The larger features are:

And there are smaller new features too:

This release has plenty of fixes:

  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Fix a bug that prevented tag popularity from being considered. Thanks to :user:`svoos`. 🐛`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 :doc:`/plugins/embedart`. Thanks to :user:`nathdwek`. 🐛`1565`
  • :doc:`/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, add wikipedia google to your sources configuration option.
  • The :ref:`list-cmd` command's help output now has a small query and format string example. Thanks to :user:`pkess`. 🐛`1582`
  • :doc:`/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 :user:`jdetrey`. 🐛`1303` 🐛`1589`
  • :doc:`/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`

1.3.14 (August 2, 2015)

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 :doc:`/plugins/ipfs` lets you share music via a new, global, decentralized filesystem. 🐛`1397`
  • :doc:`/plugins/duplicates`: You can now merge duplicate track metadata (when detecting duplicate items), or duplicate album tracks (when detecting duplicate albums).
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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 :user:`ruippeixotog`. 🐛`1104` 🐛`1493`
  • :doc:`/plugins/plexupdate`: A new token configuration option lets you specify a key for Plex Home setups. Thanks to :user:`edcarroll`. 🐛`1494`

Fixes:

1.3.13 (April 24, 2015)

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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: In auto mode (the import hook), the plugin now respects the write config option under import. 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`

1.3.12 (April 18, 2015)

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. See :ref:`combiningqueries`. 🐛`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 :ref:`sort_case_insensitive` configuration option. See :ref:`query-sort`. 🐛`1429`
  • An experimental new :doc:`/plugins/metasync` lets you get metadata from your favorite music players, starting with Amarok. 🐛`1386`
  • :doc:`/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:

1.3.11 (April 5, 2015)

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 :doc:`/plugins/filefilter` lets you write regular expressions to automatically avoid importing certain files. Thanks to :user:`mried`. 🐛`1186`
  • A new :doc:`/plugins/thumbnails` generates cover-art thumbnails for album folders for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. (This replaces the :doc:`/plugins/freedesktop`, which only worked with the Dolphin file manager.)
  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: There is a new backend that uses the bs1770gain analysis tool. Thanks to :user:`jmwatte`. 🐛`1343`
  • A new filesize field on items indicates the number of bytes in the file. 🐛`1291`
  • A new :ref:`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 option ui. (Also, the color config option has been moved from top-level to under ui. Beets will respect the old color setting, but will warn the user with a deprecation message.) 🐛`1238`
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: There's a new Wikipedia image source that uses DBpedia to find albums. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. 🐛`1194`
  • In the :ref:`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 the :ref:`per_disc_numbering` config option is set, the total number of tracks on a particular medium (i.e., disc). The field was causing problems with that :ref:`per_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 new albumtotal computed attribute that provides the total number of tracks on the album. (The :ref:`per_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 :ref:`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 :ref:`format_album` and :ref:`format_item`. The old names still work but each triggers a warning message. 🐛`1271`
  • :ref:`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, so beet ls AC/DC wouldn't work to refer to the artist.

There are also lots of medium-sized features in this update:

And many little fixes and improvements:

For developers:

  • The database_change event now sends the item or album that is subject to a change.
  • The OptionParser is now a CommonOptionsParser that offers facilities for adding usual options (--album, --path and --format). See :ref:`add_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. See :ref:`plugin-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.

1.3.10 (January 5, 2015)

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 :doc:`/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:

As usual, there are loads of little fixes and improvements:

1.3.9 (November 17, 2014)

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:

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 :ref:`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 :doc:`/plugins/play`.
  • :doc:`/plugins/bpd`: Add a new configuration option for setting the default volume. Thanks to IndiGit.
  • :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: A new ifempty config option lets you only embed album art when no album art is present. Thanks to kerobaros.
  • :doc:`/plugins/discogs`: Authenticate with the Discogs server. The plugin now requires a Discogs account due to new API restrictions. Thanks to :user:`multikatt`. 🐛`1027`, 🐛`1040`

And countless little improvements and fixes:

