Command-Line Interface¶
beet is the command-line interface to beets.
You invoke beets by specifying a command, like so:
beet COMMAND [ARGS...]
The rest of this document describes the available
commands. If you ever need a quick list of what’s available, just
type beet help
or beet help COMMAND
for help with a specific
command.
Beets also offers shell completion. For bash, see the completion
command; for zsh, see the accompanying completion script for the
beet
command.
Commands¶
Here are the built-in commands available in beets:
Also be sure to see the global flags.
import¶
beet import [-CWAPRqst] [-l LOGPATH] PATH...
beet import [options] -L QUERY
Add music to your library, attempting to get correct tags for it from MusicBrainz.
Point the command at some music: directories, single files, or compressed archives. The music will be copied to a configurable directory structure and added to a library database. The command is interactive and will try to get you to verify MusicBrainz tags that it thinks are suspect. See the autotagging guide for detail on how to use the interactive tag-correction flow.
Directories passed to the import command can contain either a single album or many, in which case the leaf directories will be considered albums (the latter case is true of typical Artist/Album organizations and many people’s “downloads” folders). The path can also be a single song or an archive. Beets supports zip and tar archives out of the box. To extract rar files, install the rarfile package and the unrar command.
Optional command flags:
- By default, the command copies files your the library directory and
updates the ID3 tags on your music. If you’d like to leave your music
files untouched, try the
-C
(don’t copy) and-W
(don’t write tags) options. You can also disable this behavior by default in the configuration file (below). - Also, you can disable the autotagging behavior entirely using
-A
(don’t autotag)—then your music will be imported with its existing metadata. - During a long tagging import, it can be useful to keep track of albums
that weren’t tagged successfully—either because they’re not in the
MusicBrainz database or because something’s wrong with the files. Use the
-l
option to specify a filename to log every time you skip an album or import it “as-is” or an album gets skipped as a duplicate. - Relatedly, the
-q
(quiet) option can help with large imports by autotagging without ever bothering to ask for user input. Whenever the normal autotagger mode would ask for confirmation, the quiet mode pessimistically skips the album. The quiet mode also disables the tagger’s ability to resume interrupted imports. - Speaking of resuming interrupted imports, the tagger will prompt you if it
seems like the last import of the directory was interrupted (by you or by
a crash). If you want to skip this prompt, you can say “yes” automatically
by providing
-p
or “no” using-P
. The resuming feature can be disabled by default using a configuration option (see below). - If you want to import only the new stuff from a directory, use the
-i
option to run an incremental import. With this flag, beets will keep track of every directory it ever imports and avoid importing them again. This is useful if you have an “incoming” directory that you periodically add things to. To get this to work correctly, you’ll need to use an incremental import every time you run an import on the directory in question—including the first time, when no subdirectories will be skipped. So consider enabling theincremental
configuration option. - By default, beets will proceed without asking if it finds a very close
metadata match. To disable this and have the importer ask you every time,
use the
-t
(for timid) option. - The importer typically works in a whole-album-at-a-time mode. If you
instead want to import individual, non-album tracks, use the singleton
mode by supplying the
-s
option. - If you have an album that’s split across several directories under a common
top directory, use the
--flat
option. This takes all the music files under the directory (recursively) and treats them as a single large album instead of as one album per directory. This can help with your more stubborn multi-disc albums. - Similarly, if you have one directory that contains multiple albums, use the
--group-albums
option to split the files based on their metadata before matching them as separate albums. - If you want to preview which files would be imported, use the
--pretend
option. If set, beets will just print a list of files that it would otherwise import. - If you already have a metadata backend ID that matches the items to be
imported, you can instruct beets to restrict the search to that ID instead of
searching for other candidates by using the
--search-id SEARCH_ID
option. Multiple IDs can be specified by simply repeating the option several times.
Reimporting¶
The import
command can also be used to “reimport” music that you’ve
already added to your library. This is useful when you change your mind
about some selections you made during the initial import, or if you prefer
to import everything “as-is” and then correct tags later.
