[HN Gopher] Beets: The music geek's media organizer
___________________________________________________________________
Beets: The music geek's media organizer
Author : hyperific
Score : 235 points
Date : 2025-11-10 06:29 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (beets.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (beets.io)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Been using this for several years now. It's definitely not for
| the average user. But nothing is quite so flexible.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Well yes, it's not that hard to use but then even using the
| terminal for an average user is complicated.
|
| There is a webpage on beets website where they list all the
| functions and explain what it does. Very useful when you go
| back after half a year and can't remember how it works.
| sumnole wrote:
| The average user likely just streams from Spotify. The users
| collecting mp3s are probably more tolerant to the learning
| curve.
| aleks5678 wrote:
| Thanks. I was looking for something like this.
| adg33 wrote:
| I love beets - the one thing I can't figure out is how to set the
| genre very wide.
|
| I like having a small number of broad genres - Rock, Hip-Hop,
| Jazz etc - but the tagging comes up with hundreds of distinct
| genres :(
| globular-toast wrote:
| I have this problem too. I find it completely useless to have
| tags like genre=Post Rock Jazz Fusion" or whatever with
| basically one band in each genre.
|
| The other thing I've never quite got right is how to deal with
| classical music and popular music with multiple pressings. A
| lot of the tagging structure seems oriented around popular
| music with just one pressing. But I have like 10 different
| recordings of _The Planets_ and several versions of Red Hot
| Chili Pepper 's _Californication_ , for example.
| jank199x wrote:
| 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...
| adg33 wrote:
| 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!
| jank199x wrote:
| There's a whitelist option. Just read the docs, really,
| lastgenre is very configurable.
| HyprMusic wrote:
| Set whitelist to a file path and then add a file with each
| genre that you want to keep on a new line. You can use the
| top-level genres in this file to base it off (except the
| whitelist isn't YAML, just a genre per line): https://raw.g
| ithubusercontent.com/beetbox/beets/master/beets...
|
| Be sure to enable canonical so it converts the specific
| genres into their parent genre.
| gmg94 wrote:
| I use lastgenre plugin with a short whitelist.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I recently looked into beets, but it seems it's focused on
| automation, is that correct? I often buy stuff that has just been
| released, and that's not yet in any database, so no automation
| works.
|
| My current workflow is download, unzip and manually tag (mainly
| genres, sometimes badly named artists/albums) with MusicBee
| (which gives me autocomplete for genres so I can reuse existing
| ones), and then copy the files to the server for Navidrome to
| pick them up.
|
| Throwing this out here to see if beets would actually work well
| with what I want after all.
| Hamuko wrote:
| If you add a lot of new stuff to your library, you'll often
| need to add them to MusicBrainz yourself. I use beets and I
| currently have added 2697 releases (2543 release groups) to
| MusicBrainz.
| tuukkao wrote:
| Beets is what got me into MusicBrainz. It's an incredible
| resource. To be fair it's not the easiest of things to get
| started with and the usability could be better (release
| drafts, anyone?) but it's efficient once you get the hang of
| it.
| non-nil wrote:
| First: Thank you! Secondly: I wish more people did this. If
| you end up needing to manually enter the data, at least if
| you add it to a public database more people can benefit,
| which also makes it feel less frustrating.
|
| I'm in the midst of a major music library overhaul and would
| not know how I'd ever get it done without Beets. For example,
| it's clearing out embedded images, fetching new hi-res
| artwork and verifying FLAC integrity, as I go through artist
| by artist.
| Semaphor wrote:
| If you are into that, that's good, but that's the exact
| opposite of making my life easier ;)
| majkinetor wrote:
| Looks like a general case. I do the same a lot with Picard and
| Foobar, but beats can also auto tag based on file name and
| populate musicbrainz. Set library directory to that of
| navidrome so it will be coppied there on import.
| skydhash wrote:
| You can use the current tags in the media files and not use any
| metadata database. I have a simple scheme for organizing my
| collection, and can correct my metadata rather quickly, but
| these days, so I don't even use beets.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I use MusicBee for everything too and sounds like my workflow
| is the same as yours. I basically take whatever is tagged on
| the file straight out of Bandcamp and then manually follow
| Discogs-like rules for normalization of the artist name so the
| directory structure works out, plus adding iTunes compilation
| metadata to deal with the "various artists" issue, adding BPM,
| customizing genre and comments etc.