  • Standard cover art in APEv2 metadata is now supported. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. 🐛`1042`
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Avoid a crash when embedding cover art fails.
  • :doc:`/plugins/mpdstats`: Fix an error on start (introduced in the previous version). Thanks to Zach Denton.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: The --yes command-line flag no longer expects an argument.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/duplicates`: Emit an error when the checksum 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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/discogs`: Recover from HTTP errors when communicating with the Discogs servers. Thanks to Dustin Rodriguez.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/play`: Fix a potential crash when the command outputs special characters. 🐛`1041`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: Avoid resizing the image multiple times when embedding into an album. Thanks to :user:`kerobaros`. 🐛`1028`, 🐛`1036`
  • :doc:`/plugins/discogs`: Avoid a situation where a trailing comma could be appended to some artist names. 🐛`1049`
  • The output of the :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: A new copy_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`
  • :doc:`/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`
  • :doc:`/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 to :user:`multikatt`. 🐛`1067`, 🐛`1091`

1.3.8 (September 17, 2014)

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 :ref:`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 :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/types` makes it easy to specify field types in your config file.

One upgrade note: if you use the :doc:`/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:

  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/mbcollection`: A new option lets you automatically update your collection on import. Thanks to Olin Gay.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: A new never_convert_lossy_files option can prevent lossy transcoding. Thanks to Simon Kohlmeyer.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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., with pip 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 :ref:`stats-cmd` command now counts album artists. The album count also more accurately reflects the number of albums in the database.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: Remove <script> tags from scraped lyrics. Thanks to Bombardment.
  • :doc:`/plugins/play`: Add a relative_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 the version command.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Remove some unhelpful genres from the default whitelist. Thanks to gwern.
  • :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`: A new echo output mode prints files' paths to standard error. Thanks to robotanarchy.
  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: Restore some error handling when mp3gain output cannot be parsed. The verbose log now contains the bad tool output in this case.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/zero`: Do not delete database values; only media file tags are affected.

1.3.7 (August 22, 2014)

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 :doc:`/plugins/importadded` reads files' modification times to set their "added" date. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
  • The new :doc:`/plugins/bpm` lets you manually measure the tempo of a playing song. Thanks to aroquen.
  • The new :doc:`/plugins/spotify` generates playlists for your Spotify account. Thanks to Olin Gay.
  • A new :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: You can now optionally search for cover art on Google Image Search. Thanks to Lemutar.
  • A new :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/play`: The command config option can now contain arguments (rather than just an executable). Thanks to Alessandro Ghedini.
  • Fix an error when using the :ref:`modify-cmd` command to remove a flexible attribute. Thanks to Pierre Rust.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/play`: Playing albums now generates filenames by default (as opposed to directories) for better compatibility. The use_folders option restores the old behavior. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
  • Fix an error when importing an empty directory with the --flat option.
  • :doc:`/plugins/mpdstats`: The last song in a playlist is now correctly counted as played. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
  • :doc:`/plugins/zero`: Prevent accidental nulling of dangerous fields (IDs and paths). Thanks to brunal.
  • The :ref:`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 :ref:`write-cmd` showing changes for fields that are not written to the file.
  • The :ref:`write-cmd` command avoids displaying the item name if there are no changes for it.
  • When using both the :doc:`/plugins/convert` and the :doc:`/plugins/scrub`, avoid scrubbing the source file of conversions. (Fix a regression introduced in the previous release.)
  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: Logging is now quieter during import. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: When loading art from the filesystem, we now prioritize covers with more keywords in them. This means that cover-front.jpg will now be taken before cover-back.jpg because it contains two keywords rather than one. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/chroma`: A new auto configuration option disables fingerprinting on import. Thanks to ddettrittus.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: A new --format option to can select the transcoding preset from the command-line.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Transcoding presets can now omit their filename extensions (extensions default to the name of the preset).
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/scrub` not to work in auto mode. Thanks to Harry Khanna.
  • The :ref:`write-cmd` command now has a --force flag. Thanks again to Harry Khanna.
  • :doc:`/plugins/mbsync`: Track alignment now works with albums that have multiple copies of the same recording. Thanks to Rui Gonçalves.

1.3.6 (May 10, 2014)

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 :doc:`/plugins/play` lets you start your desktop music player with the songs that match a query. Thanks to David Hamp-Gonsalves.
  • The new :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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:

1.3.5 (April 15, 2014)

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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Fix a crash when the server does not specify a content type. Thanks to Lee Reinhardt.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/replaygain`: Fix crashes when attempting to log errors.
  • The :ref:`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.

1.3.4 (April 5, 2014)

This release brings a hodgepodge of medium-sized conveniences to beets. A new :ref:`config-cmd` command manages your configuration, we now have :ref:`bash completion <completion>`, and the :ref:`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 :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`, it has a new dependency, the requests module.

