#beets

DjSlash: did you see my question?

darwin: yes, and I replied with 'yep', but didn't highlight you, so maybe you overlooked :)

yeah my client..

so.. I don't know what " yep " means in context :/

darwin: add the album first with 'as is', then you can use "beet ls -f '$track $title $nicelength' the_album" to import the tracks to MB

hrm, then I.. import -L it?

yes

interesting, thx

or point to the album's directory in your collection with just "beet import", that works too

(https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/referen...)

i have been playing around with beets for a couple of days now, which for all albums that are either in musicbrains (about 60%) or tagged correctly works great, but what is the way to go if the album cannot be found, or for example is missing the disc number. or no tags at all. Is there any convenient way to import such albums?

m4rcu5: check if the album is on MB, if it is, you can use the url of the release (not release group) for the 'enter Id' option. If it isn't on MB, add it there, it helps you and others to match these albums in the future.

DjSlash: ok, but there ust be a way to correctly import them first and then export tthat to MB right? like abcde does for ripping, check for tags, show them and ask for changes (which are done in vim)

well, just like I said earlier to darwin. Add the album with 'as is' option, then create a new release on MB, use beets to output the tracklist, then after adding the release is done, reimport the album.

ok, and what happens on untagged trakc on import? it does not show the tags it thinks its going to import when using as-is

either https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins... can help, or you have to tag them manually

i checked the formfilename, but its a bit of magic how it identifies them ;)

id like to tag them by hand, but how does beets import ehm as-is or how can i find them back by then?

beets can find them for you, reimporting with 'beet import -L' (see https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/referen...)

but don't add them to beets before you done tagging them manually first

DjSlash: do i have to check them before adding? or is there a way beets can show me the tags before we import them?

checking them for what purpose?

if the tags are correct. beets import as-is is more or less a wild guess, if the tags are incorrect, you only find out when they music is lost in the system

if you add them with as-is, but later re-import them by match on MB, then you don't need to worry about the tags

but you can also skip the album if beets doesn't find a match and then manually add/correct tags

I'd recommend using the log option when doing so with large imports

ok, so if you impoort the music and its lost in space, you can correct the tags on the source file, import them again and the ones that got lost are corrected?

wait, what?

how is it lost in space?

import an album with missing or incorrect tags, beets only tells you it cannot fin the tags so you hit 'as-is' now where did it go if the tags were to be incorrect, there is no way to trace it right?

you know at least some basic info about it, don't you (i.e. the directory name for instance)

but also, you can find albums that isn't tagged with musicbrainz id's

yes, but the audio is moved to a new directory

and it will always take that directory name as album name?

afaik, yes

actually, it depends on the tags, obviously

https://gist.github.com/DjSlash/aed5065dca9947d... <- for example, here you can see that beets can't find a match of an album I try to import and that I used 'as-is' as the option of my choice. Then you'll see that beets renamed it after the tags that are available.

nederlander? ;)

yep

hhmm, so best practice seems to be to skip anything it could not find, and fix those albums tags upfront with something like tagscanner

cya!

re

m4rcu5: well, when you are pretty sure you know what release it is and have found it on MB, you can tell beets to use that release.

I imported a fair amount of albums yester-/today and skipped the albums that didn't get a match on first try and now I investigate those albums if I can match them manually or need to add the release to MB

m4rcu5: I don't know if you looked at MusicBrainz Picard yet, but that one has a plugin that aids in submitting new releases to MB: "Add Cluster As Release"

(I usually "seed" my music files with Picard before handing them over to beets, since Picard also still pulls in more metadata from MB than beets does.)

Freso: but why still use beets then?

i think i'd prefer preeseeding with tagscanner (really nice tool from russia), it has really advanced features in from file name and multiple tag sources

I guess I could "import" into a fake install of beets

and then import from there into real beets, heh

m4rcu5: Because Picard is not a manager, just a tagger. beets allows me to automate (though I'm still only at semi-automating :)) mass-updating of the metadata.