|
| I think I started all this fussiness exactly because back in
| the old days when you synced to CDDB, you'd get somebody else's
| useless record label classification for a reissue or
| international release that obscured the original label, which
| in certain genres of music is quite important to be able to
| better categorize the music for auto playlists. Original year
| is also critical for auto playlists where you're looking for
| tunes around a certain era. I also have a vague memory of old
| CDJs or Serato or some damn thing not displaying the name I
| wanted so having to shuffle stuff around to Composer or Album
| Artist or something to make it work, and now here I am with
| custom-tagged all the things.
|
| My problem is I was considering replacing all my 320k MP3s with
| FLACs, which I have for all my Bandcamp purchases and most of
| my CD rips (although not from Beatport and other online
| stores)... but I realized it was going to be absolute hell to
| try and match the untagged files that I downloaded and put
| straight into cloud storage with the tagged files I already
| have in the library. It would need some kind of heuristics to
| fuzzy match the files with what's already there, then retag
| them with my preferred tags from the MP3, then move the file
| into the same location the MP3 is, then move the MusicBee
| proprietary metadata (play count, add date etc) across, then
| delete the MP3. I keep thinking there has to be a program or a
| plugin for this, but seems like not, so for now I've just given
| up and decided that 320k is good enough, actually, which makes
| me wonder why I'm keeping all these FLACs around in the first
| place. Not like I'm starting the Library of Alexandria here, I
| just like music.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > actually, which makes me wonder why I'm keeping all these
| FLACs around
|
| Sometime last year, I actually redownloaded all my BC files,
| and reripped all my CDs (had to re-do genres, but that was
| fine, I wanted cleaner genres anyway). It's simply archival.
| Lossless means you can convert it to whatever file you might
| want in the future without loss of quality.
|
| This made extra sense for my CD rips, because many of those
| were from the early 2000s and I made questionable quality
| descisions ;)
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I'm wondering about diminishing returns, because up until
| switching to FLAC about 10 years ago I ripped all my CDs to
| 320k and thus only have about 20 files in my "low bitrate"
| auto playlist that are weird indie or bootleg things that I
| couldn't bring myself to delete for nostalgia reasons. Is
| FLAC really all that much better? Can anybody hear the
| difference? I don't want to spend months awkwardly moving
| thousands of files around just because it's more useful to
| a hypothetical future archaeologist version of myself with
| hearing that got better with age instead of worse...
|
| That said, I wouldn't mind going back and retagging my
| genres in particular because one of the annoying things is
| that over the years my perception of the genre of certain
| tracks has changed, so it might be easiest to just roll
| back to ID3v1 "we got both kinds: house and techno" genres
| for the broad category and then cram subgenre keywords into
| the comment field instead... but it's been so long since I
| used CDJs that maybe all these hacks to maintain
| compatibility with different players are moot now. I saw
| that the latest and greatest DJ equipment just hooks up
| direct to online streaming services so I wouldn't be
| surprised if it also had a feature to sync everything to
| MusicBrainz as soon as you plug in a USB, which makes all
| the fussing around with legacy tags kind of pointless for a
| casual who mostly just listens or mixes at home.
| Semaphor wrote:
| 320 vs FLAC: unless you are both a mutant and audiophile
| with the right equipment, you won't hear any difference
| at all. It's purely for archival purposes for me, that I
| have the "originals" or as close as possible.
|
| Legacy tags: luckily not an issue for me, I only care
| about multiple (usually metal) subgenres and that my
| players show/filter them.
| boobsbr wrote:
| Whatever happened to MusicBrainz Picard?
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| Nothing - it's still getting regular updates.
| pooyamo wrote:
| > MusicBrainz Picard
|
| I don't think it can be used as a CLI tool. It's mainly a GUI
| app. I've tested it in the past and it works fine too.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| I spent a couple of nights working out how to configure beets to
| my liking and have loved it ever since. My "workflow" is now:
|
| - buy album on Bandcamp
|
| - download zip
|
| - beet import {zip file name}
|
| And beets extracts the zip, matches the album to musicbrainz,
| updates any metadata, and drops the files into the directory
| structure that I like (naming the files how I like them, too).
|
| Very rarely an album will need some more attention, in which case
| I use Picard to fix it before using beets to import it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Isn't beets going to just overwrite whatever you did in Picard?
| siddboots wrote:
| Well, one might use picard to find a musicbrainz release id,
| so that beetz has something to grab on to when importing.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I mean, you can just do that in the browser too. "Enter ID"
| allows you to enter the MusicBrainz UUID (or just full
| URL). You can even do in the command itself.
| beet import "Iron Maiden.zip" -S
| 4500ad36-5f92-4e4c-bb24-3a9a57faf550
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| No, you can tell it to use the metadata as-is.
|
| Sometimes there's just weirdness though - for example
| recently I bought an album and the band included all the
| tracks from their previous album as bonus tracks. So I used
| Picard to split them into the 2 "proper" albums.