New stuff:

  • Added a :ref:`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 :ref:`completion`. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
  • The :ref:`modify-cmd` command now allows removing flexible attributes. For example, beet modify artist:beatles oldies! deletes the oldies 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.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`after_write <plugin_events>` plugin event.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`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 :ref:`modify-cmd` command to add new flexible fields. Thanks to brilnius.
  • echonest plugin: Avoid crashing when the audio analysis fails. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`group_albums` and :ref:`incremental` 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.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`write-cmd` command now only shows the changes to fields that will actually be written to a file.
  • :doc:`/plugins/duplicates`: Spurious reports are now avoided for tracks with missing values (e.g., no MBIDs). Thanks to Pedro Silva.
  • The default :ref:`replace` sanitation options now remove leading whitespace by default. Thanks to brilnius.
  • :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`: Fix crash when importing albums containing / with the m3u_multi format.
  • Avoid crashing on Mutagen bugs while writing files' tags.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Display a useful error message when the FFmpeg executable can't be found.

1.3.3 (February 26, 2014)

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 :doc:`/plugins/inline` to define a field called era, you can now filter your library based on that field by typing something like beet list era:goldenage.
  • Album-level flexible attributes and plugin-provided attributes can now be used in path formats (and other item-level templates).
  • :ref:`Date-based queries <datequery>` are now possible. Try getting every track you added in February 2014 with beet ls added:2014-02 or in the whole decade with added:2010... Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
  • The :ref:`modify-cmd` command is now better at parsing and formatting fields. You can assign to boolean fields like comp, 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. The :ref:`update-cmd` and :ref:`write-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 (:ref:`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, the BEETSDIR environment variable no longer combines---it replaces your default config file.) Thanks again to geigerzaehler.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/chroma` and :doc:`/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) and item_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 a beetsplug 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 using pluginpath when beets is installed using pip. Many thanks to geigerzaehler.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/fetchart` or :doc:`/plugins/embedart` without ImageMagick installed.
  • Also, when invoking convert for image resizing fails, we now log an error instead of crashing.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: The beet fetchart command can now associate local images with albums (unless --force is provided). Thanks to brilnius.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Command output is now colorized. Thanks again to brilnius.
  • The :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fromfilename`: Fix a crash when a filename contained only a track number (e.g., 02.mp3).
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Transcoding should now work on Windows.
  • :doc:`/plugins/duplicates`: The move and copy destination arguments are now treated as directories. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
  • The :ref:`modify-cmd` command now skips confirmation and prints a message if no changes are necessary. Thanks to brilnius.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: When using the remote_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 the beet version command.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Fix an occasional crash when no tag weight was returned by Last.fm.
  • :doc:`/plugins/mpdstats`: Restore the last_played field. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
  • The :ref:`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.

1.3.2 (December 22, 2013)

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: :ref:`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 :doc:`/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, and tag options perform those actions.
  • The new :doc:`/plugins/mpdstats` collects statistics about your listening habits from MPD. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and Johann Klähn.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: The new multiple option has been replaced with the count option, which lets you limit the number of genres added to your music. (No more thousand-character genre fields!) Also, the min_weight field filters out nonsense tags to make your genres more relevant. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and rashley60.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/missing`: Avoid a possible error when an album's tracktotal field is missing.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Fix an "Item has no library" error when using the auto config option.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`id3v23` option to work only occasionally.
  • Also fix using :ref:`id3v23` in conjunction with the scrub and embedart plugins. Thanks to Chris Cogburn.
  • :doc:`/plugins/ihate`: Fix an error when importing singletons. Thanks to Mathijs de Bruin.
  • The :ref:`clutter` option can now be a whitespace-separated list in addition to a YAML list.
  • Values for the :ref:`replace` option can now be empty (i.e., null is equivalent to the empty string).
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/scrub`: Fix scrubbing of MPEG-4 files. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.

