beets 1.6.0

This release is our first experiment with time-based releases! We are aiming to publish a new release of beets every 3 months. We therefore have a healthy but not dizzyingly long list of new features and fixes.

With this release, beets now requires Python 3.6 or later (it removes support for Python 2.7, 3.4, and 3.5). There are also a few other dependency changes---if you're a maintainer of a beets package for a package manager, thank you for your ongoing efforts, and please see the list of notes below.

Major new features:

• When fetching genres from MusicBrainz, we now include genres from the release group (in addition to the release). We also prioritize genres based on the number of votes. Thanks to @aereaux.
• Primary and secondary release types from MusicBrainz are now stored in a new albumtypes field. Thanks to edgars-supe{.interpreted-text role="user"}. #2200
• An accompanying new albumtypes includes some options for formatting this new albumtypes field. Thanks to edgars-supe{.interpreted-text role="user"}.

Other new things:

• permissions: The plugin now sets cover art permissions to match the audio file permissions.
• unimported: A new configuration option supports excluding specific subdirectories in library.
• info: Add support for an --album flag.
• export: Similarly add support for an --album flag.
• beet move now highlights path differences in color (when enabled).
• When moving files and a direct rename of a file is not possible (for example, when crossing filesystems), beets now copies to a temporary file in the target folder first and then moves to the destination instead of directly copying the target path. This gets us closer to always updating files atomically. Thanks to @catap. #4060
• fetchart: Add a new option to store cover art as non-progressive image. This is useful for DAPs that do not support progressive images. Set deinterlace: yes in your configuration to enable this conversion.
• fetchart: Add a new option to change the file format of cover art images. This may also be useful for DAPs that only support some image formats.
• Support flexible attributes in %aunique. #2678 #3553
• Make %aunique faster, especially when using inline fields. #4145

Bug fixes:

• lyrics: Fix a crash when Beautiful Soup is not installed. #4027
• discogs: Support a new Discogs URL format for IDs. #4080
• discogs: Remove built-in rate-limiting because the Discogs Python library we use now has its own rate-limiting. 🐛 4108
• export: Fix some duplicated output.
• aura: Fix a potential security hole when serving image files. #4160

For plugin developers:

• :pybeets.library.Item.destination{.interpreted-text role="meth"} now accepts a replacements argument to be used in favor of the default.
• The pluginload event is now sent after plugin types and queries are available, not before.
• A new plugin event, album_removed, is called when an album is removed from the library (even when its file is not deleted from disk).

Here are some notes for packagers:

• As noted above, the minimum Python version is now 3.6.
• We fixed a flaky test, named test_album_art in the test_zero.py file, that some distributions had disabled. Disabling this test should no longer be necessary. #4037 #4038
• This version of beets no longer depends on the six library. #4030
• The gmusic plugin was removed since Google Play Music has been shut down. Thus, the optional dependency on gmusicapi does not exist anymore. #4089

beets 1.5.0

This long overdue release of beets includes far too many exciting and useful features than could ever be satisfactorily enumerated. As a technical detail, it also introduces two new external libraries: MediaFile and Confuse used to be part of beets but are now reusable dependencies---packagers, please take note. Finally, this is the last version of beets where we intend to support Python 2.x and 3.5; future releases will soon require Python 3.6.

One non-technical change is that we moved our official #beets home on IRC from freenode to Libera.Chat.

Major new features:

• Fields in queries now fall back to an item's album and check its fields too. Notably, this allows querying items by an album's attribute: in other words, beet list foo:bar will not only find tracks with the foo attribute; it will also find tracks on albums that have the foo attribute. This may be particularly useful in the path-format-config`, which matches individual items to decide which path to use. Thanks to @FichteFoll. #2797 #2988
• A new reflink config option instructs the importer to create fast, copy-on-write file clones on filesystems that support them. Thanks to @rubdos.
• A new unimported lets you find untracked files in your library directory.
• The aura has arrived! Try out the future of remote music library access today.
• We now fetch information about works from MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz matches provide the fields work (the title), mb_workid (the MBID), and work_disambig (the disambiguation string). Thanks to @dosoe. #2580 #3272
• A new parentwork gets information about the original work, which is useful for classical music. Thanks to @dosoe. #2580 #3279
• bpd: BPD now supports most of the features of version 0.16 of the MPD protocol. This is enough to get it talking to more complicated clients like ncmpcpp, but there are still some incompatibilities, largely due to MPD commands we don't support yet. (Let us know if you find an MPD client that doesn't get along with BPD!) #3214 #800
• A new deezer can autotag tracks and albums using the Deezer database. Thanks to @rhlahuja. #3355
• A new bareasc provides a new query type: "bare ASCII" queries that ignore accented characters, treating them as though they were plain ASCII characters. Use the # prefix with list or other commands. #3882
• fetchart: The plugin can now get album art from last.fm. #3530
• web: The API now supports the HTTP DELETE and PATCH methods for modifying items. They are disabled by default; set readonly: no in your configuration file to enable modification via the API. #3870

