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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I use the astoundingly flexible "beets" to manage my music library: https://beets.io

Highly recommended for anyone who always has a terminal window open. It pulls data from MusicBrainz by default, but can also be configured for other sources, such as Discogs.

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Was gonna post the same recommendation! I've been lucky to add a couple of contributions to the lyrics plugin. The project is maintained by a lovely CS professor who really puts in a lot of time and effort. I've been using it for a couple of years now and it fits perfectly in my music pipeline. Great project!

Same. Don't know what I'd do without beets, can't imagine using Picard.

The rich set of plugins are equally amazing. For instance, I use the Playlist plugin, and whenever I update any metadata on a music file that results in a file name change (thus changing the song path), it'll scan my MPD (a completely separate program) created playlists (.m3u) and update the paths for the effected songs. Just one of the many things it automates for me, besides metadata.

Although not the fault of Beets, I wish there was a decent source for Japanese albums. Between metabrainz and discogs, it only gets me 70-80% of the way there. The new Deezer plugin helps with digital only releases but it's not as accurate. Unfortunately I don't have the time to contribute to metabrainz, as that 20% missing is quite large in the context of my library.

It's also pretty easy to make your own plugins, although the API documentation isn't the greatest. I for example wanted to add all new music to my MPD queue, so I wrote a Beets plugin to do that automatically for me: https://github.com/Hamuko/beets-mpdqueue

That's a pretty nice plugin. I don't know if you're using it with the latest version of beets, but I'll give it a go, and hopefully it'll work. If not I'll try to get it working and send a patch if I do.

At the moment I use smart playlists and generate an "added today" playlist with all the songs imported to beets today, and add that playlist to my queue, appending it to the end of the queue.

  beets version 1.5.0
  Python version 3.9.9

…is what my beets --version says.

I use Picard first to do the initial cleanup of the metadata where I can look it over, then beets to copy it to my music directory and extract the album art to cover.jpg. :) It works for me! Love them both.

I haven't used it, and I don't add new music to my collection in such bulk that I need a special tool for tagging. The thing that used to boil my blood about MusicBrainz and Discogs was album dates. I couldn't give a shit if this damn release was a 1998 remaster, what I care about is that the album was recorded in 1968, and therefore it is music of the 60s. Do not add it into my smart playlist of highly rated music from the 90s!

Anyway, after automatically trashing the dates on a whole load of albums a while back I stopped using all of those tools.

MusicBrainz, and beets, has separate date fields for both those things. "original_year" is the year of the original release, and "year" is the year of the release of your version of the album.

I have my beets configured to include original_year at the beginning of the album folder name, and then the release year in parenthesis at the end, but only if it is different.

Same. I import with beets and then serve it up via Mopidy-MPD with the Iris plugin for UI and snapcast for sending it around to different devices in the house. Super nice.

Love beets, used it now for a few years with foobar2000/cmus as my media player. A few tasks I've found somewhat irky (most recently handling the Blue / Green / Red / White / Teal / Black albums by Wheezer which are all officially just named 'Wheezer'), but otherwise very easy and accurate tagging interface.

I also just rsync my music library to an external SSD so that it's backed up, and up-to-date when I'm travelling.

For multiple identically-named albums you probably want to use the "aunique" template function.

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/pathformat....

Yeah I found out about the solution via that exact part of the docs, I'm just saying it seemed like a bug when I first came across it - and some users might not realize the default behaviour (for example, if you're importing a large preexisting collection you might not miss a few albums being deleted).

It's also possible to add beatport as a tag source, which is incredibly useful for more electronic collections since musicbrainz is always lacking in that niche.

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