beetbox/beets v1.3.16

beets 1.3.16

on GitHub

The big news in this release is a new interactive editor plugin. It's really nifty: you can now change your music's metadata by making changes in a visual text editor, which can sometimes be far more efficient than the built-in modify-cmd` command. No more carefully retyping the same artist name with slight capitalization changes.

This version also adds an oft-requested "not" operator to beets' queries, so you can exclude music from any operation. It also brings friendlier formatting (and querying!) of song durations.

The big new stuff:

• A new edit lets you manually edit your music's metadata using your favorite text editor. #164 #1706
• Queries can now use "not" logic. Type a ^ before part of a query to exclude matching music from the results. For example, beet list -a beatles ^album:1 will find all your albums by the Beatles except for their singles compilation, "1." See not_query. #819 #1728
• A new embyupdate can trigger a library refresh on an Emby server when your beets database changes.
• Track length is now displayed as "M:SS" rather than a raw number of seconds. Queries on track length also accept this format: for example, beet list length:5:30.. will find all your tracks that have a duration over 5 minutes and 30 seconds. You can turn off this new behavior using the format_raw_length configuration option. #1749

Smaller changes:

• Three commands, modify, update, and mbsync, would previously move files by default after changing their metadata. Now, these commands will only move files if you have the config-import-copy or config-import-move options enabled in your importer configuration. This way, if you configure the importer not to touch your filenames, other commands will respect that decision by default too. Each command also sprouted a --move command-line option to override this default (in addition to the --nomove flag they already had). #1697
• A new configuration option, va_name, controls the album artist name for various-artists albums. The setting defaults to "Various Artists," the MusicBrainz standard. In order to match MusicBrainz, the discogs also adopts the same setting.
• info: The info command now accepts a -f/--format option for customizing how items are displayed, just like the built-in list command. #1737

Some changes for developers:

• Two new plugin hooks , albuminfo_received and trackinfo_received, let plugins intercept metadata as soon as it is received, before it is applied to music in the database. #872
• Plugins can now add options to the interactive importer prompts. See append_prompt_choices. #1758

Fixes:

• plexupdate: Fix a crash when Plex libraries use non-ASCII collection names. #1649
• discogs: Maybe fix a crash when using some versions of the requests library. #1656
• Fix a race in the importer when importing two albums with the same artist and name in quick succession. The importer would fail to detect them as duplicates, claiming that there were "empty albums" in the database even when there were not. #1652
• plugins/lastgenre: Clean up the reggae-related genres somewhat. Thanks to @Freso. #1661
• The importer now correctly moves album art files when re-importing. #314
• fetchart: In auto mode, the plugin now skips albums that already have art attached to them so as not to interfere with re-imports. #314
• fetchart: The plugin now only resizes album art if necessary, rather than always by default. #1264
• fetchart: Fix a bug where a database reference to a non-existent album art file would prevent the command from fetching new art. #1126
• thumbnails: Fix a crash with Unicode paths. #1686
• embedart: The remove_art_file option now works on import (as well as with the explicit command). #1662 #1675
• metasync: Fix a crash when syncing with recent versions of iTunes. #1700
• duplicates: Fix a crash when merging items. #1699
• smartplaylist: More gracefully handle malformed queries and missing configuration.
• Fix a crash with some files with unreadable iTunes SoundCheck metadata. #1666
• thumbnails: Fix a nasty segmentation fault crash that arose with some library versions. #1433
• convert: Fix a crash with Unicode paths in --pretend mode. #1735
• Fix a crash when sorting by nonexistent fields on queries. #1734
• Probably fix some mysterious errors when dealing with images using ImageMagick on Windows. #1721
• Fix a crash when writing some Unicode comment strings to MP3s that used older encodings. The encoding is now always updated to UTF-8. #879
• fetchart: The Google Images backend has been removed. It used an API that has been shut down. #1760
• lyrics: Fix a crash in the Google backend when searching for bands with regular-expression characters in their names, like Sunn O))). #1673
• scrub: In auto mode, the plugin now actually only scrubs files on import, as the documentation always claimed it did---not every time files were written, as it previously did. #1657
• scrub: Also in auto mode, album art is now correctly restored. #1657
• Possibly allow flexible attributes to be used with the %aunique template function. #1775
• lyrics: The Genius backend is now more robust to communication errors. The backend has also been disabled by default, since the API it depends on is currently down. #1770