1.3.1 (October 12, 2013)

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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: You can now transcode files to any audio format, rather than just MP3. Thanks again to Rowan Lewis.
  • The new :doc:`/plugins/fromfilename` guesses tags from the filenames during import when metadata tags themselves are missing. Thanks to Jan-Erik Dahlin.
  • The :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: You can now get multiple genres per album or track using the multiple config option. Thanks to rashley60 on GitHub.
  • A new :ref:`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:

  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Better error message when the image file has an unrecognized type.
  • :doc:`/plugins/mbcollection`: Detect, log, and skip invalid MusicBrainz IDs (instead of failing with an API error).
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`per_disc_numbering` enabled, the tracktotal field is now set correctly (i.e., to the number of tracks on the disc).
  • :doc:`/plugins/scrub`: The scrub command now restores album art in addition to other (database-backed) tags.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/missing`: Fix an error when printing missing track names. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
  • Fix an occasional KeyError in the :ref:`update-cmd` command introduced in 1.3.0.
  • :doc:`/plugins/scrub`: Avoid preserving certain non-standard ID3 tags such as NCON.

1.3.0 (September 11, 2013)

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 :ref:`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.

1.2.2 (August 27, 2013)

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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: More improvements to the Google backend by Fabrice Laporte.
  • :doc:`/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.)
  • :doc:`/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.

1.2.1 (June 22, 2013)

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 :ref:`ignored` setting lets you instruct the importer not to show you matches that have a certain penalty applied.
  • The :ref:`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 :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/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, :doc:`/plugins/missing`, and :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/scrub`: Handle and log I/O errors.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: The Google backend should now turn up more results. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
  • :doc:`/plugins/random`: Fix compatibility with Python 2.6. Thanks to Matthias Drochner.

1.2.0 (June 5, 2013)

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 :doc:`/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:

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 with bitrate:128000... See :ref:`numericquery`. 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 :ref:`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 the media field is unset on an album.
  • Apply minor penalties across a range of fields to differentiate between nearly identical releases: disctotal, label, catalognum, country and albumdisambig.

As usual, there were also lots of other great littler enhancements:

  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/inline` can also now define album fields. For consistency, the pathfields configuration section has been renamed item_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 :ref:`fields-cmd` command shows template fields provided by plugins. Thanks again to Pedro Silva.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`replace` configuration.
  • Friendly error messages are now printed when trying to read or write files that go missing.
  • The :ref:`modify-cmd` command can now change albums' album art paths (i.e., beet modify artpath=... works). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
  • :doc:`/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).
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: Lyrics searches should now turn up more results due to some fixes in dealing with special characters.

1.1.0 (April 29, 2013)

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.

  • :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: The embedart 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.
  • :doc:`/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 :ref:`max_filename_length` option.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Two new configuration options were added: cover_names, the list of keywords used to identify preferred images, and cautious, 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 the embedart and mbsync plugins. Invalid or missing files now cause error logs instead of crashing beets. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`.
  • :doc:`/plugins/smartplaylist`: Queries are now split using shell-like syntax instead of just whitespace, so you can now construct terms that contain spaces.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: The force config option now defaults to true and controls the behavior of the import hook. (Previously, new genres were always forced during import.)
  • :doc:`/plugins/web`: Fix an error when specifying the hostname on the command line.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Fix an error when using genre canonicalization.

1.1b3 (March 16, 2013)

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:

  • :ref:`languages` controls the preferred languages when selecting an alias from MusicBrainz. This feature requires python-musicbrainzngs 0.3 or later. Thanks to Sam Doshi.
  • :ref:`detail` enables a mode where all tracks are listed in the importer UI, as opposed to only changed tracks.
  • The --flat option to the beet 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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`: An option was added to use absolute, rather than relative, paths. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

Other stuff:

  • A new :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fuzzy`: The fuzzy command was removed and replaced with a new query type. To perform fuzzy searches, use the ~ prefix with :ref:`list-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 :ref:`extend-query`. Thanks again to Philippe Mongeau.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/convert`: Also, a new auto config option will transcode audio files automatically during import. Thanks again to Lucas Duailibe.
  • :doc:`/plugins/chroma`: A new fingerprint 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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/chroma`: Catch Acoustid Web service errors when submitting fingerprints.

1.1b2 (February 16, 2013)

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 :ref:`original_date` to true in your config file.

New configuration options:

  • :ref:`default_action` lets you determine the default (just-hit-return) option is when considering a candidate.
  • :ref:`none_rec_action` lets you skip the prompt, and automatically choose an action, when there is no good candidate. Thanks to Tai Lee.
  • :ref:`max_rec` lets you define a maximum recommendation for albums with missing/extra tracks or differing track lengths/numbers. Thanks again to Tai Lee.
  • :ref:`original_date` determines whether, when importing new albums, the year, month, and day fields should reflect the specific (e.g., reissue) release date or the original release date. Note that the original release date is always available as original_year, etc.
  • :ref:`clutter` controls which files should be ignored when cleaning up empty directories. Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :ref:`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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: The remote_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 :doc:`/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, and original_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 :ref:`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.
  • 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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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 the import command.

