Beets: The music geek’s media organizer • Hacker News Board

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#21

Post by Yodel0914 » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:22 AM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #11

Yodel0914 wrote: post #10

I spent a couple of nights working out how to configure beets to my liking and have loved it ever since. My “workflow” is now: - buy album on Bandcamp - download zip - beet import {zip file name} And beets extracts the zip, matches the album to musicbrainz, updates any metadata, and drops the files into the directory structure that I like (naming the files how I like them, too). Very rarely an album will need some mo…

Isn't beets going to just overwrite whatever you did in Picard?

No, you can tell it to use the metadata as-is.

Sometimes there’s just weirdness though - for example recently I bought an album and the band included all the tracks from their previous album as bonus tracks. So I used Picard to split them into the 2 “proper” albums.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#22

Post by globular-toast » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

adg33 wrote: post #4

I love beets - the one thing I can't figure out is how to set the genre very wide. I like having a small number of broad genres - Rock, Hip-Hop, Jazz etc - but the tagging comes up with hundreds of distinct genres :(

I have this problem too. I find it completely useless to have tags like genre=Post Rock Jazz Fusion" or whatever with basically one band in each genre.

The other thing I've never quite got right is how to deal with classical music and popular music with multiple pressings. A lot of the tagging structure seems oriented around popular music with just one pressing. But I have like 10 different recordings of The Planets and several versions of Red Hot Chili Pepper's Californication, for example.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#23

Post by Okawari » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

tuukkao wrote: post #14

If you're using Navidrome or similar to stream your music then check out beets-alternatives [0]. It lets you sync (and optionally convert) your library or a subset of it to another location, in my case my music storage mounted with Rclone. It's especially useful if you need to have a different naming structure in your target directory for whatever reason. I like to keep each disc of a multi-disc album in in its own s…

One of my favorite beets projects is beets-flask.

It lets you set up fully or partially automated import pipelines with a nice web UI to manage any manual steps needed.

Importing is usually as simple as dropping a zip in a folder and the rest is managed automatically.

https://github.com/pSpitzner/beets-flask

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#24

Post by Semaphor » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:26 AM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #7

Semaphor wrote: post #5

I recently looked into beets, but it seems it’s focused on automation, is that correct? I often buy stuff that has just been released, and that’s not yet in any database, so no automation works. My current workflow is download, unzip and manually tag (mainly genres, sometimes badly named artists/albums) with MusicBee (which gives me autocomplete for genres so I can reuse existing ones), and then copy the files to the…

If you add a lot of new stuff to your library, you'll often need to add them to MusicBrainz yourself. I use beets and I currently have added 2697 releases (2543 release groups) to MusicBrainz.

If you are into that, that’s good, but that’s the exact opposite of making my life easier ;)

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#25

Post by jank199x » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

adg33 wrote: post #4

I love beets - the one thing I can't figure out is how to set the genre very wide. I like having a small number of broad genres - Rock, Hip-Hop, Jazz etc - but the tagging comes up with hundreds of distinct genres :(

I assume lastgenre with canonicalization[0] enabled is what you need, along with count=1 if multiple genres are an issue.

[0] https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/lastgenre.htm...

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#26

Post by pooyamo » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

It's a good tool. However, last I checked, it was not possible to run it in a one-shot stateless fashion, like, passing it a list of music files so it auto-fetches album art, lyrics and updates the very same input files.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#27

Post by pooyamo » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:55 AM UTC

boobsbr wrote: post #6

Whatever happened to MusicBrainz Picard?

> MusicBrainz Picard

I don't think it can be used as a CLI tool. It's mainly a GUI app. I've tested it in the past and it works fine too.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#28

Post by mrmekon » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 10:55 AM UTC

I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over.

This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.

Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:

* brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

* commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

* non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)

* fan-recorded concerts

* fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)

* fan edits/remixes of commercial releases

* playlists & mix tapes

* mixed media releases

Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will still take thought.

This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#29

Post by curioussquirrel » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 11:01 AM UTC

Yodel0914 wrote: post #10

I spent a couple of nights working out how to configure beets to my liking and have loved it ever since. My “workflow” is now: - buy album on Bandcamp - download zip - beet import {zip file name} And beets extracts the zip, matches the album to musicbrainz, updates any metadata, and drops the files into the directory structure that I like (naming the files how I like them, too). Very rarely an album will need some mo…

A very similar workflow on my end, both beets as the main tagger/organizer and Picard to pick up whatever can't be processed through beets. Beets is amazing!

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#30

Post by skydhash » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 11:11 AM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #5

I recently looked into beets, but it seems it’s focused on automation, is that correct? I often buy stuff that has just been released, and that’s not yet in any database, so no automation works. My current workflow is download, unzip and manually tag (mainly genres, sometimes badly named artists/albums) with MusicBee (which gives me autocomplete for genres so I can reuse existing ones), and then copy the files to the…

You can use the current tags in the media files and not use any metadata database. I have a simple scheme for organizing my collection, and can correct my metadata rather quickly, but these days, so I don’t even use beets.