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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

#51

Post by doright »

I like beets' functionality but don't as much like "babysitting" it for long sessions when I have a bunch of new music to import. Especially because crashes are frequent and sometimes make it lose all incremental progress. Lack of progress bar on large imports is painful also.

It would be nice if a beets background worker could be kicked off when new music is detected to avoid the sequential nature of the commandline and see all the waiting tagging actions at once. This[0] is supposed to do that but it appears deprecated in favor of something else[1].

That being said, the "beets way" works pretty well past the import stage, so I haven't felt the need to move off it for local music.

[0] https://github.com/sentriz/betanin

[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#52

Post by Ntrails »

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

I've long enjoyed extracted audio from eg Glastonbury sets. I've only got a few that I particularly enjoyed and where the specific track was on youtube - is it that sort of thing? Is there a community of such reprobates?

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#53

Post by Semaphor »

alisonatwork wrote: post #50
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…

I use MusicBee for everything too and sounds like my workflow is the same as yours. I basically take whatever is tagged on the file straight out of Bandcamp and then manually follow Discogs-like rules for normalization of the artist name so the directory structure works out, plus adding iTunes compilation metadata to deal with the "various artists" issue, adding BPM, customizing genre and comments etc. I think I star…

> actually, which makes me wonder why I'm keeping all these FLACs around

Sometime last year, I actually redownloaded all my BC files, and reripped all my CDs (had to re-do genres, but that was fine, I wanted cleaner genres anyway). It’s simply archival. Lossless means you can convert it to whatever file you might want in the future without loss of quality.

This made extra sense for my CD rips, because many of those were from the early 2000s and I made questionable quality descisions ;)

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#55

Post by paweladamczuk »

squigz wrote: post #37
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 configurin…

Beets with this flag works relatively well for me when wrapped in a shell script, but I have spent a lot of effort trying to make it actually non-interactive.

I'm still not totally sure I got all the certainty thresholds right, I still sometimes get unexpected behavior when using Beets this way, so I agree that the non-interactive experience is lacking.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#56

Post by criddell »

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.…

I've always struggled to get my classical CDs tagged in a way that makes sense to me. Apple has figured it out in their classical music app and I should probably see if I can copy what they did in my personal library.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#57

Post by alisonatwork »

Semaphor wrote: post #53
alisonatwork wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use MusicBee for everything too and sounds like my workflow is the same as yours. I basically take whatever is tagged on the file straight out of Bandcamp and then manually follow Discogs-like rules for normalization of the artist name so the directory structure works out, plus adding iTunes compilation metadata to deal with the "various artists" issue, adding BPM, customizing genre and comments etc. I think I star…

> actually, which makes me wonder why I'm keeping all these FLACs around Sometime last year, I actually redownloaded all my BC files, and reripped all my CDs (had to re-do genres, but that was fine, I wanted cleaner genres anyway). It’s simply archival. Lossless means you can convert it to whatever file you might want in the future without loss of quality. This made extra sense for my CD rips, because many of those w…

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 files around just because it's more useful to a hypothetical future archaeologist version of myself with hearing that got better with age instead of worse...

That said, I wouldn't mind going back and retagging my genres in particular because one of the annoying things is that over the years my perception of the genre of certain tracks has changed, so it might be easiest to just roll back to ID3v1 "we got both kinds: house and techno" genres for the broad category and then cram subgenre keywords into the comment field instead... but it's been so long since I used CDJs that maybe all these hacks to maintain compatibility with different players are moot now. I saw that the latest and greatest DJ equipment just hooks up direct to online streaming services so I wouldn't be surprised if it also had a feature to sync everything to MusicBrainz as soon as you plug in a USB, which makes all the fussing around with legacy tags kind of pointless for a casual who mostly just listens or mixes at home.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#58

Post by wswope »

echelon_musk wrote: post #46

I've tried to use beets a number of times and given up each time. - beets can't delete transcoded files which have been deleted at source. - beets can't re transcode existing transcoded files when the source has been modified. - It's impossible to preserve the original directory structure when transcoding because it strips all path separators for "security". I use a Bash script I've been maintaining for a number of y…

Having hit those first two pain points, I changed my transcode config to 1) run every time, and 2) use a custom bash script as the transcode command. The bash script keeps a plaintext list of files + their modtime and disk size, then only transcodes files it hasn’t seen before. Because it’s a plaintext list and relatively small, there’s not a terrible performance hit since it’s paged into memory.

Not at all saying this to dismiss your criticism though; absolutely would be great to have better OOTB options. Just putting it out for anyone who wants a workaround :).

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#59

Post by JKCalhoun »

(Only because I have an axe to grind) I really dislike "genre" and work hard to strip that metadata tag. It is so reductive. And flawed as well.

Do we assign a "genre" to an artist? Album? Song?

The band R.E.M.: "College Rock"? "New Wave"? "Alternative"?

(Wow, don't even get me started on all the ways you can further slice up "alternative" into "shoe-gaze", "twee", etc. It's, ha ha, naval gazing for the music intelligentsia.)

R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville"? "Country"?

I think "live" and "soundtrack" might be the only two interesting "genres".

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#60

Post by Semaphor »

alisonatwork wrote: post #57
Semaphor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually, which makes me wonder why I'm keeping all these FLACs around Sometime last year, I actually redownloaded all my BC files, and reripped all my CDs (had to re-do genres, but that was fine, I wanted cleaner genres anyway). It’s simply archival. Lossless means you can convert it to whatever file you might want in the future without loss of quality. This made extra sense for my CD rips, because many of those w…

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…

320 vs FLAC: unless you are both a mutant and audiophile with the right equipment, you won't hear any difference at all. It's purely for archival purposes for me, that I have the "originals" or as close as possible.

Legacy tags: luckily not an issue for me, I only care about multiple (usually metal) subgenres and that my players show/filter them.

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