.beetsconfig

The beet command reads configuration information from ~/.beetsconfig on Unix-like OSes (inluding Mac OS X) and %APPDATA%\beetsconfig.ini on Windows. The file is in INI format.

Options

These options are available, all of which must appear under the [beets] section header:

library
Path to the beets library file. Defaults to ~/.beetsmusic.blb on Unix and %APPDATA\beetsmusic.blb on Windows.
directory
The directory to which files will be copied/moved when adding them to the library. Defaults to ~/Music.
import_write
Either yes or no, controlling whether metadata (e.g., ID3) tags are written to files when using beet import. Defaults to yes. The -w and -W command-line options override this setting.
import_copy

Either yes or no, indicating whether to copy files into the library directory when using beet import. Defaults to yes. Can be overridden with the -c and -C command-line options.

The option is ignored if import_move is enabled (i.e., beets can move or copy files but it doesn’t make sense to do both).

import_move

Either yes or no, indicating whether to move files into the library directory when using beet import. Defaults to no.

The effect is similar to the import_copy option but you end up with only one copy of the imported file. (“Moving” works even across filesystems; if necessary, beets will copy and then delete when a simple rename is impossible.) Moving files can be risky—it’s a good idea to keep a backup in case beets doesn’t do what you expect with your files.

This option overrides import_copy, so enabling it will always move (and not copy) files. The -c switch to the beet import command, however, still takes precedence.

import_resume
Either yes, no, or ask. Controls whether interrupted imports should be resumed. “Yes” means that imports are always resumed when possible; “no” means resuming is disabled entirely; “ask” (the default) means that the user should be prompted when resuming is possible. The -p and -P flags correspond to the “yes” and “no” settings and override this option.
import_incremental
Either yes or no, controlling whether imported directories are recorded and whether these recorded directories are skipped. This corresponds to the -i flag to beet import.
import_art
Either yes or no, indicating whether the autotagger should attempt to find and download album cover art for the files it imports. Defaults to yes. The -r and -R command-line options override this setting.
import_quiet_fallback
Either skip (default) or asis, specifying what should happen in quiet mode (see the -q flag to import, above) when there is no strong recommendation.
import_timid
Either yes or no, controlling whether the importer runs in timid mode, in which it asks for confirmation on every autotagging match, even the ones that seem very close. Defaults to no. The -t command-line flag controls the same setting.
import_log
Specifies a filename where the importer’s log should be kept. By default, no log is written. This can be overridden with the -l flag to import.
ignore
A space-separated list of glob patterns specifying file and directory names to be ignored when importing. Defaults to .* *~ (i.e., ignore Unix-style hidden files and backup files).
replace

A set of regular expression/replacement pairs to be applied to all filenames created by beets. Typically, these replacements are used to avoid confusing problems or errors with the filesystem (for example, leading . characters are replaced on Unix and trailing whitespace is removed on Windows). To override these substitutions, specify a sequence of whitespace-separated terms; the first term is a regular expression and the second is a string that should replace anything matching that regex. For example, replace = [xy] z will make beets replace all instances of the characters x or y with the character z.

If you do change this value, be certain that you include at least enough substitutions to avoid causing errors on your operating system. Here are the default substitutions used by beets, which are sufficient to avoid unexpected behavior on all popular platforms:

replace = [\\/] _
          ^\. _
          [\x00-\x1f] _
          [<>:"\?\*\|] _
          \.$ _
          \s+$ <strip>

These substitutions remove forward and back slashes, leading dots, and control characters—all of which is a good idea on any OS. The fourth line removes the Windows “reserved characters” (useful even on Unix for for compatibility with Windows-influenced network filesystems like Samba). Trailing dots and trailing whitespace, which can cause problems on Windows clients, are also removed.

To replace space characters, use the \s (whitespace) entity:

replace = \s _
          ...

This will avoid using a literal space and thus confusing beets. (\s also matches tabs and newlines, but that is probably fine.)

To remove characters entirely, use <strip> as the replacement. For example, to remove all vowels from your filenames:

replace = [aeiou] <strip>
          ...
art_filename
When importing album art, the name of the file (without extension) where the cover art image should be placed. Defaults to cover (i.e., images will be named cover.jpg or cover.png and placed in the album’s directory).
plugins
A space-separated list of plugin module names to load. For instance, beets includes the BPD plugin for playing music.
pluginpath
A colon-separated list of directories to search for plugins. These paths are just added to sys.path before the plugins are loaded. The plugins still have to be contained in a beetsplug namespace package.
threaded
Either yes or no, indicating whether the autotagger should use multiple threads. This makes things faster but may behave strangely. Defaults to yes.
color
Either yes or no; whether to use color in console output (currently only in the import command). Turn this off if your terminal doesn’t support ANSI colors.
timeout
The amount of time that the SQLite library should wait before raising an exception when the database lock is contended. This should almost never need to be changed except on very slow systems. Defaults to 5.0 (5 seconds).
import_delete

Either yes or no. When enabled in conjunction with import_copy, deletes original files after they are copied into your library. Has no effect if the importer is in import_move mode or “leave files in place” mode. Defaults to no.

This option is historical and deprecated: it’s almost always more appropriate to use import_move instead.

Path Format Configuration

You can also configure the directory hierarchy beets uses to store music. These settings appear under the [paths] section (rather than the main [beets] section we used above). Each string is a template string that can refer to metadata fields like $artist or $title. The filename extension is added automatically. At the moment, you can specify three special paths: default for most releases, comp for “various artist” releases with no dominant artist, and singleton for non-album tracks. The defaults look like this:

[paths]
default: $albumartist/$album%aunique{}/$track $title
singleton: Non-Album/$artist/$title
comp: Compilations/$album%aunique{}/$track $title

Note the use of $albumartist instead of $artist; this ensure that albums will be well-organized. For more about these format strings, see Path Formats. The aunique{} function ensures that identically-named albums are placed in different directories; see Album Disambiguation for details.

In addition to default, comp, and singleton, you can condition path queries based on beets queries (see Queries). There’s one catch: because the : character is reserved for separating the query from the template string, the _ character is substituted for : in these queries. This means that a config file like this:

[paths]
albumtype_soundtrack: Soundtracks/$album/$track $title

will place soundtrack albums in a separate directory. The queries are tested in the order they appear in the configuration file, meaning that if an item matches multiple queries, beets will use the path format for the first matching query.

Note that the special singleton and comp path format conditions are, in fact, just shorthand for the explicit queries singleton_true and comp_true. In contrast, default is special and has no query equivalent: the default format is only used if no queries match.

Example

Here’s an example file:

[beets]
library: /var/music.blb
directory: /var/mp3
path_format: $genre/$artist/$album/$track $title
import_copy: yes
import_write: yes
import_resume: ask
import_art: yes
import_quiet_fallback: skip
import_timid: no
import_log: beetslog.txt
ignore: .AppleDouble ._* *~ .DS_Store
art_filename: albumart
plugins: bpd
pluginpath: ~/beets/myplugins
threaded: yes
color: yes

[paths]
default: $genre/$albumartist/$album/$track $title
singleton: Singletons/$artist - $title
comp: $genre/$album/$track $title
albumtype_soundtrack: Soundtracks/$album/$track $title

[bpd]
host: 127.0.0.1
port: 6600
password: seekrit

(That [bpd] section configures the optional BPD plugin.)

Location

The configuration file is typically located at $HOME/.beetsconfig. If you want to store your .beetsconfig file somewhere else for whatever reason, you can specify its path by setting the BEETSCONFIG environment variable.

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