Changelog
1.0.0 (January 29, 2013)
After fifteen betas and two release candidates, beets has finally hit
one-point-oh. Congratulations to everybody involved. This version of beets will
remain stable and receive only bug fixes from here on out. New development is
ongoing in the betas of version 1.1.
- Scrub Plugin: Fix an incompatibility with Python 2.6.
- Lyrics Plugin: Fix an issue that failed to find lyrics when metadata
contained “real” apostrophes.
- ReplayGain Plugin: On Windows, emit a warning instead of
crashing when analyzing non-ASCII filenames.
- Silence a spurious warning from version 0.04.12 of the Unidecode module.
1.0rc2 (December 31, 2012)
This second release candidate follows quickly after rc1 and fixes a few small
bugs found since that release. There were a couple of regressions and some bugs
in a newly added plugin.
- EchoNest Tempo Plugin: If the Echo Nest API limit is exceeded or a
communication error occurs, the plugin now waits and tries again instead of
crashing. Thanks to Zach Denton.
- FetchArt Plugin: Fix a regression that caused crashes when art was
not available from some sources.
- Fix a regression on Windows that caused all relative paths to be “not found”.
1.0rc1 (December 17, 2012)
The first release candidate for beets 1.0 includes a deluge of new features
contributed by beets users. The vast majority of the credit for this release
goes to the growing and vibrant beets community. A million thanks to everybody
who contributed to this release.
There are new plugins for transcoding music, fuzzy searches, tempo collection,
and fiddling with metadata. The ReplayGain plugin has been rebuilt from
scratch. Album art images can now be resized automatically. Many other smaller
refinements make things “just work” as smoothly as possible.
With this release candidate, beets 1.0 is feature-complete. We’ll be fixing
bugs on the road to 1.0 but no new features will be added. Concurrently, work
begins today on features for version 1.1.
- New plugin: Convert Plugin transcodes music and embeds album art
while copying to a separate directory. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer and Andrew G.
Dunn.
- New plugin: Fuzzy Search Plugin lets you find albums and tracks
using fuzzy string matching so you don’t have to type (or even remember)
their exact names. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
- New plugin: EchoNest Tempo Plugin fetches tempo (BPM) information
from The Echo Nest. Thanks to David Brenner.
- New plugin: The Plugin adds a template function that helps format
text for nicely-sorted directory listings. Thanks to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
- New plugin: Zero Plugin filters out undesirable fields before
they are written to your tags. Thanks again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
- New plugin: IHate Plugin automatically skips (or warns you about)
importing albums that match certain criteria. Thanks once again to Blemjhoo
Tezoulbr.
- ReplayGain Plugin: This plugin has been completely overhauled to use
the mp3gain or aacgain command-line tools instead of the failure-prone
Gstreamer ReplayGain implementation. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
- FetchArt Plugin and EmbedArt Plugin: Both plugins can now
resize album art to avoid excessively large images. Use the maxwidth
config option with either plugin. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
- Scrub Plugin: Scrubbing now removes all types of tags from a file
rather than just one. For example, if your FLAC file has both ordinary FLAC
tags and ID3 tags, the ID3 tags are now also removed.
- stats command: New --exact switch to make the file size
calculation more accurate (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).
- list command: Templates given with -f can now show items’ and
albums’ paths (using $path).
- The output of the update, remove, and modify
commands now respects the list_format_album and
list_format_item config options. Thanks to Mike Kazantsev.
- The art_filename option can now be a template rather than a simple
string. Thanks to Jarrod Beardwood.
- Fix album queries for artpath and other non-item fields.
- Null values in the database can now be matched with the empty-string regular
expression, ^$.
- Queries now correctly match non-string values in path format predicates.
- When autotagging a various-artists album, the album artist field is now
used instead of the majority track artist.
- LastGenre Plugin: Use the albums’ existing genre tags if they pass
the whitelist (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).
- LastGenre Plugin: Add a lastgenre command for fetching genres
post facto (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).
- FetchArt Plugin: Local image filenames are now used in alphabetical
order.
- FetchArt Plugin: Fix a bug where cover art filenames could lack
a .jpg extension.
- Lyrics Plugin: Fix an exception with non-ASCII lyrics.
- Web Plugin: The API now reports file sizes (for use with the
Tomahawk resolver).
- Web Plugin: Files now download with a reasonable filename rather
than just being called “file” (thanks to Zach Denton).
- ImportFeeds Plugin: Fix error in symlink mode with non-ASCII
filenames.
- MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Fix an error when submitting a large number of
releases (we now submit only 200 releases at a time instead of 350). Thanks
to Jonathan Towne.
- EmbedArt Plugin: Made the method for embedding art into FLAC files
standard-compliant.
Thanks to Daniele Sluijters.
- Add the track mapping dictionary to the album_distance plugin function.
- When an exception is raised while reading a file, the path of the file in
question is now logged (thanks to Mike Kazantsev).
- Truncate long filenames based on their bytes rather than their Unicode
characters, fixing situations where encoded names could be too long.
- Filename truncation now incorporates the length of the extension.
- Fix an assertion failure when the MusicBrainz main database and search server
disagree.
- Fix a bug that caused the LastGenre Plugin and other plugins not to
modify files’ tags even when they successfully change the database.
- Fix a VFS bug leading to a crash in the BPD Plugin when files had
non-ASCII extensions.
- Fix for changing date fields (like “year”) with the modify
command.
- Fix a crash when input is read from a pipe without a specified encoding.
- Fix some problem with identifying files on Windows with Unicode directory
names in their path.
- Fix a crash when Unicode queries were used with import -L re-imports.
- Fix an error when fingerprinting files with Unicode filenames on Windows.
- Warn instead of crashing when importing a specific file in singleton mode.
