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Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

beets.io

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Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#31

Post by Thev00d00 »

A few people commenting that some of their collection "doesn't exist in any DB", the best way to fix it is to add it to Musicbrainz[0] yourself!

I have found that adding things to Musicbrainz is actually pretty easy (and if you are so inclined like me, pretty rewarding and fun).

Streaming releases (and Bandcamp) you simply drop the release URL into Harmony[1] and it does most of the work for you.

Musicbrainz can represent nearly everything musically related and its all freely licensed, a very cool thing to exist.

Most (non-destructive) edits are auto-applied, whilst the rest go through a 7 day voting period (they are still applied by default unless someone votes against). The barrier to entry is very low.

0. https://musicbrainz.org/

1. https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#32

Post by horrorente »

mrmekon wrote: post #28

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.…

There is a Bandcamp auto-tagging plugin for beets which should at least help with the first point: https://github.com/snejus/beetcamp

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#34

Post by Thev00d00 »

cluckindan wrote: post #33

Auto-tagging is nice to have but it will screw up verification checksums. I would prefer having metadata in a separate DB and keep the files as is, unless I explicitly request exporting the metadata to the original files.

Beets can do this too!

The -C option to avoid copying files and the -W option to prevent writing tags (or set it in the config file)

It will still attempt to match and store the results in its DB for later writing to files, or moving, or querying.

For the data to be most useful, you will need a client that connect to Beets to get the data though, Im not sure how prevelant those are. You can use the web-ui plugin though.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#35

Post by squigz »

mrmekon wrote: post #28

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.…

Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz just gets imported as-is, with maybe some metadata additions/tweaks.

> * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)

> * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs

This is a great opportunity to fill in those blanks for those services :) I didn't have much to contribute to MB but did have a few albums to add.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#36

Post by squigz »

I've loved beets (and MusicBrainz Picard) for years. This bit from the beets docs has always stuck with me when organizing my library.

"An Apology and a Brief Interlude

I would like to sincerely apologize that the autotagger in beets is so fussy. It asks you a lot of complicated questions, insecurely asking that you verify nearly every assumption it makes. This means importing and correcting the tags for a large library can be an endless, tedious process. I’m sorry for this.

Maybe it will help to think of it as a tradeoff. By carefully examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks. People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But there’s value in intimate, complete familiarity with your collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting tags as quality time with your music collection. That’s what I do."

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#37

Post by squigz »

pooyamo wrote: post #26

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.

> Relatedly, the -q (quiet) option can help with large imports by autotagging without ever bothering to ask for user input. Whenever the normal autotagger mode would ask for confirmation, the quiet mode performs a fallback action that can be configured using the quiet_fallback configuration or --quiet-fallback CLI option. By default it pessimistically skips the file. Alternatively, it can be used as is, by configuring asis.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#38

Post by yawnr »

mrmekon wrote: post #28

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.…

Can I ask what you choose to manage your library with today? I feel like streaming has made me stray so far from the joy (and pain) of library curation, and I’d really like to get back to it, I just don’t know what folks are using these days.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#39

Post by Shorel »

I organize everything into Mixxx.

It is tagged not only by genre, crates, some songs belong into more than one crate.

Also by mood, which I tag with colours.

And how much I like the song, which is by stars.

I tried Beets and it was very underwhelming in comparison =)

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#40

Post by dfc »

Thev00d00 wrote: post #34
cluckindan wrote: post #33

Auto-tagging is nice to have but it will screw up verification checksums. I would prefer having metadata in a separate DB and keep the files as is, unless I explicitly request exporting the metadata to the original files.

Beets can do this too! The -C option to avoid copying files and the -W option to prevent writing tags (or set it in the config file) It will still attempt to match and store the results in its DB for later writing to files, or moving, or querying. For the data to be most useful, you will need a client that connect to Beets to get the data though, Im not sure how prevelant those are. You can use the web-ui plugin thou…

> Beets can do this too!

This is the best summary of beets. It's wildly flexible and configurable.

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