It’s wonderful to have a music library with correct metadata. In my case, I use NCMPCPP to search by artist, title, album, genre, date, etc.
Of course, this requires everything to be tagged properly; the future has a surprise in store for you if your metalcore collection is erroneously marked as “easy listening.”
Avoid that predicament by using beets. From the project’s website:
“Beets is the media library management system for obsessive music geeks.”
By default, beets places imported music in ~/Music. If this fits your
use case, feel free to skip this section. Otherwise, add the desired
path to the config.yaml file:
directory: /path/to/music/library
Chances are that you won’t need to modify anything else. Otherwise, see Configuration.
In order to be useful, beets needs a library to work with, and that means importing music. Fortunately, importing music is pretty simple.
$ beet import /path/to/album
beet import prompts the user for additional details if needed. If the
similarity score is high enough, beets tags the music automatically
and moves on.
To list music, use beet ls. Beets can narrow down the query via a
plethora of metadata fields (genre, artist, album, year,
country, and so on).
$ beet ls genre:'Progressive Rock'
Quoting isn’t strictly necessary. I do it out of habit.
To list the available metadata fields, use beet fields.
There are high quality plugins available for beets that extend its functionality and sweeten the deal even more. I won’t list all of them here, but I’ll include a couple examples for demonstrative purposes.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter to me too much as I primarily use NCMPCPP + MPD to play music. However, with more full-featured applications like Kodi, missing artwork sticks out like a sore thumb to me.
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for this. Make certain the following is
in config.yaml:
plugins: fetchart
Then, update your library.
$ beet fetchart
See the documentation for fetchart for more details.
MusicBrainz actually doesn’t contain genre information, so I use a
plugin for this, too. Ensure that you place the appropriate entry under
plugins in config.yaml:
plugins: lastgenre
Then, update your library.
$ beet lastgenre
See the documentation for lastgenre for more details.
Beets handles most everything well. In some situations, however, I had to gently coax it into understanding what I wanted it to do.
Beets needs a separate file for each track in order to tag music, yet some releases have only one FLAC file for the entire album. Fortunately, the lone FLAC file can be split given an appropriate cue sheet (a text file that describes the album’s track layout).
Install shntool for cue splitting and cuetools to tag the
resulting files.
# pkg_add shntool cuetools
Navigate to the album in question.
$ cd /path/to/album
Split the FLAC file. -o is the encoder (shnsplit uses WAV by
default). By default, the output format looks like
split-track01.flac, split-track02.flac, etc. Beets will rename
the files according to the metadata anyway, so it doesn’t matter too
much.
$ cuebreakpoints example.cue | shnsplit -o flac example.flac
Append a .bak extension to the FLAC file. This is needed for the
next step so that the original FLAC file won’t be targeted by
cuetag.
$ mv example.flac{,.bak}
Tag the split files with the original metadata. ./*.flac targets
all FLAC files in the current directory (see
SC2035 for an
explanation of why I use ./*.flac instead of *.flac).
$ cuetag example.cue ./*.flac
If satisfied, delete the original FLAC file.
$ rm example.flac.bak
Given that this is a bit tedious, I wrote a small shell script to take care of splitting FLAC files for me. Usage is as follows:
$ splitflac example.cue example.flac
By default, splitflac doesn’t delete the original FLAC file. To do so
if the other commands succeed, pass the -d flag.
$ splitflac -d example.cue example.flac