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| A very similar workflow on my end, both beets as the main
| tagger/organizer and Picard to pick up whatever can't be
| processed through beets. Beets is amazing!
| tuukkao wrote:
| If you're using Navidrome or similar to stream your music then
| check out beets-alternatives [0]. It lets you sync (and
| optionally convert) your library or a subset of it to another
| location, in my case my music storage mounted with Rclone. It's
| especially useful if you need to have a different naming
| structure in your target directory for whatever reason. I like to
| keep each disc of a multi-disc album in in its own subdirectory
| but most streaming servers seem to prefer all tracks of an album
| to be in the same directory. With Beets-alternatives I can have a
| different naming structure for each collection vs. having to
| rename my primary collection to suit whatever streaming server I
| happen to be using.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/geigerzaehler/beets-alternatives
| Okawari wrote:
| One of my favorite beets projects is beets-flask.
|
| It lets you set up fully or partially automated import
| pipelines with a nice web UI to manage any manual steps needed.
|
| Importing is usually as simple as dropping a zip in a folder
| and the rest is managed automatically.
|
| https://github.com/pSpitzner/beets-flask
| HyprMusic wrote:
| I've tried many times to find a nice UI for beets and somehow
| never come across this. It is _exactly_ what I 've been
| searching for all these years... Thanks for sharing!
| jimbo999 wrote:
| Been using with Claude via MCP to tag a bunch of old ripped CDs -
| fun with mixed results.
| fragmede wrote:
| is Claude "listening" to the music in order to tag it?
| pooyamo wrote:
| It's a good tool. However, last I checked, it was not possible to
| run it in a one-shot stateless fashion, like, passing it a list
| of music files so it auto-fetches album art, lyrics and updates
| the very same input files.
| squigz wrote:
| > 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 performs a fallback action that can be
| configured using the quiet_fallback configuration or --quiet-
| fallback CLI option. By default it pessimistically skips the
| file. Alternatively, it can be used as is, by configuring asis.
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| Beets with this flag works relatively well for me when
| wrapped in a shell script, but I have spent a lot of effort
| trying to make it actually non-interactive.
|
| I'm still not totally sure I got all the certainty thresholds
| right, I still sometimes get unexpected behavior when using
| Beets this way, so I agree that the non-interactive
| experience is lacking.
| mrmekon wrote:
| 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. While it's possible to stray from that, it takes tons of
| time and experimentation to cram some things into its model.
|
| Purchased, popular albums are a breeze; they import nicely and
| make sense. I struggled differing amounts with:
|
| * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)
|
| * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
|
| * non-commercial albums (self-released CDRs)
|
| * fan-recorded concerts
|
| * fan-recorded festivals (a special case, a true nightmare)
|
| * fan edits/remixes of commercial releases
|
| * playlists & mix tapes
|
| * mixed media releases
|
| Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to
| figure out how to import a specific folder. Worse, after doing
| one festival it didn't necessarily make it easier to do the next
| festival. Even if I get to 100% imported, additional imports will
| still take thought.
|
| This isn't an argument against it, I still think it's a fantastic
| tool. Just understand that the farther you stray from collecting
| commercial releases, the more of a struggle it is.
| horrorente wrote:
| There is a Bandcamp auto-tagging plugin for beets which should
| at least help with the first point:
| https://github.com/snejus/beetcamp
| squigz wrote:
| Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz
| just gets imported as-is, with maybe some metadata
| additions/tweaks.
|
| > * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)
|
| > * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
|
| This is a great opportunity to fill in those blanks for those
| services :) I didn't have much to contribute to MB but did have
| a few albums to add.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Fan recordings /edits/anything that shouldn't be on
| Musicbrainz_
|
| Those should be on MusicBrainz. There's even a bootleg
| release type for fan recordings/illegal copies, and official
| style guides for live bootlegs.
|
| https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases.
| ..
| yawnr wrote:
| Can I ask what you choose to manage your library with today? I
| feel like streaming has made me stray so far from the joy (and
| pain) of library curation, and I'd really like to get back to
| it, I just don't know what folks are using these days.
