Echo Nest Plugin

The echonest plugin fetches acoustic attributes from the Echo Nest. It automatically fills in the following attributes:

  • danceability
  • energy
  • liveness
  • loudness
  • speechiness
  • bpm

All attributes except bpm are stored in flexible attributes (i.e., not in files’ metadata). See the Echo Nest’s page on acoustic attributes for a detailed description. (Their name for bpm is tempo.)

Installing Dependencies

This plugin requires the pyechonest library in order to talk to the Echo Nest API. At least version 8.0.1 is required.

There are packages for most major linux distributions, you can download the library from the Echo Nest, or you can install the library from pip, like so:

$ pip install pyechonest

To transcode music for server-side analysis (optional, of course), install the ffmpeg command-line tool.

Finally, enable the echonest plugin in your configuration (see Using Plugins).

Configuration

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

  • apikey: A custom EchoNest API key. You can apply for your own for free from the EchoNest. Default: beets’ own Echo Nest API key.
  • auto: Enable automatic metadata fetching during import. Default: yes.
  • upload: Send files to the Echo Nest server if they can not be identified by other means. Default: yes.
  • convert: Because the Echo Nest server only supports a limited range of file formats, the plugin automatically converts unsupported files to ogg. Default: yes.
  • truncate: Automatically truncate large files to their first 5 minutes before uploading them to The Echo Nest server (as files with sizes greater than 50MB are rejected). Default: yes.

Running Manually

In addition to running automatically on import, the plugin can also be run manually from the command line. Use the command beet echonest [QUERY] to fetch acoustic attributes for albums matching a certain query.