« Kevin Ngo

Beets - CLI Media Library Management for OCD Geeks

20 Dec 2011

Ever since my very first iPod back in high school, I had been glued to heavy media library manangement systems such as iTunes or Banshee. They let me import music to a consolidated library folder, edit ID3 tags and update the file, and fetch album art. However, managing it through a GUI very quickly became tedious.

My bot that fetched music from /r/listentothis was grabbing anywhere from 20 to 30 songs a day on a cron. Since they were being fetched from YouTube via youtube-dl, the songs were untagged. After a while, the songs build up, and I get hundreds or even thousands of songs that are left sitting in my library untagged. I only wanted to tag songs that I liked which entailed sifting through them. Ideally, I would want to be able to listen to my music library from anywhere (e.g. work) and slowly tag or delete songs remotely.

Depending on managing my music on my desktop with Banshee was difficult:

I depended too much on Banshee, and needed a command-line alternative. Then it happened. I visited a wise elder during my travels along the roads of the Internet, and he showed me the ancient ways of manging my music from afar. Behold, beets, “the media library management system for obsessive-compulsive music geeks. The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. (It also downloads cover art for albums it imports.) Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.”

Setup

You can install beets through pip

sudo pip install beets

Create a beets config file in your home directory

vim ~/.beetsconfig

This contains all the configurations you will need for deciding how you want your library to be managed. Here is mine:

[beets]
directory: ~/Music
library: ~/Music/musiclibrary.blb
import_copy: yes
import_write: yes
import_resume: yes
import_art: yes
import_log: ~/.beets.log
colors: yes
plugins: bpd lastid

[paths]
default: $albumartist/$albumartist - $title
compilation: $albumartist/$albumartist - $title

[bpd]
host: 127.0.0.1
port: 8080
password: a

This is just a basic configuration file, and the beets site has pretty good documentation on setting it up. Note that there is a difference between your music directory and your music database/library. Throwing a file into the directory does not throw it into your music database/library. You must import files (more on that later) for it to actually be registered in the blob file. Otherwise, it won’t show up in queries and such.

import_copy means to physically copy imported media into the library directory (it is enabled by default). The BPD plugin allows playing the media and the lastid allows tagging via acoustic fingerprinting which means it actually analyzes songs themeselves to try to determine correct metadata (more on the autotagger later).

Importing Library

You can import your library with your library’s existing metadata, or try out the autotagger. The autotagger pits the current metadata (or even uses acoustic fingerprinting if the plugin is enabled) against an online music database to try to determine canonical metadata. Using the autotagger is a long, tedious, and interactive process that will make you quite acquainted with your library.

To import using existing tags, use the -A option. This is the option I used, and worked very well. Consider setting import-write to no for the initial import since there is no need to re-copy the files onto themselves.

$ beet import -A /my/huge/mp3/library

To import using the autotagger, simply use import.

$ beet import /path/to/my/music

You can interrupt an import process and resume it later. If you want to cancel a session, just throw the -P option. If you get a weird database lock, just try again. It was most likely due to threads colliding.

Importing Songs

If you grab more songs, the process is similar. You can run import and it will copy it into your music directory if import-write is enabled. What’s nice is it will try to fetch album art for you.

$ beet import ~/some_great_album

If you want to copy from a folder that contains already-imported music, you can import incrementally with the -i option to only import new songs.

beet import -i


Querying Music

You can run queries on your database. You can run flat queries or field-specific queries. Beets has special syntax for queries (field:value for querying, field=value for setting).

$ beet ls the magnetic fields
$ beet list artist:dream

You can also get overall library statistics.

$ beet stats


Modifying Tags

You can again use queries to modify metadata.

beet modify [-MWay] QUERY FIELD=VALUE

This will change the field to value for every song that matches the query.

If you change metadata of songs using another method or delete songs without deleting it from the database, you can update the database to reflect these changes with update.

beet update

-a lot more where that came from- Official Documentation: http://readthedocs.org/docs/beets/en/1.0b11/index.html

Subsonic

A very nice complement to a library management system is a streaming player via web frontend. I used to use GNUmp3d which allowed me to stream music and video, but Subsonic, a free web-based media streamer has many really cool features including editing tags, multiple users that can see what each other is listening to, permissions for different users, and ability to download and upload music all via the frontend. I am currently hosting on on my webserver.

With the one-two punch of Beets and Subsonic, managing music has never been easier.