Smart Playlist PluginΒΆ
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:
- name: all.m3u
query: ''
- name: beatles.m3u
query: 'artist:Beatles'
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:
- name: 'ReleasedIn$year.m3u'
query: 'year::201(0|1)'
This will query all the songs in 2010 and 2011 and generate the two playlist files ReleasedIn2010.m3u and ReleasedIn2011.m3u using those songs.
You can also gather the results of several queries by putting them in a list. (Items that match both queries are not included twice.) For example:
- name: 'BeatlesUniverse.m3u'
query: ['artist:beatles', 'genre:"beatles cover"']
For querying albums instead of items (mainly useful with extensible fields),
use the album_query
field. query
and album_query
can be used at the
same time. The following example gathers single items but also items belonging
to albums that have a for_travel
extensible field set to 1:
- name: 'MyTravelPlaylist.m3u'
album_query: 'for_travel:1'
query: 'for_travel:1'
By default, all playlists are automatically regenerated after every beets
command that changes the library database. This can be disabled by specifying
auto: no
. 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.