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"BEET" "1" "May 30, 2019" "1.4" "beets"
NAME
beet - music tagger and library organizer
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SYNOPSIS
beet [args…] command [args…] beet help command
COMMANDS
import
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet import [-CWAPRqst] [-l LOGPATH] PATH... beet import [options] -L QUERYNINDENT NINDENT Add music to your library, attempting to get correct tags for it from MusicBrainz. Point the command at some music: directories, single files, or compressed archives. The music will be copied to a configurable directory structure and added to a library database. The command is interactive and will try to get you to verify MusicBrainz tags that it thinks are suspect. See the autotagging guide for detail on how to use the interactive tag-correction flow. Directories passed to the import command can contain either a single album or many, in which case the leaf directories will be considered albums (the latter case is true of typical Artist/Album organizations and many people’s “downloads” folders). The path can also be a single song or an archive. Beets supports zip and tar archives out of the box. To extract rar files, install the \%rarfile package and the unrar command. Optional command flags: NDENT 0.0
\(bu 2
By default, the command copies files your the library directory and
updates the ID3 tags on your music. In order to move the files, instead of
copying, use the -m (move) option. If you’d like to leave your music
files untouched, try the -C (don’t copy) and -W (don’t write tags)
options. You can also disable this behavior by default in the
configuration file (below).
\(bu 2
Also, you can disable the autotagging behavior entirely using -A
(don’t autotag)—then your music will be imported with its existing
metadata.
\(bu 2
During a long tagging import, it can be useful to keep track of albums
that weren’t tagged successfully—either because they’re not in the
MusicBrainz database or because something’s wrong with the files. Use the
-l option to specify a filename to log every time you skip an album
or import it “as-is” or an album gets skipped as a duplicate.
\(bu 2
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
pessimistically skips the album. The quiet mode also disables the tagger’s
ability to resume interrupted imports.
\(bu 2
Speaking of resuming interrupted imports, the tagger will prompt you if it
seems like the last import of the directory was interrupted (by you or by
a crash). If you want to skip this prompt, you can say “yes” automatically
by providing -p or “no” using -P. The resuming feature can be
disabled by default using a configuration option (see below).
\(bu 2
If you want to import only the new stuff from a directory, use the
-i
option to run an incremental import. With this flag, beets will keep
track of every directory it ever imports and avoid importing them again.
This is useful if you have an “incoming” directory that you periodically
add things to.
To get this to work correctly, you’ll need to use an incremental import every
time you run an import on the directory in question—including the first
time, when no subdirectories will be skipped. So consider enabling the
incremental configuration option.
\(bu 2
When beets applies metadata to your music, it will retain the value of any
existing tags that weren’t overwritten, and import them into the database. You
may prefer to only use existing metadata for finding matches, and to erase it
completely when new metadata is applied. You can enforce this behavior with
the --from-scratch option, or the from_scratch configuration option.
\(bu 2
By default, beets will proceed without asking if it finds a very close
metadata match. To disable this and have the importer ask you every time,
use the -t (for timid) option.
\(bu 2
The importer typically works in a whole-album-at-a-time mode. If you
instead want to import individual, non-album tracks, use the singleton
mode by supplying the -s option.
\(bu 2
If you have an album that’s split across several directories under a common
top directory, use the --flat option. This takes all the music files
under the directory (recursively) and treats them as a single large album
instead of as one album per directory. This can help with your more stubborn
multi-disc albums.
\(bu 2
Similarly, if you have one directory that contains multiple albums, use the
--group-albums option to split the files based on their metadata before
matching them as separate albums.
\(bu 2
If you want to preview which files would be imported, use the --pretend
option. If set, beets will just print a list of files that it would
otherwise import.
\(bu 2
If you already have a metadata backend ID that matches the items to be
imported, you can instruct beets to restrict the search to that ID instead of
searching for other candidates by using the --search-id SEARCH_ID option.
Multiple IDs can be specified by simply repeating the option several times.
\(bu 2
You can supply --set field=value to assign field to value on import.
