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.”
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
$ whoami_