Plugins#

Plugins extend beets’ core functionality. They add new commands, fetch additional data during import, provide new metadata sources, and much more. If beets by itself doesn’t do what you want it to, you may just need to enable a plugin—or, if you want to do something new, writing a plugin is easy if you know a little Python.

Using Plugins#

To use one of the plugins included with beets (see the rest of this page for a list), just use the plugins option in your config.yaml file:

plugins: musicbrainz inline convert web

The value for plugins can be a space-separated list of plugin names or a YAML list like [foo, bar]. You can see which plugins are currently enabled by typing beet version.

Each plugin has its own set of options that can be defined in a section bearing its name:

plugins: musicbrainz inline convert web

convert:
    auto: true

Some plugins have special dependencies that you’ll need to install. The documentation page for each plugin will list them in the setup instructions. For some, you can use pip’s “extras” feature to install the dependencies:

pip install "beets[fetchart,lyrics,lastgenre]"

Using Metadata Source Plugins#

We provide several Autotagger Extensions that fetch metadata from online databases. They share the following configuration options:

data_source_mismatch_penalty (default: 0.5)#

Penalty applied when the data source of a match candidate differs from the original source of your existing tracks. Any decimal number between 0.0 and 1.0

This setting controls how much to penalize matches from different metadata sources during import. The penalty is applied when beets detects that a match candidate comes from a different data source than what appears to be the original source of your music collection.

Example configurations:

# Prefer MusicBrainz over Discogs when sources don't match
plugins: musicbrainz discogs

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.3  # Lower penalty = preferred
discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.8  # Higher penalty = less preferred

# Do not penalise candidates from Discogs at all
plugins: musicbrainz discogs

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.5
discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.0

# Disable cross-source penalties entirely
plugins: musicbrainz discogs

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.0
discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.0

Tip

The last configuration is equivalent to setting:

match:
    distance_weights:
        data_source: 0.0  # Disable data source matching

source_weight (default: 0.5)#: Deprecated since version 2.5: Use data_source_mismatch_penalty instead.

search_limit (default: 5)#: Maximum number of search results to return.

Autotagger Extensions#

chroma: Use acoustic fingerprinting to identify audio files with missing or incorrect metadata.
deezer: Search for releases in the Deezer database.
discogs: Search for releases in the Discogs database.
fromfilename: Guess metadata for untagged tracks from their filenames.
musicbrainz: Search for releases in the MusicBrainz database.
mbpseudo: Search for releases and pseudo-releases in the MusicBrainz database.
spotify: Search for releases in the Spotify database.

Metadata#

absubmit: Analyse audio with the streaming_extractor_music program and submit the metadata to an AcousticBrainz server
acousticbrainz: Fetch various AcousticBrainz metadata
autobpm: Use Librosa to calculate the BPM from the audio.
bpm: Measure tempo using keystrokes.
bpsync: Fetch updated metadata from Beatport.
edit: Edit metadata from a text editor.
embedart: Embed album art images into files’ metadata.
fetchart: Fetch album cover art from various sources.
ftintitle: Move “featured” artists from the artist field to the title field.
keyfinder: Use the KeyFinder program to detect the musical key from the audio.
importadded: Use file modification times for guessing the value for the added field in the database.
lastgenre: Fetch genres based on Last.fm tags.
lastimport: Collect play counts from Last.fm.
lyrics: Automatically fetch song lyrics.
mbsync: Fetch updated metadata from MusicBrainz.
metasync: Fetch metadata from local or remote sources
mpdstats: Connect to MPD and update the beets library with play statistics (last_played, play_count, skip_count, rating).
parentwork: Fetch work titles and works they are part of.
replaygain: Calculate volume normalization for players that support it.
scrub: Clean extraneous metadata from music files.
zero: Nullify fields by pattern or unconditionally.

Path Formats#

albumtypes: Format album type in path formats.
bucket: Group your files into bucket directories that cover different field values ranges.
inline: Use Python snippets to customize path format strings.
rewrite: Substitute values in path formats.
advancedrewrite: Substitute field values for items matching a query.
substitute: As an alternative to rewrite, use this plugin. The main difference between them is that this plugin never modifies the files metadata.
the: Move patterns in path formats (i.e., move “a” and “the” to the end).

Interoperability#

aura: A server implementation of the AURA specification.
badfiles: Check audio file integrity.
embyupdate: Automatically notifies Emby whenever the beets library changes.
fish: Adds Fish shell tab autocompletion to beet commands.
importfeeds: Keep track of imported files via .m3u playlist file(s) or symlinks.
ipfs: Import libraries from friends and get albums from them via ipfs.
kodiupdate: Automatically notifies Kodi whenever the beets library changes.
mpdupdate: Automatically notifies MPD whenever the beets library changes.
play: Play beets queries in your music player.
playlist: Use M3U playlists to query the beets library.
plexupdate: Automatically notifies Plex whenever the beets library changes.
smartplaylist: Generate smart playlists based on beets queries.
sonosupdate: Automatically notifies Sonos whenever the beets library changes.
thumbnails: Get thumbnails with the cover art on your album folders.
subsonicupdate: Automatically notifies Subsonic whenever the beets library changes.

