Smart Playlist Plugin

smartplaylist is a plugin to generate smart playlists in m3u format based on beets queries every time your library changes. This plugin is specifically created to work well with MPD’s playlist functionality.

To use it, enable the plugin by putting smartplaylist in the plugins section in your config.yaml. Then configure your smart playlists like the following example:

smartplaylist:
    relative_to: ~/Music
    playlist_dir: ~/.mpd/playlists
    playlists:
        - query: ''
          name: all.m3u

        - query: 'artist:Beatles'
          name: beatles.m3u

If you intend to use this plugin to generate playlists for MPD, you should set relative_to to your MPD music directory (by default, relative_to is None, and the absolute paths to your music files will be generated).

playlist_dir is where the generated playlist files will be put.

You can generate as many playlists as you want by adding them to the playlists section, using beets query syntax (see Queries) for query and the file name to be generated for name. The query will be split using shell-like syntax, so if you need to use spaces in the query, be sure to quote them (e.g., artist:"The Beatles"). If you have existing files with the same names, you should back them up—they will be overwritten when the plugin runs.

For more advanced usage, you can use template syntax (see Path Formats) in the name field. For example:

- query: 'year::201(0|1)'
  name: 'ReleasedIn$year.m3u'

This will query all the songs in 2010 and 2011 and generate the two playlist files ReleasedIn2010.m3u and ReleasedIn2011.m3u using those songs.

By default, all playlists are regenerated after every beets command that changes the library database. To force regeneration, you can invoke it manually from the command line:

$ beet splupdate

which will generate your new smart playlists.

You can also use this plugin together with the MPDUpdate Plugin, in order to automatically notify MPD of the playlist change, by adding mpdupdate to the plugins line in your config file after the smartplaylist plugin.