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

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

Metadata

• AcousticBrainz Plugin: Fetch various AcousticBrainz metadata
• BPM Plugin: Measure tempo using keystrokes.
• Echo Nest Plugin: Automatically fetch acoustic attributes from the Echo Nest (tempo, energy, danceability, ...).
• Edit Plugin: Edit metadata from a texteditor.
• 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).
• 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

• 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

• EmbyUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Emby whenever the beets library changes.
• 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.
• MPDUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies MPD whenever the beets library changes.
• Play Plugin: Play beets queries in your music player.
• PlexUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies Plex whenever the beets library changes.
• Smart Playlist Plugin: Generate smart playlists based on beets queries.
• Thumbnails Plugin: Get thumbnails with the cover art on your album folders.
• Bad Files Plugin: Check audio file integrity.

Miscellaneous

• 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.
• Fuzzy Search Plugin: Search albums and tracks with fuzzy string matching.
• IHate Plugin: Automatically skip albums and tracks during the import process.
• Info Plugin: Print music files’ tags to the console.
• 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.
• Random Plugin: Randomly choose albums and tracks from your library.
• FileFilter Plugin: Automatically skip files during the import process based on regular expressions.
• 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:

• beetFs is a FUSE filesystem for browsing the music in your beets library. (Might be out of date.)
• A cmus plugin integrates with the cmus console music player.
• beets-artistcountry fetches the artist’s country of origin from MusicBrainz.
• dsedivec has two plugins: edit and moveall.
• beet-amazon adds Amazon.com as a tagger data source.
• copyartifacts helps bring non-music files along during import.
• beets-check automatically checksums your files to detect corruption.
• beets-alternatives manages external files.
• beets-follow lets you check for new albums from artists you like.
• beets-setlister generate playlists from the setlists of a given artist.
• beets-noimport adds and removes directories from the incremental import skip list.
• whatlastgenre fetches genres from various music sites.
• beets-usertag lets you use keywords to tag and organize your music.