beetbox/beets v1.3.12

beets 1.3.12

on GitHub

This little update makes queries more powerful, sorts music more intelligently, and removes a performance bottleneck. There's an experimental new plugin for synchronizing metadata with music players.

Packagers should also note a new dependency in this version: the Jellyfish Python library makes our text comparisons (a big part of the auto-tagging process) go much faster.

New features:

• Queries can now use "or" logic: if you use a comma to separate parts of a query, items and albums will match either side of the comma. For example, beet ls foo , bar will get all the items matching foo or matching bar. See combiningqueries. #1423
• The autotagger's matching algorithm is faster. We now use the Jellyfish library to compute string similarity, which is better optimized than our hand-rolled edit distance implementation. #1389
• Sorting is now case insensitive by default. This means that artists will be sorted lexicographically regardless of case. For example, the artist alt-J will now properly sort before YACHT. (Previously, it would have ended up at the end of the list, after all the capital-letter artists.) You can turn this new behavior off using the sort_case_insensitive configuration option. See query-sort. #1429
• An experimental new metasync lets you get metadata from your favorite music players, starting with Amarok. #1386
• fetchart: There are new settings to control what constitutes "acceptable" images. The minwidth option constrains the minimum image width in pixels and the enforce_ratio option requires that images be square. #1394

Little fixes and improvements:

• fetchart: Remove a hard size limit when fetching from the Cover Art Archive.
• The output of the fields command is now sorted. Thanks to @multikatt. #1402
• replaygain: Fix a number of issues with the new bs1770gain backend on Windows. Also, fix missing debug output in import mode. #1398
• Beets should now be better at guessing the appropriate output encoding on Windows. (Specifically, the console output encoding is guessed separately from the encoding for command-line arguments.) A bug was also fixed where beets would ignore the locale settings and use UTF-8 by default. #1419
• discogs: Better error handling when we can't communicate with Discogs on setup. #1417
• importadded: Fix a crash when importing singletons in-place. #1416
• fuzzy: Fix a regression causing a crash in the last release. #1422
• Fix a crash when the importer cannot open its log file. Thanks to @barsanuphe. #1426
• Fix an error when trying to write tags for items with flexible fields called date and original_date (which are not built-in beets fields). #1404