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?
I’d go ahead and contact Dwight Schrute, he seems to be the expert on beets.
Fact: Bears Beets Battlestar Galactica.
My favorite way is Borscht. They’re pretty good grilled, then cut up, and put in salad too.
I see what you did there.
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).
Adding to this as well
Ive painfully tried really hard to make lidarr work for me. I mean I really tried, for one whole year.
Beginning July I’ve dumped lidarr and started using only picard. Oh my, I wish I had tried it first.
Picard is more manual, I’ve spent much more time actually listening then trying to make lidarr work the way I wanted.
I cant speak for beets though.
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.
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.
That is a LOT of years !
Having the experience of living that long is invaluable isn’t it ?
Longevity, like a lot of things, has it’s positives and it’s negatives. It’s been a pretty decent ride even tho I was forced to ride the train. ;)
Haha! I didn’t notice who I was chatting with. Have you mastered automation yet?
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
Mine just runs over my music directory on a cron and tags what it wants. I don’t pay any attention to it. I haven’t come across a mis tagged track yet. Maybe I will at some point?
Maybe I will at some point?
As far as tags, I haven’t run across any miss-tagging. That’s usually pretty straight forward. I have had some lyrics that didn’t apply to the song, that got imported, but that’s separate from beets. When it comes to importing and embedding lyrics, I found MusicBee to be quite efficient. Takes a very long while for large collections, but it works.
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.
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.