Other new things:

• beet remove now also allows interactive selection of items from the query, similar to beet modify.
• Enable HTTPS for MusicBrainz by default and add configuration option https for custom servers. See musicbrainz-config for more details.
• mpdstats: Add a new strip_path option to help build the right local path from MPD information.
• convert: Conversion can now parallelize conversion jobs on Python 3.
• lastgenre: Add a new title_case config option to make title-case formatting optional.
• There's a new message when running beet config when there's no available configuration file. #3779
• When importing a duplicate album, the prompt now says "keep all" instead of "keep both" to reflect that there may be more than two albums involved. #3569
• chroma: The plugin now updates file metadata after generating fingerprints through the submit command.
• lastgenre: Added more heavy metal genres to the built-in genre filter lists.
• A new subsonicplaylist can import playlists from a Subsonic server.
• subsonicupdate: The plugin now automatically chooses between token- and password-based authentication based on the server version.
• A new extra_tags configuration option lets you use more metadata in MusicBrainz queries to further narrow the search.
• A new fish adds Fish shell tab autocompletion to beets.
• plugins/fetchart and plugins/embedart: Added a new quality option that controls the quality of the image output when the image is resized.
• plugins/keyfinder: Added support for keyfinder-cli. Thanks to @BrainDamage.
• plugins/fetchart: Added a new high_resolution config option to allow downloading of higher resolution iTunes artwork (at the expense of file size). #3391
• plugins/discogs: The plugin applies two new fields: discogs_labelid and discogs_artistid. #3413
• export: Added a new -f (--format) flag, which can export your data as JSON, JSON lines, CSV, or XML. Thanks to @austinmm. #3402
• convert: Added a new -l (--link) flag and link option as well as the -H (--hardlink) flag and hardlink option, which symlink or hardlink files that do not need to be converted (instead of copying them). #2324
• replaygain: The plugin now supports a per_disc option that enables calculation of album ReplayGain on disc level instead of album level. Thanks to @samuelnilsson. #293
• replaygain: The new ffmpeg ReplayGain backend supports R128_ tags. #3056
• plugins/replaygain: A new r128_targetlevel configuration option defines the reference volume for files using R128_ tags. targetlevel only configures the reference volume for REPLAYGAIN_ files. #3065
• discogs: The plugin now collects the "style" field. Thanks to @thedevilisinthedetails. #2579 #3251
• absubmit: By default, the plugin now avoids re-analyzing files that already have AcousticBrainz data. There are new force and pretend options to help control this new behavior. Thanks to @SusannaMaria. #3318
• discogs: The plugin now also gets genre information and a new discogs_albumid field from the Discogs API. Thanks to @thedevilisinthedetails. #465 #3322
• acousticbrainz: The plugin now fetches two more additional fields: moods_mirex and timbre. Thanks to @malcops. #2860
• playlist and smartplaylist: A new forward_slash config option facilitates compatibility with MPD on Windows. Thanks to @MartyLake. #3331 #3334
• The data_source field, which indicates which metadata source was used during an autotagging import, is now also applied as an album-level flexible attribute. #3350 #1693
• beatport: The plugin now gets the musical key, BPM, and genre for each track. #2080
• A new bpsync can synchronize metadata changes from the Beatport database (like the existing mbsync for MusicBrainz).
• hook: The plugin now treats non-zero exit codes as errors. #3409
• subsonicupdate: A new url configuration replaces the older (and now deprecated) separate host, port, and contextpath config options. As a consequence, the plugin can now talk to Subsonic over HTTPS. Thanks to @jef. #3449
• discogs: The new index_tracks option enables incorporation of work names and intra-work divisions into imported track titles. Thanks to cole-miller. #3459
• web: The query API now interprets backslashes as path separators to support path queries. Thanks to @nmeum. #3567
• beet import now handles tar archives with bzip2 or gzip compression. #3606
• beet import also now handles 7z archives, via the py7zr library. Thanks to @arogl. #3906
• plexupdate: Added an option to use a secure connection to Plex server, and to ignore certificate validation errors if necessary. #2871
• convert: A new delete_originals configuration option can delete the source files after conversion during import. Thanks to logan-arens. #2947
• There is a new --plugins (or -p) CLI flag to specify a list of plugins to load.
• A new genres option fetches genre information from MusicBrainz. This functionality depends on functionality that is currently unreleased in the python-musicbrainzngs library: see PR #266 _. Thanks to :user:aereaux`.
• replaygain: Analysis now happens in parallel using the command and ffmpeg backends. #3478
• plugins/replaygain: The bs1770gain backend is removed. Thanks to @SamuelCook.
• Added trackdisambig which stores the recording disambiguation from MusicBrainz for each track. #1904
• plugins/fetchart: The new max_filesize configuration sets a maximum target image file size.
• badfiles: Checkers can now run during import with the check_on_import config option.
• export: The plugin is now much faster when using the --include-keys option is used. Thanks to @ssssam.
• The importer's set_fields` option now saves all updated fields to on-disk metadata. #3925 #3927
• We now fetch ISRC identifiers from MusicBrainz. Thanks to @aereaux.
• metasync: The plugin now also fetches the "Date Added" field from iTunes databases and stores it in the itunes_dateadded field. Thanks to @sandersantema.
• lyrics: Added a new Tekstowo.pl lyrics provider. Thanks to various people for the implementation and for reporting issues with the initial version. #3344 #3904 #3905 #3994
• beet update will now confirm that the user still wants to update if their library folder cannot be found, preventing the user from accidentally wiping out their beets database. Thanks to user: logan-arens. #1934