1.1b1 (January 29, 2013)

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 to random and fuzzy_search has been renamed to fuzzy.
  • 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 called auto.
  • Reorganized import config options: The various import_* options are now organized under an import: 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 called state.pickle in the same directory instead of ~/.beetsstate.

It also adds some new features:

  • :doc:`/plugins/inline`: Inline definitions can now contain statements or blocks in addition to just expressions. Thanks to Florent Thoumie.
  • Add a configuration option, :ref:`terminal_encoding`, controlling the text encoding used to print messages to standard output.
  • The MusicBrainz hostname (and rate limiting) are now configurable. See :ref:`musicbrainz-config`.
  • You can now configure the similarity thresholds used to determine when the autotagger automatically accepts a metadata match. See :ref:`match-config`.
  • :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`: Added a new configuration option that controls the base for relative paths used in m3u files. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.

1.0.0 (January 29, 2013)

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.

  • :doc:`/plugins/scrub`: Fix an incompatibility with Python 2.6.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: Fix an issue that failed to find lyrics when metadata contained "real" apostrophes.
  • :doc:`/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.

1.0rc2 (December 31, 2012)

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.
  • :doc:`/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".

1.0rc1 (December 17, 2012)

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: :doc:`/plugins/convert` transcodes music and embeds album art while copying to a separate directory. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer and Andrew G. Dunn.
  • New plugin: :doc:`/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: :doc:`/plugins/the` adds a template function that helps format text for nicely-sorted directory listings. Thanks to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
  • New plugin: :doc:`/plugins/zero` filters out undesirable fields before they are written to your tags. Thanks again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
  • New plugin: :doc:`/plugins/ihate` automatically skips (or warns you about) importing albums that match certain criteria. Thanks once again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart` and :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: Both plugins can now resize album art to avoid excessively large images. Use the maxwidth config option with either plugin. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :ref:`stats-cmd` command: New --exact switch to make the file size calculation more accurate (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).
  • :ref:`list-cmd` command: Templates given with -f can now show items' and albums' paths (using $path).
  • The output of the :ref:`update-cmd`, :ref:`remove-cmd`, and :ref:`modify-cmd` commands now respects the :ref:`list_format_album` and :ref:`list_format_item` config options. Thanks to Mike Kazantsev.
  • The :ref:`art-filename` option can now be a template rather than a simple string. Thanks to Jarrod Beardwood.
  • Fix album queries for artpath and other non-item fields.
  • Null values in the database can now be matched with the empty-string regular expression, ^$.
  • 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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Use the albums' existing genre tags if they pass the whitelist (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Add a lastgenre command for fetching genres post facto (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Local image filenames are now used in alphabetical order.
  • :doc:`/plugins/fetchart`: Fix a bug where cover art filenames could lack a .jpg extension.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lyrics`: Fix an exception with non-ASCII lyrics.
  • :doc:`/plugins/web`: The API now reports file sizes (for use with the Tomahawk resolver).
  • :doc:`/plugins/web`: Files now download with a reasonable filename rather than just being called "file" (thanks to Zach Denton).
  • :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`: Fix error in symlink mode with non-ASCII filenames.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/bpd` when files had non-ASCII extensions.
  • Fix for changing date fields (like "year") with the :ref:`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.

1.0b15 (July 26, 2012)

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 :doc:`/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 :ref:`per_disc_numbering` config option.
  • The default output format for the beet list command is now configurable via the :ref:`list_format_item` and :ref:`list_format_album` config options. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
  • Album cover art fetching is now encapsulated in the :doc:`/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's autofetch option to no.
    • 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 and albumartist_credit can now contain release- and recording-specific variations of the artist's name. See :ref:`itemfields`.
  • 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 :ref:`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 (because artist 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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/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.
  • :doc:`/plugins/embedart`: Fix crash when audio files are unreadable.
  • :doc:`/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.