| jmathai wrote:
| I have all of my mp3s on a NAS and point plex at it to index.
| I've also set it up as a source for Sonos (which I'm growing
| less fond of as each day passes).
|
| I guess my point is that I like having a directory of music
| (organized by artist/album) and make the discovery
| applications I use do the work of finding and playing the
| music I want.
| mrzool wrote:
| > * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp)
|
| > * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs
|
| I fixed those two by adding the missing releases to the
| database beets uses as its data source (musicbrainz.org), and
| importing the album in Beets afterwards. I still get
| notifications for edits to entries I contributed over a decade
| ago!
| Ntrails wrote:
| > 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?
| snthd wrote:
| Musicbrainz can do events
|
| https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=glastonbury&type=event&.
| ..
| criddell wrote:
| I've always struggled to get my classical CDs tagged in a way
| that makes sense to me. Apple has figured it out in their
| classical music app and I should probably see if I can copy
| what they did in my personal library.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Maybe worth looking at Roon for that? It's not free but they
| handle classical music very well.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Everyone else is telling you to go update musicbrainz, and
| that's a sensible course of action for the first two bullets,
| but the much easier path is to import all these files with
| whatever metadata they have.
|
| There is no canonical metadata for a fan recording of a concert
| or DIY CD-R, so you lose out on nothing by importing the files
| as they are today.
|
| Once you're over the hump of the first import, beets is a
| fabulous tool for ingesting new music. It's well worth it.
| tasuki wrote:
| > Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to
| figure out how to import a specific folder.
|
| Thanks for saving me time, I guess? I just maintain very
| spartan id3 tags on my music, artist, album, song name, track
| id, and that's about it.
|
| What more would beets give me? How would it improve my
| experience?
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| 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 represent nearly everything musically related and
| its all freely licensed, a very cool thing to exist.
|
| Most (non-destructive) edits are auto-applied, whilst the rest go
| through a 7 day voting period (they are still applied by default
| unless someone votes against). The barrier to entry is very low.
|
| 0. https://musicbrainz.org/
|
| 1. https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/
| tech_ken wrote:
| 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.
| mukti wrote:
| If you have the files downloaded, picard is also useful -
| https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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.
| sparky_z wrote:
| You're still assuming that all of a person's music metadata
| _belongs_ in a global database. Some of my collection includes:
|
| -"frankenstein" musical soundtracks where I've assembled my
| favorite version of each song from all the various published
| recordings. Sometimes I've even edited pieces of different
| recordings together into a hybrid track. -a soundboard
| recording of my friend's high school talent show performance
| -Music I've personally recorded from video games or other
| random sources -Songs where I've edited out parts I don't like
| (such as overly-long drum solos) leaving just the parts I do.
|
| I've organized these things in a way that makes sense for me,
| not for the world.
|
| This is like a bookshelf that can only store books with an ISBN
| that can be classified in the Dewey decimal system. Too bad
| about your family photo scrapbooks or your personal
| sketchbooks!
| zdw wrote:
| I'm not sure that's what the earlier poster ment.
|
| What I think they're doing (and what I've done) is add music
| that wasn't already in the global database to it. For
| example, a promotional CD, or releases from a small
| publisher, etc.
|
| In these cases, you're not adding personal metadata or
| mixtapes.
|
| That said, definitely do self organization if it works for
| you. Most of your examples seem like they're suitable for
| custom playlists.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Auto-tagging is nice to have but it will screw up verification
| checksums. I would prefer having metadata in a separate DB and
| keep the files as is, unless I explicitly request exporting the
| metadata to the original files.
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| Beets can do this too!
|
| The -C option to avoid copying files and the -W option to
| prevent writing tags (or set it in the config file)
|
| It will still attempt to match and store the results in its DB
| for later writing to files, or moving, or querying.
|
| For the data to be most useful, you will need a client that
| connect to Beets to get the data though, Im not sure how
| prevelant those are. You can use the web-ui plugin though.
| dfc wrote:
| > Beets can do this too!
|
| This is the best summary of beets. It's wildly flexible and
| configurable.
| squigz wrote:
| I've loved beets (and MusicBrainz Picard) for years. This bit
| from the beets docs has always stuck with me when organizing my
| library.
|
| "An Apology and a Brief Interlude
|
| I would like to sincerely apologize that the autotagger in beets
| is so fussy. It asks you a lot of complicated questions,
| insecurely asking that you verify nearly every assumption it
| makes. This means importing and correcting the tags for a large
| library can be an endless, tedious process. I'm sorry for this.