Just point the beet import
command at a directory of files that are
already catalogged in your library. Beets will automatically detect this
situation and avoid duplicating any items. In this situation, the “copy
files” option (-c
/-C
on the command line or copy
in the
config file) has slightly different behavior: it causes files to be moved,
rather than duplicated, if they’re already in your library. (The same is
true, of course, if move
is enabled.) That is, your directory
structure will be updated to reflect the new tags if copying is enabled; you
never end up with two copies of the file.
The -L
(--library
) flag is also useful for retagging. Instead of
listing paths you want to import on the command line, specify a query
string that matches items from your library. In this case, the
-s
(singleton) flag controls whether the query matches individual items
or full albums. If you want to retag your whole library, just supply a null
query, which matches everything: beet import -L
Note that, if you just want to update your files’ tags according to
changes in the MusicBrainz database, the MBSync Plugin is a
better choice. Reimporting uses the full matching machinery to guess
metadata matches; mbsync
just relies on MusicBrainz IDs.
list¶
beet list [-apf] QUERY
Queries the database for music.
Want to search for “Gronlandic Edit” by of Montreal? Try beet list
gronlandic
. Maybe you want to see everything released in 2009 with
“vegetables” in the title? Try beet list year:2009 title:vegetables
. You
can also specify the sort order. (Read more in Queries.)
You can use the -a
switch to search for albums instead of individual items.
In this case, the queries you use are restricted to album-level fields: for
example, you can search for year:1969
but query parts for item-level fields
like title:foo
will be ignored. Remember that artist
is an item-level
field; albumartist
is the corresponding album field.
The -p
option makes beets print out filenames of matched items, which might
be useful for piping into other Unix commands (such as xargs). Similarly, the
-f
option lets you specify a specific format with which to print every album
or track. This uses the same template syntax as beets’ path formats. For example, the command beet ls -af '$album: $tracktotal'
beatles
prints out the number of tracks on each Beatles album. In Unix shells,
remember to enclose the template argument in single quotes to avoid environment
variable expansion.
remove¶
beet remove [-ad] QUERY
Remove music from your library.
This command uses the same query syntax as the list
command.
You’ll be shown a list of the files that will be removed and asked to confirm.
By default, this just removes entries from the library database; it doesn’t
touch the files on disk. To actually delete the files, use beet remove -d
.
modify¶
beet modify [-MWay] QUERY [FIELD=VALUE...] [FIELD!...]
Change the metadata for items or albums in the database.
Supply a query matching the things you want to change and a
series of field=value
pairs. For example, beet modify genius of love
artist="Tom Tom Club"
will change the artist for the track “Genius of Love.”
To remove fields (which is only possible for flexible attributes), follow a
field name with an exclamation point: field!
.
The -a
switch operates on albums instead of
individual tracks. Items will automatically be moved around when necessary if
they’re in your library directory, but you can disable that with -M
. Tags
will be written to the files according to the settings you have for imports,
but these can be overridden with -w
(write tags, the default) and -W
(don’t write tags). Finally, this command politely asks for your permission
before making any changes, but you can skip that prompt with the -y
switch.
move¶
beet move [-capt] [-d DIR] QUERY
Move or copy items in your library.
This command, by default, acts as a library consolidator: items matching the
query are renamed into your library directory structure. By specifying a
destination directory with -d
manually, you can move items matching a query
anywhere in your filesystem. The -c
option copies files instead of moving
them. As with other commands, the -a
option matches albums instead of items.
To perform a “dry run”, just use the -p
(for “pretend”) flag. This will
show you a list of files that would be moved but won’t actually change anything
on disk. The -t
option sets the timid mode which will ask again
before really moving or copying the files.
update¶
beet update [-aM] QUERY
Update the library (and, optionally, move files) to reflect out-of-band metadata changes and file deletions.
This will scan all the matched files and read their tags, populating the
database with the new values. By default, files will be renamed according to
their new metadata; disable this with -M
. Beets will skip files if their
modification times have not changed, so any out-of-band metadata changes must
also update these for beet update
to recognise that the files have been
edited.
To perform a “dry run” of an update, just use the -p
(for “pretend”) flag.
