MusicBrainz Submit Plugin

The mbsubmit plugin provides an extra prompt choice during an import session and a mbsubmit command that prints the tracks of the current album in a format that is parseable by MusicBrainz’s track parser.

Usage

Enable the mbsubmit plugin in your configuration (see Using Plugins) and select the Print tracks choice which is by default displayed when no strong recommendations are found for the album:

No matching release found for 3 tracks.
For help, see: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#nomatch
[U]se as-is, as Tracks, Group albums, Skip, Enter search, enter Id, aBort,
Print tracks? p
01. An Obscure Track - An Obscure Artist (3:37)
02. Another Obscure Track - An Obscure Artist (2:05)
03. The Third Track - Another Obscure Artist (3:02)

No matching release found for 3 tracks.
For help, see: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#nomatch
[U]se as-is, as Tracks, Group albums, Skip, Enter search, enter Id, aBort,
Print tracks?

You can also run beet mbsubmit QUERY to print the track information for any album:

$ beet mbsubmit album:"An Obscure Album"
01. An Obscure Track - An Obscure Artist (3:37)
02. Another Obscure Track - An Obscure Artist (2:05)
03. The Third Track - Another Obscure Artist (3:02)

As MusicBrainz currently does not support submitting albums programmatically, the recommended workflow is to copy the output of the Print tracks choice and paste it into the parser that can be found by clicking on the “Track Parser” button on MusicBrainz “Tracklist” tab.

Configuration

To configure the plugin, make a mbsubmit: section in your configuration file. The following options are available:

  • format: The format used for printing the tracks, defined using the same template syntax as beets’ path formats. Default: $track. $title - $artist ($length).
  • threshold: The minimum strength of the autotagger recommendation that will cause the Print tracks choice to be displayed on the prompt. Default: medium (causing the choice to be displayed for all albums that have a recommendation of medium strength or lower). Valid values: none, low, medium, strong.

Please note that some values of the threshold configuration option might require other beets command line switches to be enabled in order to work as intended. In particular, setting a threshold of strong will only display the prompt if timid mode is enabled. You can find more information about how the recommendation system works at Autotagger Matching Options.