- Add human-readable error messages when writing files’ tags fails or when a
directory can’t be created.
- Changed plugin loading so that modules can be imported without
unintentionally loading the plugins they contain.
1.0b15 (July 26, 2012)
The fifteenth (!) beta of beets is compendium of small fixes and features, most
of which represent long-standing requests. The improvements include matching
albums with extra tracks, per-disc track numbering in multi-disc albums, an
overhaul of the album art downloader, and robustness enhancements that should
keep beets running even when things go wrong. All these smaller changes should
help us focus on some larger changes coming before 1.0.
Please note that this release contains one backwards-incompatible change: album
art fetching, which was previously baked into the import workflow, is now
encapsulated in a plugin (the FetchArt Plugin). If you want to continue
fetching cover art for your music, enable this plugin after upgrading to beets
1.0b15.
- The autotagger can now find matches for albums when you have extra tracks
on your filesystem that aren’t present in the MusicBrainz catalog. Previously,
if you tried to match album with 15 audio files but the MusicBrainz entry had
only 14 tracks, beets would ignore this match. Now, beets will show you
matches even when they are “too short” and indicate which tracks from your
disk are unmatched.
- Tracks on multi-disc albums can now be numbered per-disc instead of
per-album via the per_disc_numbering config option.
- The default output format for the beet list command is now configurable
via the list_format_item and list_format_album config options.
Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
- Album cover art fetching is now encapsulated in the
FetchArt Plugin. Be sure to enable this plugin if you’re using this
functionality. As a result of this new organization, the new plugin has gained
a few new features:
- “As-is” and non-autotagged imports can now have album art imported from
the local filesystem (although Web repositories are still not searched in
these cases).
- A new command, beet fetchart, allows you to download album art
post-import. If you only want to fetch art manually, not automatically
during import, set the new plugin’s autofetch option to no.
- New album art sources have been added.
- Errors when communicating with MusicBrainz now log an error message instead of
halting the importer.
- Similarly, filesystem manipulation errors now print helpful error messages
instead of a messy traceback. They still interrupt beets, but they should now
be easier for users to understand. Tracebacks are still available in verbose
mode.
- New metadata fields for artist credits: artist_credit and
albumartist_credit can now contain release- and recording-specific
variations of the artist’s name. See Available Values.
- Revamped the way beets handles concurrent database access to avoid
nondeterministic SQLite-related crashes when using the multithreaded importer.
On systems where SQLite was compiled without usleep(3) support,
multithreaded database access could cause an internal error (with the message
“database is locked”). This release synchronizes access to the database to
avoid internal SQLite contention, which should avoid this error.
- Plugins can now add parallel stages to the import pipeline. See
Writing Plugins.
- Beets now prints out an error when you use an unrecognized field name in a
query: for example, when running beet ls -a artist:foo (because artist
is an item-level field).
- New plugin events:
- import_task_choice is called after an import task has an action
assigned.
- import_task_files is called after a task’s file manipulation has
finished (copying or moving files, writing metadata tags).
- library_opened is called when beets starts up and opens the library
database.
- LastGenre Plugin: Fixed a problem where path formats containing
$genre would use the old genre instead of the newly discovered one.
- Fix a crash when moving files to a Samba share.
- MPDUpdate Plugin: Fix TypeError crash (thanks to Philippe Mongeau).
- When re-importing files with import_copy enabled, only files inside the
library directory are moved. Files outside the library directory are still
copied. This solves a problem (introduced in 1.0b14) where beets could crash
after adding files to the library but before finishing copying them; during
the next import, the (external) files would be moved instead of copied.
- Artist sort names are now populated correctly for multi-artist tracks and
releases. (Previously, they only reflected the first artist.)
- When previewing changes during import, differences in track duration are now
shown as “2:50 vs. 3:10” rather than separated with -> like track numbers.
This should clarify that beets isn’t doing anything to modify lengths.
- Fix a problem with query-based path format matching where a field-qualified
pattern, like albumtype_soundtrack, would match everything.
- Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix matching with ambiguous Acoustids. Some Acoustids
are identified with multiple recordings; beets now considers any associated
recording a valid match. This should reduce some cases of errant track
reordering when using chroma.
- Fix the ID3 tag name for the catalog number field.
- Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix occasional crash at end of fingerprint submission
and give more context to “failed fingerprint generation” errors.
- Interactive prompts are sent to stdout instead of stderr.
- EmbedArt Plugin: Fix crash when audio files are unreadable.
- BPD Plugin: Fix crash when sockets disconnect (thanks to Matteo
Mecucci).
- Fix an assertion failure while importing with moving enabled when the file was
already at its destination.
- Fix Unicode values in the replace config option (thanks to Jakob Borg).
- Use a nicer error message when input is requested but stdin is closed.
- Fix errors on Windows for certain Unicode characters that can’t be represented
in the MBCS encoding. This required a change to the way that paths are
represented in the database on Windows; if you find that beets’ paths are out
of sync with your filesystem with this release, delete and recreate your
database with beet import -AWC /path/to/music.
- Fix import with relative path arguments on Windows.
1.0b14 (May 12, 2012)
The centerpiece of this beets release is the graceful handling of
similarly-named albums. It’s now possible to import two albums with the same
artist and title and to keep them from conflicting in the filesystem. Many other
awesome new features were contributed by the beets community, including regular
expression queries, artist sort names, moving files on import. There are three
new plugins: random song/album selection; MusicBrainz “collection” integration;
and a plugin for interoperability with other music library systems.
A million thanks to the (growing) beets community for making this a huge
release.
- The importer now gives you choices when duplicates are detected.
