I’m finally making a real effort to add beets to my life. I’ve been hesitant because I like what I like and I (mostly) know what I’m doing, you know? I also have a lot of local independent albums that are just not likely to get tagged anyway.
But here I am. Yesterday I was able to work through:
- Implementing my preferred directory structure and naming conventions
- Adding album art (embedded and in the folder)
- Embedding lyrics
- Adding ReplyGain information
I use Navidrome as my server and have a collection of about 2000 albums.
What are some of your tips for using beets?
What cool things are you doing?
What should I be thinking about as I go about this?
albums one by one with --timid flag. You are using Navidrome , than you music should be well tagged already. Should be fast and easy, just repeat it 2000 time. You can also disable lockups and just import “as is” if you trust your taggig
That’s the thing, I think my tags are mostly in really good shape and I’m happy with them. Maybe I’m just looking to solve a problem I don’t have.
So much safer to go one album at a time using Picard. Picard makes it easy to go down the list of a disorganized directory, identify most things automatically, allow in depth review and modifications to what Picard came up with, and standardize file naming. I’ve tried to let programs like Lidarr and beets automate it, but they always ends up causing more and more complex problems to discover and solve after awhile. Music releases are complex and sources are diverse, using distinct standards of form and format. It’s not a problem that can realistically be solved for my entire music library without the guiding hand of a librarian. I could listen to my library for over six months without repeating, even 1 album out of a 100 mis-tagged or misidentifyied could take me years to discover.
I do like to automate the less critical and more machine oriented library tasks like adding genres tags, replaygain, and lyrics as you do. Just not things like the metadata tags, file naming, or album art (embedded or otherwise).
Hm. So maybe my current process for tagging is one I should still keep and just shift some of the less important work to beets. I kind of like that.
IDK if I’d recommend this to others, but I don’t trust unsupervised metadata lookup (I’m anal like that), so I lookup metadata with musicbrainz picard and then feed the files to beets only to keep my library organized.
My beets doesn’t do any lookup (no lookup plugins are enabled,
none_rec_action: asis,fetchartconfigured to only look at the local filesystem).This is kind of how I have been operating. Rip to FLAC. Manage the lookup and tagging manually. Then I have a series of scripts to convert to MP3, apply RG, and send the FLAC to an off-site backup, move MP3s into the library.
I thought maybe I’ve been too anal about my tags and I should just work through letting it standardize and add IDs to everything. But now you all have me questioning that part.
i fucked with beets importing my measly 20 thousand songs over a weekend or so and it was uhh
miserable for a person with insane ADHD
i couldnt pay attention for shit
nowadays, if something pops up in a navidrome smart playlist or isn’t found in the genre it should be, i will open up that whole folder in picard and go to town.
I can blast one artist into submission, but trying to spend all day doing it, artist after artist, my brain melts.
I suppose I should take another look at Picard as well. For a lot of years, I’ve relied on MP3tag for everything. It’s just a simple interface, I know how to make it do what I want. I like managing tags.
But I figure with beets, I can take care of the tagging and some things I’ve been doing manually or have other processes for - like downloading lyrics and applying ReplayGain information.
My plan with beets is to just take it an artist at a time, see how it goes, and then if I can’t find a groove or don’t like what it’s doing, I can give up.
heck your post already had me check if beets can be installed on bazzite, which, yay python!
I started trying to see how hard it would be to get started but don’t have the time today to get reacquainted with it lol
Not going to lie, I spent the weekend having Gemini step me through each bit that I wanted to accomplish. I think having a solid idea of the specifics of what I wanted to do helped a lot. Previously id gone in like “manage my collection, app!” with no clear idea of what I even needed.
I’ve switched to Picard, too. I do think for a task like this a GUI makes a big difference. I tried with beets, but you really have to do a lot of research in advance to understand what it is doing and the settings you need, and it’s not one-size-fits-all.
If you don’t have a lot of indie stuff, and you primarily have whole albums, AND you have the patience to go through your entire library one track at a time, then I’m sure it works fine.
