Plugins¶
Plugins extend beets’ core functionality. They add new commands, fetch additional data during import, provide new metadata sources, and much more. If beets by itself doesn’t do what you want it to, you may just need to enable a plugin—or, if you want to do something new, writing a plugin is easy if you know a little Python.
Using Plugins¶
To use one of the plugins included with beets (see the rest of this page for a list), just use the plugins option in your config.yaml file, like so:
plugins: inline discogs web
The value for plugins can be a space-separated list of plugin names or a YAML list like [foo, bar]. You can see which plugins are currently enabled by typing beet version.
Autotagger Extensions¶
- Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Use acoustic fingerprinting to identify audio files with missing or incorrect metadata.
- Discogs Plugin: Search for releases in the Discogs database.
- FromFilename Plugin: Guess metadata for untagged tracks from their filenames.
Metadata¶
- Lyrics Plugin: Automatically fetch song lyrics.
- Echo Nest Plugin: Automatically fetch acoustic attributes from the Echo Nest (tempo, energy, danceability, ...).
- LastGenre Plugin: Fetch genres based on Last.fm tags.
- MBSync Plugin: Fetch updated metadata from MusicBrainz
- FetchArt Plugin: Fetch album cover art from various sources.
- EmbedArt Plugin: Embed album art images into files’ metadata.
- ReplayGain Plugin: Calculate volume normalization for players that support it.
- Scrub Plugin: Clean extraneous metadata from music files.
- Zero Plugin: Nullify fields by pattern or unconditionally.
- FtInTitle Plugin: Move “featured” artists from the artist field to the title field.
- MPDStats Plugin: Connect to MPD and update the beets library with play statistics (last_played, play_count, skip_count, rating).
Path Formats¶
- Inline Plugin: Use Python snippets to customize path format strings.
- Rewrite Plugin: Substitute values in path formats.
- The Plugin: Move patterns in path formats (i.e., move “a” and “the” to the end).
Interoperability¶
- MPDUpdate Plugin: Automatically notifies MPD whenever the beets library changes.
- ImportFeeds Plugin: Keep track of imported files via .m3u playlist file(s) or symlinks.
- Smart Playlist Plugin: Generate smart playlists based on beets queries.
Miscellaneous¶
- Web Plugin: An experimental Web-based GUI for beets.
- Random Plugin: Randomly choose albums and tracks from your library.
- Fuzzy Search Plugin: Search albums and tracks with fuzzy string matching.
- MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Maintain your MusicBrainz collection list.
- IHate Plugin: Automatically skip albums and tracks during the import process.
- BPD Plugin: A music player for your beets library that emulates MPD and is compatible with MPD clients.
- Convert Plugin: Transcode music and embed album art while exporting to a different directory.
- Info Plugin: Print music files’ tags to the console.
- Missing Plugin: List missing tracks.
- Duplicates Plugin: List duplicate tracks or albums.
Other Plugins¶
In addition to the plugins that come with beets, there are several plugins that are maintained by the beets community. To use an external plugin, there are two options for installation:
- Make sure it’s in the Python path (known as sys.path to developers). This just means the plugin has to be installed on your system (e.g., with a setup.py script or a command like pip or easy_install).
- Set the pluginpath config variable to point to the directory containing the plugin. (See Configuration.)
Once the plugin is installed, enable it by placing its name on the plugins line in your config file.
Here are a few of the plugins written by the beets community:
- beetFs is a FUSE filesystem for browsing the music in your beets library. (Might be out of date.)
- A cmus plugin integrates with the cmus console music player.
- beets-artistcountry fetches the artist’s country of origin from MusicBrainz.
- gbeets integrates beets with Google Music.
- dsedivec has two plugins: edit and moveall.
- beet-amazon adds Amazon.com as a tagger data source.
- copyartifacts helps bring non-music files along during import.