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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

#81

Post by doright »

dgfl wrote: post #61
JKCalhoun wrote: post #59

(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 intelli…

A genre is a volume in song space. More seriously, there’s no reason you can’t assign more than one genre to a song, or say that “it’s a mix of A and B”. You can extend the concept to albums and artists just as easily. I’m not familiar with R.E.M., but on rateyourmusic.com they’re marked as alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock. “Don’t go back to Rockville” is marked as Ja…

RYM genres would be extremely useful to have as a beets autotag plugin and I've been waiting for years for their API to be opened up specifically for them.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#82

Post by mukti »

tech_ken wrote: post #69
Thev00d00 wrote: post #31

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 repr…

Wow I've needed harmony for years, thanks for sharing! My dumb ass was filling out the Musicbrainz by hand for like two months before I just gave up on beets.

If you have the files downloaded, picard is also useful - https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#83

Post by jank199x »

adg33 wrote: post #47
jank199x wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think I'm using that already. Limiting to one genre I don't think will fix it - what I want is to define the allowable values for genre, and then limit to one. It's probably better with the limit one though!

There's a whitelist option. Just read the docs, really, lastgenre is very configurable.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#85

Post by JKCalhoun »

dgfl wrote: post #61
JKCalhoun wrote: post #59

(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 intelli…

A genre is a volume in song space. More seriously, there’s no reason you can’t assign more than one genre to a song, or say that “it’s a mix of A and B”. You can extend the concept to albums and artists just as easily. I’m not familiar with R.E.M., but on rateyourmusic.com they’re marked as alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock. “Don’t go back to Rockville” is marked as Ja…

"…alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock…"

Yeah, that is kind of making my point. Others perhaps enjoy creative pigeon-holing.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#86

Post by JKCalhoun »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #63
JKCalhoun wrote: post #59

(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 intelli…

I don't think theres anything wrong with labelling genres, its good for describing things. If I say "I love post hardcore, does anyone have more of that?" its a lot easier than going "hear me I out, I like punk sounds but maybe not necessarily punk songs?" What about movies? Can books have a genre? seems like a silly thing to take issue with. Alternative is a huge umbrella and it means something very different now th…

The classic line more or less sums it up: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#87

Post by CharlesW »

mukti wrote: post #82
tech_ken wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I've needed harmony for years, thanks for sharing! My dumb ass was filling out the Musicbrainz by hand for like two months before I just gave up on beets.

If you have the files downloaded, picard is also useful - https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

You'll want to bookmark Harmony even if you're using Picard since it's driven by the same database. Happily, once you add an item using Harmony, Picard can find your just-entered release almost immediately via the Release ID of the release you just created.

I find myself needing to create releases for ~10% of the albums I tag, and Harmony is a game-changer for that.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#88

Post by snthd »

Ntrails wrote: post #52
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?

Musicbrainz can do events

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=glastonbury&type=event&...

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#89

Post by CharlesW »

robinhood wrote: post #76

Beets is amazing. The fact that it exists is a blessing for those like us who maintain our own music library. I've been wanting to build my own Plex alternative for a while now. I've tried all the other tools out there, but Plex is definitely the least bad tool that let me enjoy my music without subscribing to Spotify and others. I've already spent hours trying to figure out all the things that are required to make t…

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 library are actually on the client side.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#90

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #59

(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 intelli…

I Find it stupid for artists but helpful for albums. NB: I use RYM as source (via https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/rymscrap) for my extended metadata, gotta exploit that autism.
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