The advantage of Picard is that you can see many tracks at a glance to focus on the ones that need attention. Plus you can pause at any time and pick up where you left off.
I now do almost all of this through Strawberry, which has Picard built in.
“I tried with beets, but you really have to do a lot of research in advance to understand what it is doing and the settings you need, and it’s not one-size-fits-all.”
This is exactly how it’s gone for me in the past. This is maybe my 3rd or 4th attempt at it, but I finally feel like I’m getting a handle on it.
i did not know about strawberry having this functionalityyyyyyyy!!
thanks for the tip!
I’d go ahead and contact Dwight Schrute, he seems to be the expert on beets.
My favorite way is Borscht. They’re pretty good grilled, then cut up, and put in salad too.
Fact: Bears Beets Battlestar Galactica.
I see what you did there.
I’m not near my computer, rn, I’ll throw my config in here.
I use the artifacts plug-in, auto transcode for certain formats and lastgenre
hmmm tips, not sure. You have beets already, that’s the main tip :)
I have it reformatting filenames, storing it in the proper paths, retrieve albumart, and that’s about it I reckon. In case I forgot anyting, I’ll update this message when home.
As for unrecognized albums… That’s tough, I have a bunch of them too. I weighed storing them in the regular folders versus in a separate unrecognized/ folder. Went with the latter approach. I rescan that folder every month, sometimes new matches appear. That unrecognized folder is also shared to navidrome, so except for some missing album art and perhaps improper file/song names, not really an issue.
I also have a lot of local independent albums that are just not likely to get tagged anyway
I feel your pain. I have a lot of Indie stuff from where I used to run a legit, licensed, internet radio station back in the pre-Napster days. A lot coming from the now defunct MP3.com and Bandcamp. Some of which is a bit obscure. For those, I had to tag them manually.
Now you have me downloading 10GB of MP3.com pages so I can go searching for old albums. :D
Do you keep those releases separated from your main library (file-wise)? I’m trying to decide if it makes sense to segregate them and manage them completely outside of beets.
I keep everything in the main library Artist/Album/etc. Reason being, the software we used at the time was playlist and script driven. So you’d have something like: 'play 5 songs from the top 50 set list - play 3 songs from the commercial set list - play bumper and station id - play shoutout from random Indie band - play 5 from secondary set list - etc. So, at the time it didn’t make sense for me to segregate the Indie from the commercial. We played commercial cuts obviously for those familiar with them, but introduced Indie bands and promoted them for the most part. It was a shit load of fun really. Then the RIAA screwed everything up levying fees on internet radio that weren’t even required for terra radio. We had to pay $.5 per song, per listener, which doesn’t seem like a lot but when you figure up how many 3:00 minute songs fit into an hour and you have several thousand people tuned in daily from all over the world, it started to become some real money. Then we went to Washington to plead our case in front of a commission headed up by Senator Leahy. In the end a lot of us disbanded because we were doing this as a work of love for music and the Indie bands, and just couldn’t cut the fees on top of ASCAP/SESAC/SOCAN/BMI licensing. It was fun for a while tho. I’ve had a lifelong love affair with music.
ETA: At one point I really got into it with my postal carrier because he was toting sacks of CDs. I had to put a special box at the mailbox so he could dump all the CDs in. LOL
My mail carrier gave me a talking to when I started getting a lot of records in the mail during covid. He didn’t like them sitting in the mailbox in the heat. Haha. I mean, good looking out, guy, but I think we’re good.
Well, that was super cool of him. You don’t get a lot of mail carriers that really give a shit.
I am really sorry for what happened ,
I don’t live in the US so idk what RIAA is but they sound like they are not a good group.
If i may ask, the members (your friends who also liked working in the radio station) what happened to them ?
Do you still meet up and enjoy music sometimes?
RIAA: Recording Industry Association of America
All you really need to know is they are a bunch of self serving pricks.
Our lives went separate ways and I got caught up in other things. That was 28+ years ago. Lots of water under the bridge.