|
| Maybe it will help to think of it as a tradeoff. By carefully
| examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar
| with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks.
| People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their
| shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into
| a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But
| there's value in intimate, complete familiarity with your
| collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting
| tags as quality time with your music collection. That's what I
| do."
| Shorel wrote:
| I organize everything into Mixxx.
|
| It is tagged not only by genre, crates, some songs belong into
| more than one crate.
|
| Also by mood, which I tag with colours.
|
| And how much I like the song, which is by stars.
|
| I tried Beets and it was very underwhelming in comparison =)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but different target users here :)
| Beets seems to be for consumers who want to organize their
| music collection, and while Mixxx can help with that too, it's
| mainly for music connoisseurs who play for others (AKA DJs).
| I'm not sure how well someone looking for the first could use
| Mixxx, the interface isn't exactly the epitome of user-
| friendliness if you just wanna organize then press play :)
| Shorel wrote:
| You are correct in your appreciation.
|
| Mixxx is best used with a DJ console, however for me it is
| also easily used as a player that automatically picks a song
| from some selected crates in Auto DJ mode.
|
| So I'm in the mood for Salsa, I put that crate as the AutoDJ
| source.
|
| Later I can change it to progressive rock, or 90's disco, and
| it will randomly pick songs from the selected crate or
| crates.
|
| I can also do DJ things, like looping some sections or mashup
| some songs.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Tried Beets once because it pairs well with Navidrome, it's
| pretty feature packed and exhaustive in what it does. Though
| after fiddling with it and realizing that it's more effort for my
| use case than I'd like I ditched it and now I don't really bother
| tagging. I hope to do the same thing for Navidrome too and find
| something to replace it with similar to KDE Elisa which makes it
| easy to make playlists on the fly and organize music around
| folders instead of tags.
|
| Different strokes for different folks, that's not to say that
| Navidrome and Beets aren't amazing pieces of kit.
| Mashimo wrote:
| I currently use OneTagger https://onetagger.github.io
|
| It's more for adding tags before you add them to your collection.
| You can setup shortcuts to often used tags. Of course it can also
| rename and move files based on tags.
|
| I then can auto create playlists based on those tags (with a
| different program)
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I've tried to use beets a number of times and given up each time.
|
| - beets can't delete transcoded files which have been deleted at
| source.
|
| - beets can't re transcode existing transcoded files when the
| source has been modified.
|
| - It's impossible to preserve the original directory structure
| when transcoding because it strips all path separators for
| "security".
|
| I use a Bash script I've been maintaining for a number of years
| instead.
| wswope wrote:
| Having hit those first two pain points, I changed my transcode
| config to 1) run every time, and 2) use a custom bash script as
| the transcode command. The bash script keeps a plaintext list
| of files + their modtime and disk size, then only transcodes
| files it hasn't seen before. Because it's a plaintext list and
| relatively small, there's not a terrible performance hit since
| it's paged into memory.
|
| Not at all saying this to dismiss your criticism though;
| absolutely would be great to have better OOTB options. Just
| putting it out for anyone who wants a workaround :).
| SirFatty wrote:
| For physical media, Discogs is the way to go...
| zdc1 wrote:
| If anyone is looking at options in this space, I used to use
| Media Monkey for organising and curating my large offline music
| collection. It did things like metadata and album art management,
| album-level volume levelling, and would even reorganise the file
| structure of your music to whatever pattern you set.
|
| I also loved that you could set up separate "libraries", so I
| could have metal and classical arranged by album, and EDM as a
| bunch of single tracks that are organised into playlists. Only
| downside is that it's Windows software.
| doright wrote:
| I like beets' functionality but don't as much like "babysitting"
| it for long sessions when I have a bunch of new music to import.
| Especially because crashes are frequent and sometimes make it
| lose all incremental progress. Lack of progress bar on large
| imports is painful also.
|
| It would be nice if a beets background worker could be kicked off
| when new music is detected to avoid the sequential nature of the
| commandline and see all the waiting tagging actions at once.
| This[0] is supposed to do that but it appears deprecated in favor
| of something else[1].
|
| That being said, the "beets way" works pretty well past the
| import stage, so I haven't felt the need to move off it for local
| music.
|
| [0] https://github.com/sentriz/betanin
|
| [1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| (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 intelligentsia.)
|
| R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville"? "Country"?
