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, like so:

plugins: 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: 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, like this:

pip install beets[fetchart,lyrics,lastgenre]

Using Metadata Source Plugins

Some plugins provide sources for metadata in addition to MusicBrainz. These plugins share the following configuration option:

• source_weight: Penalty applied to matches during import. Set to 0.0 to disable. Default: 0.5.

For example, to equally consider matches from Discogs and MusicBrainz add the following to your configuration:

plugins: discogs

discogs:
   source_weight: 0.0

Autotagger Extensions

• Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Use acoustic fingerprinting to identify audio files with missing or incorrect metadata.

• Discogs Plugin: Search for releases in the Discogs database.

• Spotify Plugin: Search for releases in the Spotify database.

• Deezer Plugin: Search for releases in the Deezer database.

• FromFilename Plugin: Guess metadata for untagged tracks from their filenames.

Metadata

• AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin: Analyse audio with the streaming_extractor_music program and submit the metadata to the AcousticBrainz server

• AcousticBrainz Plugin: Fetch various AcousticBrainz metadata

• BPM Plugin: Measure tempo using keystrokes.

• BPSync Plugin: Fetch updated metadata from Beatport.

• Edit Plugin: Edit metadata from a text editor.

• EmbedArt Plugin: Embed album art images into files’ metadata.

• FetchArt Plugin: Fetch album cover art from various sources.

• FtInTitle Plugin: Move “featured” artists from the artist field to the title field.

• Key Finder Plugin: Use the KeyFinder program to detect the musical key from the audio.

• ImportAdded Plugin: Use file modification times for guessing the value for the added field in the database.

• LastGenre Plugin: Fetch genres based on Last.fm tags.

• LastImport Plugin: Collect play counts from Last.fm.

• Lyrics Plugin: Automatically fetch song lyrics.

• MBSync Plugin: Fetch updated metadata from MusicBrainz.

• MetaSync Plugin: Fetch metadata from local or remote sources

• MPDStats Plugin: Connect to MPD and update the beets library with play statistics (last_played, play_count, skip_count, rating).

• ParentWork Plugin: Fetch work titles and works they are part of.

• ReplayGain Plugin: Calculate volume normalization for players that support it.

• Scrub Plugin: Clean extraneous metadata from music files.

• Zero Plugin: Nullify fields by pattern or unconditionally.

Path Formats

• AlbumTypes Plugin: Format album type in path formats.

• Bucket Plugin: Group your files into bucket directories that cover different field values ranges.

• Inline Plugin: Use Python snippets to customize path format strings.

• Rewrite Plugin: Substitute values in path formats.

• The Plugin: Move patterns in path formats (i.e., move “a” and “the” to the end).

Interoperability

• AURA Plugin: A server implementation of the AURA specification.

• Bad Files Plugin: Check audio file integrity.

• EmbyUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Emby whenever the beets library changes.

• Fish Plugin: Adds Fish shell tab autocompletion to beet commands.

• ImportFeeds Plugin: Keep track of imported files via .m3u playlist file(s) or symlinks.

• IPFS Plugin: Import libraries from friends and get albums from them via ipfs.

• KodiUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Kodi whenever the beets library changes.

• MPDUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies MPD whenever the beets library changes.

• Play Plugin: Play beets queries in your music player.

• Playlist Plugin: Use M3U playlists to query the beets library.

• PlexUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Plex whenever the beets library changes.

• Smart Playlist Plugin: Generate smart playlists based on beets queries.

• SonosUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Sonos whenever the beets library changes.

• Thumbnails Plugin: Get thumbnails with the cover art on your album folders.

• SubsonicUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Subsonic whenever the beets library changes.

Miscellaneous

• Bare-ASCII Search Plugin: Search albums and tracks with bare ASCII string matching.

• BPD Plugin: A music player for your beets library that emulates MPD and is compatible with MPD clients.

• Convert Plugin: Transcode music and embed album art while exporting to a different directory.

• Duplicates Plugin: List duplicate tracks or albums.

• Export Plugin: Export data from queries to a format.

• FileFilter Plugin: Automatically skip files during the import process based on regular expressions.

• Fuzzy Search Plugin: Search albums and tracks with fuzzy string matching.

• Hook Plugin: Run a command when an event is emitted by beets.

• IHate Plugin: Automatically skip albums and tracks during the import process.

• Info Plugin: Print music files’ tags to the console.

• Load Extension Plugin: Load SQLite extensions.

• MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Maintain your MusicBrainz collection list.

• MusicBrainz Submit Plugin: Print an album’s tracks in a MusicBrainz-friendly format.

• Missing Plugin: List missing tracks.

• mstream: A music streaming server + webapp that can be used alongside beets.

• Random Plugin: Randomly choose albums and tracks from your library.

• Spotify Plugin: Create Spotify playlists from the Beets library.

• Types Plugin: Declare types for flexible attributes.

• Web Plugin: 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-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.

• 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-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-importreplace lets you perform regex replacements on incoming metadata.

• beets-mosaic generates a montage of a mosaic from cover art.

• 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-popularity fetches popularity values from Spotify.

• 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.

• 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-yearfixer attempts to fix all missing original_year and year fields.