Previously, when beets found an existing album or item in your library
matching the metadata on a newly-imported one, it would just skip the new
music to avoid introducing duplicates into your library. Now, you have three
choices: skip the new music (the previous behavior), keep both, or remove the
old music. See the Duplicates section in the autotagging guide
for details.
- Beets can now avoid storing identically-named albums in the same directory.
The new %aunique{} template function, which is included in the default
path formats, ensures that Crystal Castles’ albums will be placed into
different directories. See Album Disambiguation for details.
- Beets queries can now use regular expressions. Use an additional : in
your query to enable regex matching. See Regular Expressions for the full details.
Thanks to Matteo Mecucci.
- Artist sort names are now fetched from MusicBrainz. There are two new data
fields, artist_sort and albumartist_sort, that contain sortable artist
names like “Beatles, The”. These fields are also used to sort albums and items
when using the list command. Thanks to Paul Provost.
- Many other new metadata fields were added, including ASIN, label catalog
number, disc title, encoder, and MusicBrainz release group ID. For a full list
of fields, see Available Values.
- Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: A new command, beet submit, will submit
fingerprints to the Acoustid database. Submitting your library helps
increase the coverage and accuracy of Acoustid fingerprinting. The Chromaprint
fingerprint and Acoustid ID are also now stored for all fingerprinted tracks.
This version of beets requires at least version 0.6 of pyacoustid for
fingerprinting to work.
- The importer can now move files. Previously, beets could only copy files
and delete the originals, which is inefficient if the source and destination
are on the same filesystem. Use the import_move configuration option and
see .beetsconfig for more details. Thanks to Domen Kožar.
- New Random Plugin: Randomly select albums and tracks from your library.
Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
- The MusicBrainz Collection Plugin by Jeffrey Aylesworth was added to the core
beets distribution.
- New ImportFeeds Plugin: Catalog imported files in m3u playlist
files or as symlinks for easy importing to other systems. Thanks to Fabrice
Laporte.
- The -f (output format) option to the beet list command can now contain
template functions as well as field references. Thanks to Steve Dougherty.
- A new command beet fields displays the available metadata fields (thanks
to Matteo Mecucci).
- The import command now has a --noincremental or -I flag to disable
incremental imports (thanks to Matteo Mecucci).
- When the autotagger fails to find a match, it now displays the number of
tracks on the album (to help you guess what might be going wrong) and a link
to the FAQ.
- The default filename character substitutions were changed to be more
conservative. The Windows “reserved characters” are substituted by default
even on Unix platforms (this causes less surprise when using Samba shares to
store music). To customize your character substitutions, see the replace
config option.
- LastGenre Plugin: Added a “fallback” option when no suitable genre
can be found (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).
- Rewrite Plugin: Unicode rewriting rules are now allowed (thanks to
Nicolas Dietrich).
- Filename collisions are now avoided when moving album art.
- BPD Plugin: Print messages to show when directory tree is being
constructed.
- BPD Plugin: Use Gstreamer’s playbin2 element instead of the
deprecated playbin.
- BPD Plugin: Random and repeat modes are now supported (thanks to
Matteo Mecucci).
- BPD Plugin: Listings are now sorted (thanks once again to Matteo
Mecucci).
- Filenames are normalized with Unicode Normal Form D (NFD) on Mac OS X and NFC
on all other platforms.
- Significant internal restructuring to avoid SQLite locking errors. As part of
these changes, the not-very-useful “save” plugin event has been removed.
1.0b13 (March 16, 2012)
Beets 1.0b13 consists of a plethora of small but important fixes and
refinements. A lyrics plugin is now included with beets; new audio properties
are catalogged; the list command has been made more powerful; the autotagger
is more tolerant of different tagging styles; and importing with original file
deletion now cleans up after itself more thoroughly. Many, many bugs—including
several crashers—were fixed. This release lays the foundation for more features
to come in the next couple of releases.
- The Lyrics Plugin, originally by Peter Brunner, is revamped and
included with beets, making it easy to fetch song lyrics.
- Items now expose their audio sample rate, number of channels, and
bits per sample (bitdepth). See Path Formats for a list of
all available audio properties. Thanks to Andrew Dunn.
- The beet list command now accepts a “format” argument that lets you show
specific information about each album or track. For example, run beet ls
-af '$album: $tracktotal' beatles to see how long each Beatles album is.
Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
- The autotagger now tolerates tracks on multi-disc albums that are numbered
per-disc. For example, if track 24 on a release is the first track on the
second disc, then it is not penalized for having its track number set to 1
instead of 24.
- The autotagger sets the disc number and disc total fields on autotagged
albums.
- The autotagger now also tolerates tracks whose track artists tags are set
to “Various Artists”.
- Terminal colors are now supported on Windows via Colorama (thanks to Karl).
- When previewing metadata differences, the importer now shows discrepancies in
track length.
- Importing with import_delete enabled now cleans up empty directories that
contained deleting imported music files.
- Similarly, import_delete now causes original album art imported from the
disk to be deleted.
- Plugin-supplied template values, such as those created by rewrite, are now
properly sanitized (for example, AC/DC properly becomes AC_DC).
- Filename extensions are now always lower-cased when copying and moving files.
- The inline plugin now prints a more comprehensible error when exceptions
occur in Python snippets.
- The replace configuration option can now remove characters entirely (in
addition to replacing them) if the special string <strip> is specified as
the replacement.
- New plugin API: plugins can now add fields to the MediaFile tag abstraction
layer. See Writing Plugins.
- A reasonable error message is now shown when the import log file cannot be
opened.
- The import log file is now flushed and closed properly so that it can be used
to monitor import progress, even when the import crashes.
- Duplicate track matches are no longer shown when autotagging singletons.
- The chroma plugin now logs errors when fingerprinting fails.
- The lastgenre plugin suppresses more errors when dealing with the Last.fm
API.