|
| I think "live" and "soundtrack" might be the only two interesting
| "genres".
| dgfl wrote:
| 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 Jangle pop, and the "Reckoning" album overall is
| mostly Jangle pop with some influences from post-punk and
| Paisley Underground.
|
| You may not agree with these categorizations, but it's a crowd-
| sourced website so you can go vote for different genres. You
| may also disagree with the existence of all of these genres,
| some of which I've never heard of myself (but as I said, I
| haven't listened much to R.E.M. in general), but my point is
| more that if you're familiar with them then you kind of know
| what to expect from the song.
|
| I'd never heard "don't go back to rockville", but just from
| these genres you named to make your point, I already knew what
| it would approximately sound like. And indeed listening to it
| confirmed that.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| Genres are fun to play with too. If something has breakdown
| and maybe some screams? Put 'core' at the end. Its all up to
| interpretation and it gives us some easy short hand to
| discuss music.
| doright wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "...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.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| 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 than it did
| in the 90's when it meant pavement or sonic youth.
|
| 'naval gazing for music intelligentsia' did a pitchfork writer
| run over your mom?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The classic line more or less sums it up: "Writing about
| music is like dancing about architecture."
| timcobb wrote:
| Same, glad to know I'm not alone!
| creeble wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| There are probably broad categories that I might find myself
| using, but for my own core collection of music (deeper than
| it is wide, mostly), it barely matters.
| yard2010 wrote:
| King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
|
| Genre: Yes
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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.
| timcobb wrote:
| How do you all handle FLAC/CUE releases? A problem I have is that
| I want to have processed/tagged tracks, but I also want to keep
| FLAC/CUEs. I end up have redundant and separate organized library
| and original data.
| parineum wrote:
| I, personally, split the flac. It sounds like you don't want to
| do that but though but it does remain lossless amd I prefer to
| see the tracks representing individually in the filesystem.
| intrikate wrote:
| I just split everything into tracks like they are on the album.
| Is there a tangible benefit to a single large FLAC with a CUE
| to tell the player where the songs are?
| timcobb wrote:
| There are a few benefits in my opinion, mainly:
|
| - The CUE maps the audio in a "CD-native" way, like each
| track can have 1 or more indices, which enables things like
| pregaps. When you split FLACs into discrete tracks you need
| to figure out how to project that onto files, do you put the
| pregaps at the end of previous tracks? At the beginning of
| next tracks? In short, with a CUE you can emulate the CD
| experience more accurately.
|
| - If you are seeding a torrent, you need to keep the original
| data intact.
| henrebotha wrote:
| Beets crashes with a Musicbrainz connection error more than half
| the time, on my machine. How does anyone use it productively?
| dleslie wrote:
| What I really want is a plugin that starts an icecast server with
| a given song as a root, and continues to stream songs whose
| albums/artists are within a certain reference distance of the
| root on discogs/wikipedia/etc.
|
| So if I start on Guzzlemug I'll get some Blood Incantation, but
| maybe also some Pink Floyd.
| gcr wrote:
| Anything like this for movies/TV shows/videos? I'm familiar with
| tinymediamanager, for example, but I'd love something fast on the
| CLI...
| robinhood wrote:
| 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 this new system. And it's unbelievably
| complicated. From parsing metadata to converting music, to
| understanding how deep and complex tagging work for music (yeah,
| it doesn't sound like it at first, but it truly is infinitely
| complex), I'm overwhelmed by how hard it would be to build a tool
| that compete with a combination of beets/iTunes.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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.
| bfors wrote:
| Wow, I remember beets from about 10 years ago. I never got into
| meticulously organizing my music, but I'm glad to see it's still
| around. Also the site loaded absolutely ridiculously fast.
| clueless wrote:
| Is there a beets LLM version as well, where I can RAG-style
| search through my music collection?
| headelf wrote:
| Does this have a bulk command to look at the metadata of files in
| a folder and use those to rename the files? Assume the current
| filenames are just random strings
| euroderf wrote:
| Consider a case where a DJ's entire show can be downloaded as a
| single MP3, AND there is a complete playlist for the show.
|
| Is there any software that can use this to break up the single
| mp3 into the numerous individual song tracks ? And insert
| metadata ? And perhaps also fingerprint each track to match it to
| a specific version of the song ?
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| If the playlist is something like a CUE file then yes,
| certainly. CUETools/XLD/foobar2000 can split by cue file. And
| Picard can do audio fingerprints to match tracks and get
| metadata for them.
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