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

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#121

Post by CharlesW » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #120

CharlesW wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of alternatives for music servers in the world. Can I ask if you've explored Plex alternatives (Jellyfin, Emby, Lyrion, Navidrome, various Subsonic/OpenSubsonic-compatible servers, etc.), and if so, what you need that they don't do? I ask because I'm working on a new music app for iOS which has pluggable sources, and so my bias is that most of the issues preventing me from easily enjoying my music lib…

Frictionless use is the biggest one. I can install Plex, all my movies, tv-shows, anime and music is there. Then I can drop Plexamp on my phone, log in with my Plex account and all my music is right there and if I rate a song on my phone, it's updated on Plex and vice versa.

Plexamp is what I settled on too, before deciding that I was only going to be happy if I built something better.

Plexamp is quite good as a standalone app, but as close to greatness as it is, it's a React Native app (better than a Flutter app, but still) that doesn't play well with the iOS ecosystem — no widgets, virtually no Siri/App Intents support, no Apple Music integration, etc.

I also decided that it shouldn't matter where my music "lives", and so it supports any local, self-hosted, or cloud-based source. (These are working today: https://imgur.com/szrkeIJ)

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#122

Post by acrophiliac » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

Here's what I did: $ pip install beets $ beet config -e $ beet import Music/BillEvans The database directory /home/user/.beets does not exist. Create it (Y/n)? y configuration error: import must be a collection, not NoneType

I was momentarily flummoxed by the error message. I pretty quickly realized I had mistakenly commented out all the lines in the import section of the config file. But for a nontechnical person the error message might be a bit hard to interpret. Maybe consider a more beginner friendly message with hints on how to correct the problem?

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#123

Post by henrebotha » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #110

henrebotha wrote: post #67

Beets crashes with a Musicbrainz connection error more than half the time, on my machine. How does anyone use it productively?

MusicBrainz is currently being hammered by AI scrapers. There's a pull request on the Beets GitHub that seems to address the crashing.

I couldn't find the PR in question. Do you have a link?

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#124

Post by alisonatwork » Sun, Nov 16, 2025, 12:01 AM UTC

hmstx wrote: post #118

alisonatwork wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering about diminishing returns, because up until switching to FLAC about 10 years ago I ripped all my CDs to 320k and thus only have about 20 files in my "low bitrate" auto playlist that are weird indie or bootleg things that I couldn't bring myself to delete for nostalgia reasons. Is FLAC really all that much better? Can anybody hear the difference? I don't want to spend months awkwardly moving thousands of…

Pioneer DJ, I mean AlphaTheta, probably don't even know MusicBrainz exists. They're too busy selling subscriptions for RekordBox. And they do nothing to help you with the metadata on your files, besides filtering in browser mode. I can relate to the problem of revising genre or energy ratings over time. I've gone with custom genre tags for ages, ie "dub/house/techno" or "funk/disco/edits" with a sprinkling of extra q…

I let this thread go for a while, but just saw your reply and wanted to say thanks for your insight! I am a hobbyist DJ for whom "playing out" just means "on a friend's equipment from time to time" so I probably don't need to fuss as much as I do, but your experience has kinda reaffirmed for me that keeping stuff MP3 is going to be the least hassle.

It really used to annoy me that bringing along just a USB left me with a useless "filenames only" view on old CDJs, and then even when they did read the file they only cached the metadata of a fraction of the tags, which is how I ended up same as you - custom genres with modifiers in the comment. It's not the ideal data structure for organizing your collection at home, but it seems to work the best for bringing music to go.