These assignments will merge with (and possibly override) the
set_fields configuration dictionary. You can use the option multiple
times on the command line, like so:
NDENT 2.0 NDENT 3.5 beet import --set genre="Alternative Rock" --set mood="emotional"NINDENT NINDENT NINDENT
list
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet list [-apf] QUERYNINDENT NINDENT Queries the database for music. Want to search for “Gronlandic Edit” by of Montreal? Try beet list gronlandic. Maybe you want to see everything released in 2009 with “vegetables” in the title? Try beet list year:2009 title:vegetables. You can also specify the sort order. (Read more in query.) You can use the -a switch to search for albums instead of individual items. In this case, the queries you use are restricted to album-level fields: for example, you can search for year:1969 but query parts for item-level fields like title:foo will be ignored. Remember that artist is an item-level field; albumartist is the corresponding album field. The -p option makes beets print out filenames of matched items, which might be useful for piping into other Unix commands (such as \%xargs). Similarly, the -f option lets you specify a specific format with which to print every album or track. This uses the same template syntax as beets’ path formats. For example, the command beet ls -af \(aq$album: $tracktotal\(aq beatles prints out the number of tracks on each Beatles album. In Unix shells, remember to enclose the template argument in single quotes to avoid environment variable expansion.
remove
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet remove [-adf] QUERYNINDENT NINDENT Remove music from your library. This command uses the same query syntax as the list command. You’ll be shown a list of the files that will be removed and asked to confirm. By default, this just removes entries from the library database; it doesn’t touch the files on disk. To actually delete the files, use beet remove -d. If you do not want to be prompted to remove the files, use beet remove -f.
modify
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet modify [-MWay] [-f FORMAT] QUERY [FIELD=VALUE...] [FIELD!...]NINDENT NINDENT Change the metadata for items or albums in the database. Supply a query matching the things you want to change and a series of field=value pairs. For example, beet modify genius of love artist="Tom Tom Club" will change the artist for the track “Genius of Love.” To remove fields (which is only possible for flexible attributes), follow a field name with an exclamation point: field!. The -a switch operates on albums instead of individual tracks. Without this flag, the command will only change track-level data, even if all the tracks belong to the same album. If you want to change an album-level field, such as year or albumartist, you’ll want to use the -a flag to avoid a confusing situation where the data for individual tracks conflicts with the data for the whole album. Items will automatically be moved around when necessary if they’re in your library directory, but you can disable that with -M. Tags will be written to the files according to the settings you have for imports, but these can be overridden with -w (write tags, the default) and -W (don’t write tags). When you run the modify command, it prints a list of all affected items in the library and asks for your permission before making any changes. You can then choose to abort the change (type n), confirm (y), or interactively choose some of the items (s). In the latter case, the command will prompt you for every matching item or album and invite you to type y to apply the changes, n to discard them or q to exit and apply the selected changes. This option lets you choose precisely which data to change without spending too much time to carefully craft a query. To skip the prompts entirely, use the -y option.
move
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet move [-capt] [-d DIR] QUERYNINDENT NINDENT Move or copy items in your library. This command, by default, acts as a library consolidator: items matching the query are renamed into your library directory structure. By specifying a destination directory with -d manually, you can move items matching a query anywhere in your filesystem. The -c option copies files instead of moving them. As with other commands, the -a option matches albums instead of items. The -e flag (for “export”) copies files without changing the database. To perform a “dry run”, just use the -p (for “pretend”) flag. This will show you a list of files that would be moved but won’t actually change anything on disk. The -t option sets the timid mode which will ask again before really moving or copying the files.
update
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet update [-F] FIELD [-aM] QUERYNINDENT NINDENT Update the library (and, optionally, move files) to reflect out-of-band metadata changes and file deletions. This will scan all the matched files and read their tags, populating the database with the new values. By default, files will be renamed according to their new metadata; disable this with -M. Beets will skip files if their modification times have not changed, so any out-of-band metadata changes must also update these for beet update to recognise that the files have been edited. To perform a “dry run” of an update, just use the -p (for “pretend”) flag. This will show you all the proposed changes but won’t actually change anything on disk. By default, all the changed metadata will be populated back to the database. If you only want certain fields to be written, specify them with the \(ga-F\(ga flags (which can be used multiple times). For the list of supported fields, please see \(gabeet fields\(ga. When an updated track is part of an album, the album-level fields of all tracks from the album are also updated. (Specifically, the command copies album-level data from the first track on the album and applies it to the rest of the tracks.) This means that, if album-level fields aren’t identical within an album, some changes shown by the update command may be overridden by data from other tracks on the same album. This means that running the update command multiple times may show the same changes being applied.
