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?
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.
Picard adds IDs too (well, I think it only adds musicbrainz ids, per default anyway, but those are the only ones I care about).
The lookup is automatic as well (you can review or intervene if it fails to identify the release).
It also has a plugin for replay gain (I redo that step in my script anyways) and can be configured to delete any previous tags if you re-process music that you had previously tagged with some other software (IIRC it doesn’t clean them up per default).
If you’ve not used it, I recommend giving it a try before deciding how to go on.