LastGenre Plugin ================ The MusicBrainz database `does not contain genre information`_. Therefore, when importing and autotagging music, beets does not assign a genre. The ``lastgenre`` plugin fetches *tags* from `Last.fm`_ and assigns them as genres to your albums and items. The plugin is included with beets as of version 1.0b11. .. _does not contain genre information: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/General_FAQ#Why_does_MusicBrainz_not_support_genre_information.3F .. _Last.fm: http://last.fm/ The plugin requires `pylast`_, which you can install using `pip`_ by typing:: pip install pylast After you have pylast installed, enable the plugin by putting ``lastgenre`` on your ``plugins`` line in :doc:`config file `. The plugin chooses genres based on a *whitelist*, meaning that only certain tags can be considered genres. This way, tags like "my favorite music" or "seen live" won't be considered genres. The plugin ships with a fairly extensive internal whitelist, but you can set your own in the config file using the ``whitelist`` configuration value:: lastgenre: whitelist: /path/to/genres.txt The genre list file should contain one genre per line. Blank lines are ignored. For the curious, the default genre list is generated by a `script that scrapes Wikipedia`_. .. _pip: http://www.pip-installer.org/ .. _pylast: http://code.google.com/p/pylast/ .. _script that scrapes Wikipedia: https://gist.github.com/1241307 By default, beets will always fetch new genres, even if the files already have once. To instead leave genres in place in when they pass the whitelist, set the ``force`` option to "no". If no genre is found, the file will be left unchanged. To instead specify a fallback genre, use the ``fallback`` configuration option. You can, of course, use the empty string as a fallback, like so:: lastgenre: fallback: '' Canonicalization ---------------- The plugin can also *canonicalize* genres, meaning that more obscure genres can be turned into coarser-grained ones that are present in the whitelist. This works using a tree of nested genre names, represented using `YAML`_, where the leaves of the tree represent the most specific genres. To enable canonicalization, set the ``canonical`` configuration value:: lastgenre: canonical: '' Setting this value to the empty string will use a built-in canonicalization tree. You can also set it to a path, just like the ``whitelist`` config value, to use your own tree. .. _YAML: http://www.yaml.org/ Genre Source ------------ When looking up genres for albums or individual tracks, you can choose whether to use Last.fm tags on the album, the artist, or the track. For example, you might want all the albums for a certain artist to carry the same genre. Set the ``source`` configuration value to "album", "track", or "artist", like so:: lastgenre: source: artist The default is "album". When set to "track", the plugin will fetch *both* album-level and track-level genres for your music when importing albums. Running Manually ---------------- In addition to running automatically on import, the plugin can also run manually from the command line. Use the command ``beet lastgenre [QUERY]`` to fetch genres for albums matching a certain query. To disable automatic genre fetching on import, set the ``auto`` config option to false.