A collection of plugins for the music manager beets.
This plugin fetches community voted genres from MusicBrainz and applies them to the albums and items in your beets library.
Download mbgenres.py and install it in your beets configuration.
For instructions on installing a 3rd party beets plugin, please reference the section entitled Other Plugins in the beets documentation for plugins.
The following configuration options can be added to your beets config file under a mbgenres: section.
- genrecount: The maximum number of genres to fetch for a release from MusicBrainz. Default:
5. - minvotes: The minimum number of votes required for a genre to be added. Default:
1. - fallback: A string to be used if no genres are found on MusicBrainz. You can set the string as
''if you want genres to be cleared.None, the default value, will keep existing tags even if the config optionreplaceis set toTrue. Default:None. - dynamiccount: If set to
True, allows the number of genres to exceed the genrecount setting if tied votes would be excluded. This should be configured with thedynamicdivideroption. If set toFalsethen the genrecount will be strictly followed, ties will be decided by alphabetical order of tags. Default:True. - dynamicdivider: Used with
dynamiccount. Tags with vote counts greater than or equal to the dynamicdivider will be put in one group, tags with vote counts less than dynamicdivider will be put in a second group. If the maximum number of genres selected contains only genres in the first group or only in the second group, then dynamiccount will overflow any ties. If the tied votes are in the second group and there are also tags from the first group, then all of the tied genres will be removed instead of overflowed. Default:2.
For more details on howdynamiccountanddynamicdividerwork, see the Dynamic Count and Divider Explainer section. - artistfallback: If set to
True, fetches genres from the release artist if no genres are found at the release or release group level. Default:True. - replace: If set to
True, all existing genres on tracks will be replaced with MusicBrainz genres or set to thefallbackvalue if no genres are found. If set toFalse, the MusicBrainz genres will be added to the existing genres on albums instead of replacing them. Default:False. - auto: If set to
True, genres will be added on album imports. If set toFalse, genres will only be added when manually run. Default:False. - separator: The string used to separate multiple genres. Default:
;. - titlecase: If set to
True, then all genres will be title cased. If set toFalse, all genres will be lowercased. Default:False. - updatefrequency: How many days between genre updates. MusicBrainz genres will not be fetched for releases that have been updated within that number of days. Use the
-For--forceoption when manually running to override. Default:7.
By default the plugin only imports genres in MusicBrainz's genre list. If you would like to whitelist other genres or tags, you can add them to the file tagwhitelist.txt in the same folder you placed the plugin in. Each whitelisted tag should be entered on its own line. tagwhitelist.txt can be manually created, or can be automatically created by running the plugin once.
The plugin can be manually run with the command beet mbgenres [QUERY]. If you would like to ignore the updatefrequency config setting and force a genre update, you can use the command beet mbgenres -F [QUERY] or beet mbgenres --force [QUERY].
The purpose of the dynamic count and divider is to allow maximum count overflows in the event of vote ties, but exclude overflows of genres with low numbers of votes if higher voted genres are available. Because of the low number of genre votes on MusicBrainz, 2 is the recommended setting for dynamicdivider, but if needed it can be set higher. Setting it to 1 will always allow overflows for tied votes, regardless of vote counts.
Below are some examples of how the default settings (dynamiccount: True, dynamicdivider: 2) are applied to different scenarios.
8 genres are returned from MusicBrainz. 6 are in the first dynamic group set by the divider, 2 are in the second dynamic group. The genrecount setting is configured to 5, so the overflow from the first dynamic group is allowed.
Original genres:
'alternative rock':3, 'pop rock':2', electronic':2, 'jungle':2, 'new wave':2, 'pop':2, 'power pop':1, 'rock':1
Dynamic result:
'alternative rock':3, 'pop rock':2', electronic':2, 'jungle':2, 'new wave':2, 'pop':2
8 genres are returned from MusicBrainz. 2 are in the first dynamic group set by the divider, 6 are in the second dynamic group. The genrecount setting is configured to 5, so the overflow from the second dynamic group is discarded.
Original genres:
'alternative rock':3, 'pop rock':2', electronic':1, 'jungle':1, 'new wave':1, 'pop':1, 'power pop':1, 'rock':1
Dynamic result:
'alternative rock':3, 'pop rock':2'
8 genres are returned from MusicBrainz. All 8 are in the second dynamic group. The genrecount setting is configured to 5, but the overflow is allowed as there are no genres in the first group.
Original genres:
'alternative rock':1, 'pop rock':1', electronic':1, 'jungle':1, 'new wave':1, 'pop':1, 'power pop':1, 'rock':1
Dynamic result:
'alternative rock':1, 'pop rock':1', electronic':1, 'jungle':1, 'new wave':1, 'pop':1, 'power pop':1, 'rock':1
4 genres are returned from MusicBrainz. 1 is in the first dynamic group set by the divider, 3 are in the second dynamic group. The genrecount setting is configured to 5, so no genres need to be discarded and the genres are unaltered.
Original genres:
'alternative rock':2, 'pop rock':1, 'electronic':1, 'jungle':1
Dynamic result:
'alternative rock':2, 'pop rock':1, 'electronic':1, 'jungle':1
This plugin generates an HTML report of your beets library that can be helpful for MusicBrainz editing.
- Your library must be accurately linked to MusicBrainz releases. If your recordings are not linked to the correct releases, then this plugin will not generate accurate data and should not be used.
- Your beets installation must have the Chromaprint/Acoustid plugin installed and you must use the plugin to fingerprint and submit your files to Acoustid before using this plugin.
- Installing and running the mbsync plugin is highly recommended to make sure you are generating a report from the most recent MusicBrainz data.
Download mbhelperplugin.py and install it in your beets configuration.
For instructions on installing a 3rd party beets plugin, please reference the section entitled Other Plugins in the beets documentation for plugins.
Run the command beets mbhelper to generate an html file containing the MusicBrainz Helper report. -d DIRECTORY or --directory DIRECTORY can be used as arguments if you would like to specify a directory path for the file to be placed in.
The HTML report contains two pages, you can switch between these pages using the menu in the top right.
This page lists tracks in your library that are linked to different MusicBrainz recordings but share the same acoustid. This may indicate that the recordings should be merged.
Shared acoustids are a good sign that recordings may need to be merged, but should not be the only thing you rely on. Acoustids group similar fingerprints and may sometimes group recordings that should remain separate in MusicBrainz (examples are clean vs explicit recordings, DJ mixes, or differences in intros or outros).
This page lists tracks in your library that share MusicBrainz recordings but do not have matching acoustids. This may indicate a mistaken recording merge in the past that needs to be split.
This list has a very high false positive rate. Differences in the speed of a recording, added noise (such as from a vinyl rip), or other small differences between releases can cause the same recording to have multiple acoustids. Please review the acoustids individually on acoustid.org (the fingerprint comparison tool is good for this purpose) and use common sense before splitting a recording.