#beets

I’m using the echonest plugin to add bpm info to my tags, but itunes isn’t picking it up, even after telling iTunes to rescan the file. Anyone have any idea how to poke iTunes to pick up the new tag? I’m hoping to create smart playlists based on BPM for exercising.

there's no bpm tag in id3

is there?

oh, I see, your question isn't actually about bpm, it's about the new tag?

in that case, check this out -

does itunes parse tbpm is your question

echonest appears to set bpm. I have this: bpm: 129

well.. no.

are you tagging id3 files or mp4 / m4a files?

mp3/id3

so, that's TBPM tag

and I'm pretty sure beets is properly populating it

so why itunes is not refreshing tbpm is your question.

yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s itunes that’s the issue here. however, google is returning lots of results about alternative apps to use to set the bpm field in itunes for tracks with no bpm tag set at all.

it’s not really helpful for my situation. I also ran ftintitle earlier, and ran an applescript that refreshed all my tags. I see those changes. but not bpm.

use another program and verify the tag is actually present on the files first

and that the format is correct

mutagen-inspect shows TBMP=129

TBPM, probably.

so the tag appears to be valid

is it an id3v1 tag, v2, or both?

perhaps itunes reads only one of the 2?

BrainDamage: good approach!!!

it's v2.4

because that's what mutagen writes, iirc

I know iTunes will read both. I believe all my tags are stripped of v1 though.

but what about 2.3 vs 2.4 or wharteer?

iTunes will actually let you convert between tag versions

or at least it used to.

if no one has encountered this issue and remembers a fix I don’t really mean to trouble the channel with troubleshooting it. I just figured there were reasonable odds someone in here might have encountered this issue.

I'm curious if you find the solution

and we can at least check your thinking

and tell you how things should be :)

Well, we’ve determined that the tag is being written correctly - at least if we trust mutagen’s output.

agree

iTunes is known to have to be poked to check for new tags, but the refresh tag script I have appears to work since it picked up previous artist/title changes I made earlier this evening.

The non-scripted solution given to poke iTunes is to highlight the song and select ‘Get Info’. I’ve done this for updated songs, and I do not see the BPM field being set.

Now, it would not be unprecedented for iTunes to treat some fields differently from others. I just need to determine if that’s the case for the (T)BPM field, and if there’s an alternative approach that works.

Hmmm… There may be another way to skin this cat (sorry Miffles). I can generate an m3u with a bmp query in beets. If I can find a way to get iTunes to read (and re-read) some playlists on startup, that would be sufficient to solve my problem as well.

has anyone here tried to use the info provided by echonest to automatically generate playlists, similar to itunes' genius mixes?

no, but totally doable.

also, I installed echoprint-codegen (well, built it), and set the codegen: path in the config, but echonest is still uploading

do I need to explicitely disable uploading?

or is just uploading when I've fingerprinted a track that echonest doesn't already know about?

is there a way to query beets for any tracks that don't have a particular flexattr set?