Edit Plugin#

The edit plugin lets you modify music metadata using your favorite text editor.

Enable the edit plugin in your configuration (see Using Plugins) and then type:

beet edit QUERY

Your text editor (i.e., the command in your $VISUAL or $EDITOR environment variable) will open with a list of tracks to edit. Make your changes and exit your text editor to apply them to your music.

Command-Line Options#

The edit command has these command-line options:

  • -a or --album: Edit albums instead of individual items.

  • -f FIELD or --field FIELD: Specify an additional field to edit (in addition to the defaults set in the configuration).

  • --all: Edit all available fields.

Interactive Usage#

The edit plugin can also be invoked during an import session. If enabled, it adds two new options to the user prompt:

[A]pply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums, Enter search, enter Id, aBort, eDit, edit Candidates?

  • eDit: use this option for using the original items’ metadata as the starting point for your edits.

  • edit Candidates: use this option for using a candidate’s metadata as the starting point for your edits.

When editing an album during import (i.e., after you have chosen eDit or edit Candidates for an album import), the fields listed in albumfields are shown as a YAML header section before the per-track documents. This allows you to edit album-level fields (such as album, albumartist, or any configured albumfields entry) for all tracks at once. Fields that appear in both itemfields and albumfields are shown only in the header section, not per-track.

Also, please be aware that the edit Candidates choice can only be used with the matches found during the initial search (and currently not supporting the candidates found via the Enter search or enter Id choices). You might find the --search-id SEARCH_ID import option useful for those cases where you already have a specific candidate ID that you want to edit.

Configuration#

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

  • itemfields: A space-separated list of item fields to include in the editor by default. Default: track title artist album

  • albumfields: The same when editing albums (with the -a option). Default: album albumartist. These fields are also shown as a YAML header during interactive import when editing an album import.