Perfecting your metadata: tagging music with beets

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.”

Cue splitting

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. -f specifies the cue sheet, -o is the encoder (shnsplit uses WAV by default), and -t is the output format (track number + title).
```
$ shnsplit -f example.cue -o flac -t "%n %t" 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 it 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

Configuring beets (if needed)

By default, beets imports music to ~/Music. If this fits your use case, feel free to skip this section. My music is located at /mnt/music since I use an external drive to store it, so I added this to my config.yaml file:

directory: /mnt/music

Chances are that you won’t need to modify anything else. Otherwise, see Configuration.

Importing music

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.

Dealing with false positives

Sometimes beets makes mistakes. The release date, record label, or country might be wrong, for instance. I use -t (timid) for this reason.

If the provided MusicBrainz URL at least points to the correct album, press ‘m’ (More candidates) to see more options.

Rarely, beets will spit out something that doesn’t match at all. When this happens, it’s easiest to manually search for the album on MusicBrainz. Then, copy and paste the URL and feed it to beets by pressing ‘i’ (enter ID).

If -t is used consistently, consider setting the equivalent option in config.yaml.

import:
  timid: yes

Other nice things

There are advantages to using beets other than correct metadata. Beets can output statistics and perform queries, for instance.

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.