- Fix a bug in the rewrite plugin that broke the use of multiple rules for
a single field.
- Fix a crash with non-ASCII characters in bytestring metadata fields (e.g.,
MusicBrainz IDs).
- Fix another crash with non-ASCII characters in the configuration paths.
- Fix a divide-by-zero crash on zero-length audio files.
- Fix a crash in the chroma plugin when the Acoustid database had no
recording associated with a fingerprint.
- Fix a crash when an autotagging with an artist or album containing “AND” or
“OR” (upper case).
- Fix an error in the rewrite and inline plugins when the corresponding
config sections did not exist.
- Fix bitrate estimation for AAC files whose headers are missing the relevant
data.
- Fix the list command in BPD (thanks to Simon Chopin).
1.0b12 (January 16, 2012)
This release focuses on making beets’ path formatting vastly more powerful. It
adds a function syntax for transforming text. Via a new plugin, arbitrary Python
code can also be used to define new path format fields. Each path format
template can now be activated conditionally based on a query. Character set
substitutions are also now configurable.
In addition, beets avoids problematic filename conflicts by appending numbers to
filenames that would otherwise conflict. Three new plugins (inline,
scrub, and rewrite) are included in this release.
- Functions in path formats provide a simple way to write complex file
naming rules: for example, %upper{%left{$artist,1}} will insert the
capitalized first letter of the track’s artist. For more details, see
Path Formats. If you’re interested in adding your own template
functions via a plugin, see Writing Plugins.
- Plugins can also now define new path fields in addition to functions.
- The new Inline Plugin lets you use Python expressions to customize
path formats by defining new fields in the config file.
- The configuration can condition path formats based on queries. That is,
you can write a path format that is only used if an item matches a given
query. (This supersedes the earlier functionality that only allowed
conditioning on album type; if you used this feature in a previous version,
you will need to replace, for example, soundtrack: with
albumtype_soundtrack:.) See Path Format Configuration.
- Filename substitutions are now configurable via the replace config
value. You can choose which characters you think should be allowed in your
directory and music file names. See .beetsconfig.
- Beets now ensures that files have unique filenames by appending a number
to any filename that would otherwise conflict with an existing file.
- The new Scrub Plugin can remove extraneous metadata either manually
or automatically.
- The new Rewrite Plugin can canonicalize names for path formats.
- The autotagging heuristics have been tweaked in situations where the
MusicBrainz database did not contain track lengths. Previously, beets
penalized matches where this was the case, leading to situations where
seemingly good matches would have poor similarity. This penalty has been
removed.
- Fix an incompatibility in BPD with libmpc (the library that powers mpc and
ncmpc).
- Fix a crash when importing a partial match whose first track was missing.
- The lastgenre plugin now correctly writes discovered genres to imported
files (when tag-writing is enabled).
- Add a message when skipping directories during an incremental import.
- The default ignore settings now ignore all files beginning with a dot.
- Date values in path formats ($year, $month, and $day) are now
appropriately zero-padded.
- Removed the --path-format global flag for beet.
- Removed the lastid plugin, which was deprecated in the previous version.
1.0b11 (December 12, 2011)
This version of beets focuses on transitioning the autotagger to the new version
of the MusicBrainz database (called NGS). This transition brings with it a
number of long-overdue improvements: most notably, predictable behavior when
tagging multi-disc albums and integration with the new Acoustid acoustic
fingerprinting technology.
The importer can also now tag incomplete albums when you’re missing a few
tracks from a given release. Two other new plugins are also included with this
release: one for assigning genres and another for ReplayGain analysis.
- Beets now communicates with MusicBrainz via the new Next Generation Schema
(NGS) service via python-musicbrainz-ngs. The bindings are included with
this version of beets, but a future version will make them an external
dependency.
- The importer now detects multi-disc albums and tags them together. Using a
heuristic based on the names of directories, certain structures are classified
as multi-disc albums: for example, if a directory contains subdirectories
labeled “disc 1” and “disc 2”, these subdirectories will be coalesced into a
single album for tagging.
- The new Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin uses the Acoustid open-source acoustic
fingerprinting service. This replaces the old lastid plugin, which used
Last.fm fingerprinting and is now deprecated. Fingerprinting with this library
should be faster and more reliable.
- The importer can now perform partial matches. This means that, if you’re
missing a few tracks from an album, beets can still tag the remaining tracks
as a single album. (Thanks to Simon Chopin.)
- The new LastGenre Plugin automatically assigns genres to imported
albums and items based on Last.fm tags and an internal whitelist. (Thanks to
KraYmer.)
- The ReplayGain Plugin, written by Peter Brunner, has been merged
into the core beets distribution. Use it to analyze audio and adjust
playback levels in ReplayGain-aware music players.
- Albums are now tagged with their original release date rather than the date
of any reissue, remaster, “special edition”, or the like.
- The config file and library databases are now given better names and locations
on Windows. Namely, both files now reside in %APPDATA%; the config file is
named beetsconfig.ini and the database is called beetslibrary.blb
(neither has a leading dot as on Unix). For backwards compatibility, beets
will check the old locations first.
- When entering an ID manually during tagging, beets now searches for anything
that looks like an MBID in the entered string. This means that full
MusicBrainz URLs now work as IDs at the prompt. (Thanks to derwin.)
- The importer now ignores certain “clutter” files like .AppleDouble
directories and ._* files. The list of ignored patterns is configurable
via the ignore setting; see .beetsconfig.
- The database now keeps track of files’ modification times so that, during
an update, unmodified files can be skipped. (Thanks to Jos van der Til.)
- The album art fetcher now uses albumart.org as a fallback when the Amazon
art downloader fails.
- A new timeout config value avoids database locking errors on slow systems.