1.0b14 (May 12, 2012)

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 :ref:`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. See :ref:`aunique` for details.
  • Beets queries can now use regular expressions. Use an additional : in your query to enable regex matching. See :ref:`regex` for the full details. Thanks to Matteo Mecucci.
  • Artist sort names are now fetched from MusicBrainz. There are two new data fields, artist_sort and albumartist_sort, that contain sortable artist names like "Beatles, The". These fields are also used to sort albums and items when using the list 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 :ref:`itemfields`.
  • :doc:`/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 :doc:`/reference/config` for more details. Thanks to Domen Kožar.
  • New :doc:`/plugins/random`: Randomly select albums and tracks from your library. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
  • The :doc:`/plugins/mbcollection` by Jeffrey Aylesworth was added to the core beets distribution.
  • New :doc:`/plugins/importfeeds`: Catalog imported files in m3u playlist files or as symlinks for easy importing to other systems. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
  • The -f (output format) option to the beet 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 :ref:`the replace config option <replace>`.
  • :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre`: Added a "fallback" option when no suitable genre can be found (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).
  • :doc:`/plugins/rewrite`: Unicode rewriting rules are now allowed (thanks to Nicolas Dietrich).
  • Filename collisions are now avoided when moving album art.
  • :doc:`/plugins/bpd`: Print messages to show when directory tree is being constructed.
  • :doc:`/plugins/bpd`: Use Gstreamer's playbin2 element instead of the deprecated playbin.
  • :doc:`/plugins/bpd`: Random and repeat modes are now supported (thanks to Matteo Mecucci).
  • :doc:`/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.

1.0b13 (March 16, 2012)

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 :doc:`/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 :doc:`/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, run beet 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 becomes AC_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 :ref:`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 and inline 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).

1.0b12 (January 16, 2012)

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 :doc:`/reference/pathformat`. If you're interested in adding your own template functions via a plugin, see :ref:`writing-plugins`.
  • Plugins can also now define new path fields in addition to functions.
  • The new :doc:`/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: with albumtype_soundtrack:.) See :ref:`path-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 :doc:`/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 :doc:`/plugins/scrub` can remove extraneous metadata either manually or automatically.
  • The new :doc:`/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 for beet.
  • Removed the lastid plugin, which was deprecated in the previous version.

1.0b11 (December 12, 2011)

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 :doc:`/plugins/chroma` uses the Acoustid open-source acoustic fingerprinting service. This replaces the old lastid 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 :doc:`/plugins/lastgenre` automatically assigns genres to imported albums and items based on Last.fm tags and an internal whitelist. (Thanks to KraYmer.)
  • The :doc:`/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 named beetsconfig.ini and the database is called beetslibrary.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 the ignore setting; see :doc:`/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.

1.0b10 (September 22, 2011)

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 :doc:`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 with field=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 run beet 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. The import_incremental config option makes this the default.
  • When pruning directories, "clutter" files such as .DS_Store and Thumbs.db are ignored (and removed with otherwise-empty directories).
  • The :doc:`/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 in embed 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.

1.0b9 (July 9, 2011)

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"`` or beet ls the\ knife. Read more in :doc:`/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. Running beet ls path/to/music will show all the music in your library under the specified directory. The :doc:`/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 of beet 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.

1.0b8 (April 28, 2011)

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 :doc:`/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 query singleton:true matches only singleton tracks; singleton:false matches only album tracks. The lastid 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 :doc:`/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 the import_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.

1.0b7 (April 5, 2011)

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 the import 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 either yes, no, or ask, 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 are skip (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.

1.0b6 (January 20, 2011)

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.

1.0b5 (September 28, 2010)

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' :doc:`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 :doc:`/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 :doc:`/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 the import_delete option in your .beetsconfig to yes.
  • Importing without autotagging (beet import -A) now prints out album names as it imports them to indicate progress.
  • The new :doc:`/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.

1.0b4 (August 9, 2010)

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 :doc:`/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 to no (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 to no 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 run import 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 entering b (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 SQLite ProgrammingError 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 type beet 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.

1.0b3 (July 22, 2010)

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. The import_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 the art_filename config option. (See :doc:`/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 and dadd 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 options plugins (a space-separated list of plugin names) and pluginpath (a colon-separated list of directories to search beyond sys.path). Plugins are just Python modules under the beetsplug namespace package containing subclasses of beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin. See the beetsplug directory for examples or :doc:`/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 and beet rm -a won't match anything. To "upgrade" your database, you can use the included albumify plugin. Running beets albumify with the plugin activated (set plugins=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 a ``format attribute, so you can use $format in your library path format strings like $artist - $album ($format) to get directories with names like Paul 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!

1.0b2 (July 7, 2010)

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"). Use beet 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.

1.0b1 (June 17, 2010)

Initial release.