Miscellaneous#

bareasc: Search albums and tracks with bare ASCII string matching.
bpd: A music player for your beets library that emulates MPD and is compatible with MPD clients.
convert: Transcode music and embed album art while exporting to a different directory.
duplicates: List duplicate tracks or albums.
export: Export data from queries to a format.
filefilter: Automatically skip files during the import process based on regular expressions.
fuzzy: Search albums and tracks with fuzzy string matching.
hook: Run a command when an event is emitted by beets.
ihate: Automatically skip albums and tracks during the import process.
info: Print music files’ tags to the console.
loadext: Load SQLite extensions.
mbcollection: Maintain your MusicBrainz collection list.
mbsubmit: Print an album’s tracks in a MusicBrainz-friendly format.
missing: List missing tracks.
mstream: A music streaming server + webapp that can be used alongside beets.
random: Randomly choose albums and tracks from your library.
spotify: Create Spotify playlists from the Beets library.
types: Declare types for flexible attributes.
web: An experimental Web-based GUI for beets.

Other Plugins#

In addition to the plugins that come with beets, there are several plugins that are maintained by the beets community. To use an external plugin, there are two options for installation:

Make sure it’s in the Python path (known as sys.path to developers). This just means the plugin has to be installed on your system (e.g., with a setup.py script or a command like pip or easy_install).
Set the pluginpath config variable to point to the directory containing the plugin. (See Configuration.)

Once the plugin is installed, enable it by placing its name on the plugins line in your config file.

Here are a few of the plugins written by the beets community:

beets-alternatives: Manages external files.
beet-amazon: Adds Amazon.com as a tagger data source.
beets-artistcountry: Fetches the artist’s country of origin from MusicBrainz.
beets-autofix: Automates repetitive tasks to keep your library in order.
beets-autogenre: Assigns genres to your library items using the lastgenre and beets-xtractor plugins as well as additional rules.
beets-audible: Adds Audible as a tagger data source and provides other features for managing audiobook collections.
beets-barcode: Lets you scan or enter barcodes for physical media to search for their metadata.
beetcamp: Enables bandcamp.com autotagger with a fairly extensive amount of metadata.
beetstream: Server implementation of the Subsonic API specification, serving the beets library and (smartplaylist plugin generated) M3U playlists, allowing you to stream your music on a multitude of clients.
beets-bpmanalyser: Analyses songs and calculates their tempo (BPM).
beets-check: Automatically checksums your files to detect corruption.
A cmus plugin: Integrates with the cmus console music player.
beets-copyartifacts: Helps bring non-music files along during import.
beets-describe: Gives you the full picture of a single attribute of your library items.
drop2beets: Automatically imports singles as soon as they are dropped in a folder (using Linux’s inotify). You can also set a sub-folders hierarchy to set flexible attributes by the way.
dsedivec: Has two plugins: edit and moveall.
beets-filetote: Helps bring non-music extra files, attachments, and artifacts during imports and CLI file manipulation actions (beet move, etc.).
beets-fillmissing: Interactively prompts you to fill in missing or incomplete metadata fields for music tracks.
beets-follow: Lets you check for new albums from artists you like.
beetFs: Is a FUSE filesystem for browsing the music in your beets library. (Might be out of date.)
beets-goingrunning: Generates playlists to go with your running sessions.
beets-ibroadcast: Uploads tracks to the iBroadcast cloud service.
beets-id3extract: Maps arbitrary ID3 tags to beets custom fields.
beets-importreplace: Lets you perform regex replacements on incoming metadata.
beets-jiosaavn: Adds JioSaavn.com as a tagger data source.
beets-more: Finds versions of indexed releases with more tracks, like deluxe and anniversary editions.
beets-mosaic: Generates a montage of a mosaic from cover art.
beets-mpd-utils: Plugins to interface with MPD. Comes with mpd_tracker (track play/skip counts from MPD) and mpd_dj (auto-add songs to your queue.)
beets-noimport: Adds and removes directories from the incremental import skip list.
beets-originquery: Augments MusicBrainz queries with locally-sourced data to improve autotagger results.
beets-plexsync: Allows you to sync your Plex library with your beets library, create smart playlists in Plex, and import online playlists (from services like Spotify) into Plex.
beets-setlister: Generate playlists from the setlists of a given artist.
beet-summarize: Can compute lots of counts and statistics about your music library.
beets-usertag: Lets you use keywords to tag and organize your music.
beets-webm3u: Serves the (smartplaylist plugin generated) M3U playlists via HTTP.
beets-webrouter: Serves multiple beets webapps (e.g. web, beets-webm3u, beetstream, aura) using a single command/process/host/port, each under a different path.
whatlastgenre: Fetches genres from various music sites.
beets-xtractor: Extracts low- and high-level musical information from your songs.
beets-ydl: Downloads audio from youtube-dl sources and import into beets.
beets-ytimport: Download and import your liked songs from YouTube into beets.
beets-yearfixer: Attempts to fix all missing original_year and year fields.
beets-youtube: Adds YouTube Music as a tagger data source.