Play Plugin

The play plugin allows you to pass the results of a query to a music player in the form of an m3u playlist.

Usage

To use the play plugin, enable it in your configuration (see Using Plugins). Then use it by invoking the beet play command with a query. The command will create a temporary m3u file and open it using an appropriate application. You can query albums instead of tracks using the -a option.

By default, the playlist is opened using the open command on OS X, xdg-open on other Unixes, and start on Windows. To configure the command, you can use a play: section in your configuration file:

play:
    command: /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC

You can also specify additional space-separated options to command (like you would on the command-line):

play:
    command: /usr/bin/command --option1 --option2 some_other_option

Enable beets’ verbose logging to see the command’s output if you need to debug.

Configuration

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

  • command: The command used to open the playlist. Default: open on OS X, xdg-open on other Unixes and start on Windows.
  • relative_to: Emit paths relative to base directory. Default: None.
  • use_folders: When using the -a option, the m3u will contain the paths to each track on the matched albums. Enable this option to store paths to folders instead. Default: no.