- Fix a crash after using the “as Tracks” option during import.
- Fix a Unicode error when tagging items with missing titles.
- Fix a crash when the state file (~/.beetsstate) became emptied or
corrupted.
1.0b10 (September 22, 2011)
This version of beets focuses on making it easier to manage your metadata
after you’ve imported it. A bumper crop of new commands has been added: a
manual tag editor (modify), a tool to pick up out-of-band deletions and
modifications (update), and functionality for moving and copying files
around (move). Furthermore, the concept of “re-importing” is new: you can
choose to re-run beets’ advanced autotagger on any files you already have in
your library if you change your mind after you finish the initial import.
As a couple of added bonuses, imports can now automatically skip
previously-imported directories (with the -i flag) and there’s an
experimental Web interface to beets in a new standard
plugin.
- A new beet modify command enables manual, command-line-based
modification of music metadata. Pass it a query along with field=value
pairs that specify the changes you want to make.
- A new beet update command updates the database to reflect changes in the
on-disk metadata. You can now use an external program to edit tags on files,
remove files and directories, etc., and then run beet update to make sure
your beets library is in sync. This will also rename files to reflect their
new metadata.
- A new beet move command can copy or move files into your library
directory or to another specified directory.
- When importing files that are already in the library database, the items are
no longer duplicated—instead, the library is updated to reflect the new
metadata. This way, the import command can be transparently used as a
re-import.
- Relatedly, the -L flag to the “import” command makes it take a query as
its argument instead of a list of directories. The matched albums (or items,
depending on the -s flag) are then re-imported.
- A new flag -i to the import command runs incremental imports, keeping
track of and skipping previously-imported directories. This has the effect of
making repeated import commands pick up only newly-added directories. The
import_incremental config option makes this the default.
- When pruning directories, “clutter” files such as .DS_Store and
Thumbs.db are ignored (and removed with otherwise-empty directories).
- The Web Plugin encapsulates a simple Web-based GUI for beets. The
current iteration can browse the library and play music in browsers that
support HTML5 Audio.
- When moving items that are part of an album, the album art implicitly moves
too.
- Files are no longer silently overwritten when moving and copying files.
- Handle exceptions thrown when running Mutagen.
- Fix a missing __future__ import in embed art on Python 2.5.
- Fix ID3 and MPEG-4 tag names for the album-artist field.
- Fix Unicode encoding of album artist, album type, and label.
- Fix crash when “copying” an art file that’s already in place.
1.0b9 (July 9, 2011)
This release focuses on a large number of small fixes and improvements that turn
beets into a well-oiled, music-devouring machine. See the full release notes,
below, for a plethora of new features.
- Queries can now contain whitespace. Spaces passed as shell arguments are
now preserved, so you can use your shell’s escaping syntax (quotes or
backslashes, for instance) to include spaces in queries. For example,
typing``beet ls “the knife”`` or beet ls the\ knife. Read more in
Queries.
- Queries can match items from the library by directory. A path: prefix
is optional; any query containing a path separator (/ on POSIX systems) is
assumed to be a path query. Running beet ls path/to/music will show all
the music in your library under the specified directory. The
Queries reference again has more details.
- Local album art is now automatically discovered and copied from the
imported directories when available.
- When choosing the “as-is” import album (or doing a non-autotagged import),
every album either has an “album artist” set or is marked as a compilation
(Various Artists). The choice is made based on the homogeneity of the
tracks’ artists. This prevents compilations that are imported as-is from being
scattered across many directories after they are imported.
- The release label for albums and tracks is now fetched from !MusicBrainz,
written to files, and stored in the database.
- The “list” command now accepts a -p switch that causes it to show
paths instead of titles. This makes the output of beet ls -p suitable
for piping into another command such as xargs.
- Release year and label are now shown in the candidate selection list to help
disambiguate different releases of the same album.
- Prompts in the importer interface are now colorized for easy reading. The
default option is always highlighted.
- The importer now provides the option to specify a MusicBrainz ID manually if
the built-in searching isn’t working for a particular album or track.
- $bitrate in path formats is now formatted as a human-readable kbps value
instead of as a raw integer.
- The import logger has been improved for “always-on” use. First, it is now
possible to specify a log file in .beetsconfig. Also, logs are now appended
rather than overwritten and contain timestamps.
- Album art fetching and plugin events are each now run in separate pipeline
stages during imports. This should bring additional performance when using
album art plugins like embedart or beets-lyrics.
- Accents and other Unicode decorators on characters are now treated more fairly
by the autotagger. For example, if you’re missing the acute accent on the “e”
in “café”, that change won’t be penalized. This introduces a new dependency
on the unidecode Python module.
- When tagging a track with no title set, the track’s filename is now shown
(instead of nothing at all).
- The bitrate of lossless files is now calculated from their file size (rather
than being fixed at 0 or reflecting the uncompressed audio bitrate).
- Fixed a problem where duplicate albums or items imported at the same time
would fail to be detected.
- BPD now uses a persistent “virtual filesystem” in order to fake a directory
structure. This means that your path format settings are respected in BPD’s
browsing hierarchy. This may come at a performance cost, however. The virtual
filesystem used by BPD is available for reuse by plugins (e.g., the FUSE
plugin).
- Singleton imports (beet import -s) can now take individual files as
arguments as well as directories.
- Fix Unicode queries given on the command line.
- Fix crasher in quiet singleton imports (import -qs).
- Fix crash when autotagging files with no metadata.
- Fix a rare deadlock when finishing the import pipeline.
- Fix an issue that was causing mpdupdate to run twice for every album.
- Fix a bug that caused release dates/years not to be fetched.
- Fix a crasher when setting MBIDs on MP3s file metadata.
- Fix a “broken pipe” error when piping beets’ standard output.