This will show you all the proposed changes but won’t actually change anything
on disk.
When an updated track is part of an album, the album-level fields of all
tracks from the album are also updated. (Specifically, the command copies
album-level data from the first track on the album and applies it to the
rest of the tracks.) This means that, if album-level fields aren’t identical
within an album, some changes shown by the update
command may be
overridden by data from other tracks on the same album. This means that
running the update
command multiple times may show the same changes being
applied.
write¶
beet write [-pf] [QUERY]
Write metadata from the database into files’ tags.
When you make changes to the metadata stored in beets’ library database
(during import or with the modify command, for example), you often
have the option of storing changes only in the database, leaving your files
untouched. The write
command lets you later change your mind and write the
contents of the database into the files. By default, this writes the changes only if there is a difference between the database and the tags in the file.
You can think of this command as the opposite of update.
The -p
option previews metadata changes without actually applying them.
The -f
option forces a write to the file, even if the file tags match the database. This is useful for making sure that enabled plugins that run on write (e.g., the Scrub and Zero plugins) are run on the file.
stats¶
beet stats [-e] [QUERY]
Show some statistics on your entire library (if you don’t provide a query) or the matched items (if you do).
By default, the command calculates file sizes using their bitrate and
duration. The -e
(--exact
) option reads the exact sizes of each file
(but is slower). The exact mode also outputs the exact duration in seconds.
fields¶
beet fields
Show the item and album metadata fields available for use in Queries and Path Formats. The listing includes any template fields provided by plugins and any flexible attributes you’ve manually assigned to your items and albums.
config¶
beet config [-pdc]
beet config -e
Show or edit the user configuration. This command does one of three things:
- With no options, print a YAML representation of the current user
configuration. With the
--default
option, beets’ default options are also included in the dump. - The
--path
option instead shows the path to your configuration file. This can be combined with the--default
flag to show where beets keeps its internal defaults. - By default, sensitive information like passwords is removed when dumping the
configuration. The
--clear
option includes this sensitive data. - With the
--edit
option, beets attempts to open your config file for editing. It first tries the$EDITOR
environment variable and then a fallback option depending on your platform:open
on OS X,xdg-open
on Unix, and direct invocation on Windows.
Global Flags¶
Beets has a few “global” flags that affect all commands. These must appear
between the executable name (beet
) and the command—for example, beet -v
import ...
.
-l LIBPATH
: specify the library database file to use.-d DIRECTORY
: specify the library root directory.-v
: verbose mode; prints out a deluge of debugging information. Please use this flag when reporting bugs. You can use it twice, as in-vv
, to make beets even more verbose.-c FILE
: read a specified YAML configuration file.
Beets also uses the BEETSDIR
environment variable to look for
configuration and data.
Shell Completion¶
Beets includes support for shell command completion. The command beet
completion
prints out a bash 3.2 script; to enable completion put a line
like this into your .bashrc
or similar file:
eval "$(beet completion)"
Or, to avoid slowing down your shell startup time, you can pipe the beet
completion
output to a file and source that instead.
You will also need to source the bash-completion script, which is probably
available via your package manager. On OS X, you can install it via Homebrew
with brew install bash-completion
; Homebrew will give you instructions for
sourcing the script.
The completion script suggests names of subcommands and (after typing
-
) options of the given command. If you are using a command that
accepts a query, the script will also complete field names.
beet list ar[TAB]
# artist: artist_credit: artist_sort: artpath:
beet list artp[TAB]
beet list artpath\:
(Don’t worry about the slash in front of the colon: this is a escape sequence for the shell and won’t be seen by beets.)
Completion of plugin commands only works for those plugins
that were enabled when running beet completion
. If you add a plugin
later on you will want to re-generate the script.
zsh¶
If you use zsh, take a look at the included completion script.
Another approach is to use zsh’s bash completion compatibility. This snippet defines some bash-specific functions to make this work without errors:
autoload bashcompinit
bashcompinit
_get_comp_words_by_ref() { :; }
compopt() { :; }
_filedir() { :; }
eval "$(beet completion)"