write
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet write [-pf] [QUERY]NINDENT NINDENT Write metadata from the database into files’ tags. When you make changes to the metadata stored in beets’ library database (during import or with the \%modify command, for example), you often have the option of storing changes only in the database, leaving your files untouched. The write command lets you later change your mind and write the contents of the database into the files. By default, this writes the changes only if there is a difference between the database and the tags in the file. You can think of this command as the opposite of \%update. The -p option previews metadata changes without actually applying them. The -f option forces a write to the file, even if the file tags match the database. This is useful for making sure that enabled plugins that run on write (e.g., the Scrub and Zero plugins) are run on the file.
stats
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet stats [-e] [QUERY]NINDENT NINDENT Show some statistics on your entire library (if you don’t provide a query) or the matched items (if you do). By default, the command calculates file sizes using their bitrate and duration. The -e (--exact) option reads the exact sizes of each file (but is slower). The exact mode also outputs the exact duration in seconds.
fields
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet fieldsNINDENT NINDENT Show the item and album metadata fields available for use in query and pathformat. The listing includes any template fields provided by plugins and any flexible attributes you’ve manually assigned to your items and albums.
config
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 beet config [-pdc] beet config -eNINDENT NINDENT Show or edit the user configuration. This command does one of three things: NDENT 0.0
\(bu 2
With no options, print a YAML representation of the current user
configuration. With the --default option, beets’ default options are
also included in the dump.
\(bu 2
The --path option instead shows the path to your configuration file.
This can be combined with the --default flag to show where beets keeps
its internal defaults.
\(bu 2
By default, sensitive information like passwords is removed when dumping the
configuration. The --clear option includes this sensitive data.
\(bu 2
With the --edit option, beets attempts to open your config file for
editing. It first tries the $EDITOR environment variable and then a
fallback option depending on your platform: open on OS X, xdg-open
on Unix, and direct invocation on Windows.
NINDENT GLOBAL FLAGS
Beets has a few “global” flags that affect all commands. These must appear
between the executable name (beet) and the command—for example, beet -v
import ....
NDENT 0.0 \(bu 2
-l LIBPATH: specify the library database file to use.
\(bu 2
-d DIRECTORY: specify the library root directory.
\(bu 2
-v: verbose mode; prints out a deluge of debugging information. Please use
this flag when reporting bugs. You can use it twice, as in -vv, to make
beets even more verbose.
\(bu 2
-c FILE: read a specified YAML configuration file. This
configuration works as an overlay: rather than replacing your normal
configuration options entirely, the two are merged. Any individual options set
in this config file will override the corresponding settings in your base
configuration.
NINDENT Beets also uses the BEETSDIR environment variable to look for
configuration and data.
SHELL COMPLETION
Beets includes support for shell command completion. The command beet
completion prints out a \%bash 3.2 script; to enable completion put a line
like this into your .bashrc or similar file:
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 eval "$(beet completion)"NINDENT NINDENT Or, to avoid slowing down your shell startup time, you can pipe the beet completion output to a file and source that instead. You will also need to source the \%bash-completion script, which is probably available via your package manager. On OS X, you can install it via Homebrew with brew install bash-completion; Homebrew will give you instructions for sourcing the script. The completion script suggests names of subcommands and (after typing -) options of the given command. If you are using a command that accepts a query, the script will also complete field names. NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5
beet list ar[TAB] # artist: artist_credit: artist_sort: artpath: beet list artp[TAB] beet list artpath\e:NINDENT NINDENT (Don’t worry about the slash in front of the colon: this is a escape sequence for the shell and won’t be seen by beets.) Completion of plugin commands only works for those plugins that were enabled when running beet completion. If you add a plugin later on you will want to re-generate the script.
zsh
If you use zsh, take a look at the included \%completion script. The script
should be placed in a directory that is part of your fpath, and not
sourced in your .zshrc. Running echo $fpath will give you a list of
valid directories.
Another approach is to use zsh’s bash completion compatibility. This snippet
defines some bash-specific functions to make this work without errors:
NDENT 0.0 NDENT 3.5 autoload bashcompinit bashcompinit _get_comp_words_by_ref() { :; } compopt() { :; } _filedir() { :; } eval "$(beet completion)"NINDENT NINDENT
SEE ALSO
http://beets.readthedocs.org/
beetsconfig(5)
AUTHOR
Adrian Sampson
COPYRIGHT
2016, Adrian Sampson
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