- A better error message is given when the database file is unopenable.
- Suppress errors due to timeouts and bad responses from MusicBrainz.
- Fix a crash on album queries with item-only field names.
1.0b8 (April 28, 2011)
This release of beets brings two significant new features. First, beets now has
first-class support for “singleton” tracks. Previously, it was only really meant
to manage whole albums, but many of us have lots of non-album tracks to keep
track of alongside our collections of albums. So now beets makes it easy to tag,
catalog, and manipulate your individual tracks. Second, beets can now
(optionally) embed album art directly into file metadata rather than only
storing it in a “file on the side.” Check out the EmbedArt Plugin for
that functionality.
- Better support for singleton (non-album) tracks. Whereas beets previously
only really supported full albums, now it can also keep track of individual,
off-album songs. The “singleton” path format can be used to customize where
these tracks are stored. To import singleton tracks, provide the -s switch to
the import command or, while doing a normal full-album import, choose the “as
Tracks” (T) option to add singletons to your library. To list only singleton
or only album tracks, use the new singleton: query term: the query
singleton:true matches only singleton tracks; singleton:false matches
only album tracks. The lastid plugin has been extended to support
matching individual items as well.
- The importer/autotagger system has been heavily refactored in this release.
If anything breaks as a result, please get in touch or just file a bug.
- Support for album art embedded in files. A new EmbedArt Plugin
implements this functionality. Enable the plugin to automatically embed
downloaded album art into your music files’ metadata. The plugin also provides
the “embedart” and “extractart” commands for moving image files in and out of
metadata. See the wiki for more details. (Thanks, daenney!)
- The “distance” number, which quantifies how different an album’s current and
proposed metadata are, is now displayed as “similarity” instead. This should
be less noisy and confusing; you’ll now see 99.5% instead of 0.00489323.
- A new “timid mode” in the importer asks the user every time, even when it
makes a match with very high confidence. The -t flag on the command line
and the import_timid config option control this mode. (Thanks to mdecker
on GitHub!)
- The multithreaded importer should now abort (either by selecting aBort or by
typing ^C) much more quickly. Previously, it would try to get a lot of work
done before quitting; now it gives up as soon as it can.
- Added a new plugin event, album_imported, which is called every time an
album is added to the library. (Thanks, Lugoues!)
- A new plugin method, register_listener, is an imperative alternative to
the @listen decorator (Thanks again, Lugoues!)
- In path formats, $albumartist now falls back to $artist (as well as
the other way around).
- The importer now prints “(unknown album)” when no tags are present.
- When autotagging, “and” is considered equal to “&”.
- Fix some crashes when deleting files that don’t exist.
- Fix adding individual tracks in BPD.
- Fix crash when ~/.beetsconfig does not exist.
1.0b7 (April 5, 2011)
Beta 7’s focus is on better support for “various artists” releases. These albums
can be treated differently via the new [paths] config section and the
autotagger is better at handling them. It also includes a number of
oft-requested improvements to the beet command-line tool, including several
new configuration options and the ability to clean up empty directory subtrees.
- “Various artists” releases are handled much more gracefully. The
autotagger now sets the comp flag on albums whenever the album is
identified as a “various artists” release by !MusicBrainz. Also, there is now
a distinction between the “album artist” and the “track artist”, the latter of
which is never “Various Artists” or other such bogus stand-in. (Thanks to
Jonathan for the bulk of the implementation work on this feature!)
- The directory hierarchy can now be customized based on release type. In
particular, the path_format setting in .beetsconfig has been replaced with
a new [paths] section, which allows you to specify different path formats
for normal and “compilation” (various artists) releases as well as for each
album type (see below). The default path formats have been changed to use
$albumartist instead of $artist.
- A new ``albumtype`` field reflects the release type as specified by
MusicBrainz.
- When deleting files, beets now appropriately “prunes” the directory
tree—empty directories are automatically cleaned up. (Thanks to
wlof on GitHub for this!)
- The tagger’s output now always shows the album directory that is currently
being tagged. This should help in situations where files’ current tags are
missing or useless.
- The logging option (-l) to the import command now logs duplicate
albums.
- A new import_resume configuration option can be used to disable the
importer’s resuming feature or force it to resume without asking. This option
may be either yes, no, or ask, with the obvious meanings. The
-p and -P command-line flags override this setting and correspond to
the “yes” and “no” settings.
- Resuming is automatically disabled when the importer is in quiet (-q)
mode. Progress is still saved, however, and the -p flag (above) can be
used to force resuming.
- The BEETSCONFIG environment variable can now be used to specify the
location of the config file that is at ~/.beetsconfig by default.
- A new import_quiet_fallback config option specifies what should
happen in quiet mode when there is no strong recommendation. The options are
skip (the default) and “asis”.
- When importing with the “delete” option and importing files that are already
at their destination, files could be deleted (leaving zero copies afterward).
This is fixed.
- The version command now lists all the loaded plugins.
- A new plugin, called info, just prints out audio file metadata.
- Fix a bug where some files would be erroneously interpreted as MPEG-4 audio.
- Fix permission bits applied to album art files.
- Fix malformed !MusicBrainz queries caused by null characters.
- Fix a bug with old versions of the Monkey’s Audio format.
- Fix a crash on broken symbolic links.
- Retry in more cases when !MusicBrainz servers are slow/overloaded.
- The old “albumify” plugin for upgrading databases was removed.
1.0b6 (January 20, 2011)
This version consists primarily of bug fixes and other small improvements. It’s
in preparation for a more feature-ful release in beta 7. The most important
issue involves correct ordering of autotagged albums.
- Quiet import: a new “-q” command line switch for the import command
suppresses all prompts for input; it pessimistically skips all albums that the
importer is not completely confident about.
- Added support for the WavPack and Musepack formats. Unfortunately, due
to a limitation in the Mutagen library (used by beets for metadata
manipulation), Musepack SV8 is not yet supported. Here’s the upstream bug
in question.
- BPD now uses a pure-Python socket library and no longer requires
eventlet/greenlet (the latter of which is a C extension). For the curious, the
socket library in question is called Bluelet.
- Non-autotagged imports are now resumable (just like autotagged imports).
- Fix a terrible and long-standing bug where track orderings were never applied.
This manifested when the tagger appeared to be applying a reasonable ordering
to the tracks but, later, the database reflects a completely wrong association
of track names to files. The order applied was always just alphabetical by
filename, which is frequently but not always what you want.
- We now use Windows’ “long filename” support. This API is fairly tricky,
though, so some instability may still be present—please file a bug if you
run into pathname weirdness on Windows. Also, filenames on Windows now never
end in spaces.
- Fix crash in lastid when the artist name is not available.
- Fixed a spurious crash when LANG or a related environment variable is set
to an invalid value (such as 'UTF-8' on some installations of Mac OS X).
- Fixed an error when trying to copy a file that is already at its destination.
- When copying read-only files, the importer now tries to make the copy
writable. (Previously, this would just crash the import.)
- Fixed an UnboundLocalError when no matches are found during autotag.
- Fixed a Unicode encoding error when entering special characters into the
“manual search” prompt.
- Added `` beet version`` command that just shows the current release version.
1.0b5 (September 28, 2010)
This version of beets focuses on increasing the accuracy of the autotagger. The
main addition is an included plugin that uses acoustic fingerprinting to match
based on the audio content (rather than existing metadata). Additional
heuristics were also added to the metadata-based tagger as well that should make
it more reliable. This release also greatly expands the capabilities of beets’
plugin API. A host of other little features and fixes
are also rolled into this release.
- The lastid plugin adds Last.fm acoustic fingerprinting
support to the autotagger. Similar to the PUIDs used by !MusicBrainz Picard,
this system allows beets to recognize files that don’t have any metadata at
all. You’ll need to install some dependencies for this plugin to work.
- To support the above, there’s also a new system for extending the autotagger
via plugins. Plugins can currently add components to the track and album
distance functions as well as augment the MusicBrainz search. The new API is
documented at Plugins.
- String comparisons in the autotagger have been augmented to act more
intuitively. Previously, if your album had the title “Something (EP)” and it
was officially called “Something”, then beets would think this was a fairly
significant change. It now checks for and appropriately reweights certain
parts of each string. As another example, the title “The Great Album” is
considered equal to “Great Album, The”.
- New event system for plugins (thanks, Jeff!). Plugins can now get
callbacks from beets when certain events occur in the core. Again, the API is
documented in Plugins.
- The BPD plugin is now disabled by default. This greatly simplifies
installation of the beets core, which is now 100% pure Python. To use BPD,
though, you’ll need to set plugins: bpd in your .beetsconfig.
- The import command can now remove original files when it copies items into
your library. (This might be useful if you’re low on disk space.) Set the
import_delete option in your .beetsconfig to yes.
- Importing without autotagging (beet import -A) now prints out album names
as it imports them to indicate progress.
- The new MPDUpdate Plugin will automatically update your MPD server’s
index whenever your beets library changes.
- Efficiency tweak should reduce the number of !MusicBrainz queries per
autotagged album.
- A new -v command line switch enables debugging output.
- Fixed bug that completely broke non-autotagged imports (import -A).
- Fixed bug that logged the wrong paths when using import -l.
- Fixed autotagging for the creatively-named band !!!.
- Fixed normalization of relative paths.
- Fixed escaping of / characters in paths on Windows.
1.0b4 (August 9, 2010)
This thrilling new release of beets focuses on making the tagger more usable in
a variety of ways. First and foremost, it should now be much faster: the tagger
now uses a multithreaded algorithm by default (although, because the new tagger
is experimental, a single-threaded version is still available via a config
option). Second, the tagger output now uses a little bit of ANSI terminal
coloring to make changes stand out. This way, it should be faster to decide what
to do with a proposed match: the more red you see, the worse the match is.
Finally, the tagger can be safely interrupted (paused) and restarted later at
the same point. Just enter b for aBort at any prompt to stop the tagging
process and save its progress. (The progress-saving also works in the
unthinkable event that beets crashes while tagging.)
Among the under-the-hood changes in 1.0b4 is a major change to the way beets
handles paths (filenames). This should make the whole system more tolerant to
special characters in filenames, but it may break things (especially databases
created with older versions of beets). As always, let me know if you run into
weird problems with this release.
Finally, this release’s setup.py should install a beet.exe startup stub
for Windows users. This should make running beets much easier: just type
beet if you have your PATH environment variable set up correctly. The
Getting Started guide has some tips on installing beets on Windows.
Here’s the detailed list of changes:
- Parallel tagger. The autotagger has been reimplemented to use multiple
threads. This means that it can concurrently read files from disk, talk to the
user, communicate with MusicBrainz, and write data back to disk. Not only does
this make the tagger much faster because independent work may be performed in
parallel, but it makes the tagging process much more pleasant for large
imports. The user can let albums queue up in the background while making a
decision rather than waiting for beets between each question it asks. The
parallel tagger is on by default but a sequential (single- threaded) version
is still available by setting the threaded config value to no (because
the parallel version is still quite experimental).
- Colorized tagger output. The autotagger interface now makes it a little
easier to see what’s going on at a glance by highlighting changes with
terminal colors. This feature is on by default, but you can turn it off by
setting color to no in your .beetsconfig (if, for example, your
terminal doesn’t understand colors and garbles the output).
- Pause and resume imports. The import command now keeps track of its
progress, so if you’re interrupted (beets crashes, you abort the process, an
alien devours your motherboard, etc.), beets will try to resume from the point
where you left off. The next time you run import on the same directory, it
will ask if you want to resume. It accomplishes this by “fast-forwarding”
through the albums in the directory until it encounters the last one it saw.
(This means it might fail if that album can’t be found.) Also, you can now
abort the tagging process by entering b (for aBort) at any of the prompts.
- Overhauled methods for handling fileystem paths to allow filenames that have
badly encoded special characters. These changes are pretty fragile, so please
report any bugs involving UnicodeError or SQLite ProgrammingError
messages in this version.
- The destination paths (the library directory structure) now respect
album-level metadata. This means that if you have an album in which two tracks
have different album-level attributes (like year, for instance), they will
still wind up in the same directory together. (There’s currently not a very
smart method for picking the “correct” album-level metadata, but we’ll fix
that later.)
- Fixed a bug where the CLI would fail completely if the LANG environment
variable was not set.
- Fixed removal of albums (beet remove -a): previously, the album record
would stay around although the items were deleted.
- The setup script now makes a beet.exe startup stub on Windows; Windows
users can now just type beet at the prompt to run beets.
- Fixed an occasional bug where Mutagen would complain that a tag was already
present.
- Fixed a bug with reading invalid integers from ID3 tags.
- The tagger should now be a little more reluctant to reorder tracks that
already have indices.
1.0b3 (July 22, 2010)
This release features two major additions to the autotagger’s functionality:
album art fetching and MusicBrainz ID tags. It also contains some important
under-the-hood improvements: a new plugin architecture is introduced
and the database schema is extended with explicit support for albums.
This release has one major backwards-incompatibility. Because of the new way
beets handles albums in the library, databases created with an old version of
beets might have trouble with operations that deal with albums (like the -a
switch to beet list and beet remove, as well as the file browser for
BPD). To “upgrade” an old database, you can use the included albumify plugin
(see the fourth bullet point below).
- Album art. The tagger now, by default, downloads album art from Amazon
that is referenced in the MusicBrainz database. It places the album art
alongside the audio files in a file called (for example) cover.jpg. The
import_art config option controls this behavior, as do the -r and
-R options to the import command. You can set the name (minus extension)
of the album art file with the art_filename config option. (See
.beetsconfig for more information about how to configure the album
art downloader.)
- Support for MusicBrainz ID tags. The autotagger now keeps track of the
MusicBrainz track, album, and artist IDs it matched for each file. It also
looks for album IDs in new files it’s importing and uses those to look up data
in MusicBrainz. Furthermore, track IDs are used as a component of the tagger’s
distance metric now. (This obviously lays the groundwork for a utility that
can update tags if the MB database changes, but that’s for the future.)
Tangentially, this change required the database code to support a lightweight
form of migrations so that new columns could be added to old databases–this
is a delicate feature, so it would be very wise to make a backup of your
database before upgrading to this version.
- Plugin architecture. Add-on modules can now add new commands to the beets
command-line interface. The bpd and dadd commands were removed from
the beets core and turned into plugins; BPD is loaded by default. To load the
non-default plugins, use the config options plugins (a space-separated
list of plugin names) and pluginpath (a colon-separated list of
directories to search beyond sys.path). Plugins are just Python modules
under the beetsplug namespace package containing subclasses of
beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin. See the beetsplug directory for examples or
Plugins for instructions.
- As a consequence of adding album art, the database was significantly
refactored to keep track of some information at an album (rather than item)
granularity. Databases created with earlier versions of beets should work
fine, but they won’t have any “albums” in them–they’ll just be a bag of
items. This means that commands like beet ls -a and beet rm -a won’t
match anything. To “upgrade” your database, you can use the included
albumify plugin. Running beets albumify with the plugin activated (set
plugins=albumify in your config file) will group all your items into
albums, making beets behave more or less as it did before.
- Fixed some bugs with encoding paths on Windows. Also, : is now replaced
with - in path names (instead of _) for readability.
- MediaFile``s now have a ``format attribute, so you can use $format in
your library path format strings like $artist - $album ($format) to get
directories with names like Paul Simon - Graceland (FLAC).
Beets also now has its first third-party plugin: beetfs, by Martin Eve! It
exposes your music in a FUSE filesystem using a custom directory structure. Even
cooler: it lets you keep your files intact on-disk while correcting their tags
when accessed through FUSE. Check it out!
1.0b2 (July 7, 2010)
This release focuses on high-priority fixes and conspicuously missing features.
Highlights include support for two new audio formats (Monkey’s Audio and Ogg
Vorbis) and an option to log untaggable albums during import.
- Support for Ogg Vorbis and Monkey’s Audio files and their tags. (This
support should be considered preliminary: I haven’t tested it heavily because
I don’t use either of these formats regularly.)
- An option to the beet import command for logging albums that are
untaggable (i.e., are skipped or taken “as-is”). Use beet import -l
LOGFILE PATHS. The log format is very simple: it’s just a status (either
“skip” or “asis”) followed by the path to the album in question. The idea is
that you can tag a large collection and automatically keep track of the albums
that weren’t found in MusicBrainz so you can come back and look at them later.
- Fixed a UnicodeEncodeError on terminals that don’t (or don’t claim to)
support UTF-8.
- Importing without autotagging (beet import -A) is now faster and doesn’t
print out a bunch of whitespace. It also lets you specify single files on the
command line (rather than just directories).
- Fixed importer crash when attempting to read a corrupt file.
- Reorganized code for CLI in preparation for adding pluggable subcommands. Also
removed dependency on the aging cmdln module in favor of a hand-rolled
solution.
1.0b1 (June 17, 2010)
Initial release.