Fixes:

• Adapt to breaking changes in Python's ast module in Python 3.8.
• beatport: Fix the assignment of the genre field, and rename musical_key to initial_key. #3387
• lyrics: Fixed the Musixmatch backend for lyrics pages when lyrics are divided into multiple elements on the webpage, and when the lyrics are missing.
• web: Allow use of the backslash character in regex queries. #3867
• web: Fixed a small bug that caused the album art path to be redacted e...

beets 1.4.9

This small update is part of our attempt to release new versions more often! There are a few important fixes, and we're clearing the deck for a change to beets' dependencies in the next version.

The new feature is:

• You can use the NO_COLOR environment variable to disable terminal colors. #3273

There are some fixes in this release:

• Fix a regression in the last release that made the image resizer fail to detect older versions of ImageMagick. #3269
• gmusic: The oauth_file config option now supports more flexible path values, including ~ for the home directory. #3270
• gmusic: Fix a crash when using version 12.0.0 or later of the gmusicapi module. #3270
• Fix an incompatibility with Python 3.8's AST changes. #3278

Here's a note for packagers:

• pathlib is now an optional test dependency on Python 3.4+, removing the need for a Debian patch. #3275

beets 1.4.8

This release is far too long in coming, but it's a good one. There is the usual torrent of new features and a ridiculously long line of fixes, but there are also some crucial maintenance changes. We officially support Python 3.7 and 3.8, and some performance optimizations can (anecdotally) make listing your library more than three times faster than in the previous version.

The new core features are:

• A new config-aunique configuration option allows setting default options for the aunique template function.
• The albumdisambig field no longer includes the MusicBrainz release group disambiguation comment. A new releasegroupdisambig field has been added. #3024
• The modify command now allows resetting fixed attributes. For example, beet modify -a artist:beatles artpath! resets artpath attribute from matching albums back to the default value. #2497
• A new importer option, ignore_data_tracks, lets you skip audio tracks contained in data files. #3021

There are some new plugins:

• The playlist can query the beets library using M3U playlists. Thanks to @Holzhaus and @Xenopathic. #123 #3145
• The loadext allows loading of SQLite extensions, primarily for use with the ICU SQLite extension for internationalization. #3160 #3226
• The subsonicupdate can automatically update your Subsonic library. Thanks to @maffo999. #3001

And many improvements to existing plugins:

• lastgenre: Added option -A to match individual tracks and singletons. #3220 #3219
• play: The plugin can now emit a UTF-8 BOM, fixing some issues with foobar2000 and Winamp. Thanks to @mz2212. #2944
• gmusic:
  • Add a new option to automatically upload to Google Play Music library on track import. Thanks to @shuaiscott.
  • Add new options for Google Play Music authentication. Thanks to @thetarkus. #3002
• replaygain: albumpeak on large collections is calculated as the average, not the maximum. #3008 #3009
• chroma:
  • Now optionally has a bias toward looking up more relevant releases according to the preferred configuration options. Thanks to @Archer4499. #3017
  • Fingerprint values are now properly stored as strings, which prevents strange repeated output when running beet write. Thanks to @Holzhaus. #3097 #2942
• convert: The plugin now has an id3v23 option that allows you to override the global id3v23 option. Thanks to @Holzhaus. #3104
• spotify:
  • The plugin now uses OAuth for authentication to the Spotify API. Thanks to @rhlahuja. #2694 #3123
  • The plugin now works as an import metadata provider: you can match tracks and albums using the Spotify database. Thanks to @rhlahuja. #3123
• ipfs: The plugin now supports a nocopy option which passes that flag to ipfs. Thanks to @wildthyme.
• discogs: The plugin now has rate limiting for the Discogs API. #3081
• mpdstats, mpdupdate: These plugins now use the MPD_PORT environment variable if no port is specified in the configuration file. #3223
• bpd:
  • MPD protocol commands consume and single are now supported along with updated semantics for repeat and previous and new fields for status. The bpd server now understands and ignores some additional commands. #3200 #800
  • MPD protocol command idle is now supported, allowing the MPD version to be bumped to 0.14. #3205 #800
  • MPD protocol command decoders is now supported. #3222
  • The plugin now uses the main beets logging system. The special-purpose --debug flag has been removed. Thanks to @arcresu. #3196
• mbsync: The plugin no longer queries MusicBrainz when either the mb_albumid or mb_trackid field is invalid. See also the discussion on Google Groups Thanks to @arogl.
• export: The plugin now also exports path field if the user explicitly specifies it with -i parameter. This only works when exporting library fields. #3084
• acousticbrainz: The plugin now declares types for all its fields, which enables easier querying and avoids a problem where very small numbers would be stored as strings. Thanks to @rain0r. #2790 #3238

Some improvements have been focused on improving beets' performance:

• Querying the library is now faster:
  • We only convert fields that need to be displayed. Thanks to @pprkut. #3089
  • We now compile templates once and reuse them instead of recompiling them to print out each matching object. Thanks to @simonpersson. #3258
  • Querying the library for items is now faster, for all queries that do not need to access album level properties. This was implemented by lazily fetching the album only when needed. Thanks to @simonpersson. #3260
• absubmit, badfiles: Analysis now works in parallel (on Python 3 only). Thanks to @bemeurer. #2442 #3003
• mpdstats: Use the currentsong MPD command instead of playlist to get the current song, improving performance when the playlist is long. Thanks to @ray66. #3207 #2752

Several improvements are related to usability:

• The disambiguation string for identifying albums in the importer now shows the catalog number. Thanks to @8h2a. #2951
• Added whitespace padding to missing tracks dialog to improve readability. Thanks to @jams2. #2962
• The move command now lists the number of items already in-place. Thanks to @RollingStar. #3117
• Modify selection can now be applied early without selecting every item. #3083
• Beets now emits more useful messages during startup if SQLite returns an error. The SQLite error message is now attached to the beets message. #3005
• Fixed a confusing typo when the convert plugin copies the art covers. #3063

Many fixes have been focused on issues where beets would previously crash:

• Avoid a crash when archive extraction fails during import. #3041
• Missing album art file during an update no longer causes a fatal exception (instead, an error is logged and the missing file path is removed from the library). #3030
• When updating the database, beets no longer tries to move album art twice. #3189
• Fix an unhandled exception when pruning empty directories. #1996 #3209
• fetchart: Added network connection error handling to backends so that beets won't crash if a request fails. Thanks to @Holzhaus. #1579
• badfiles: Avoid a crash when the underlying tool emits undecodable output. #3165
• beatport: Avoid a crash when the server produces an error. #3184
• bpd: Fix crashes in the bpd server during exception handling. #3200
• bpd: Fix a crash triggered when certain clients tried to list the albums belonging to a particular artist. #3007 #3215
• replaygain: Avoid a crash when the bs1770gain tool emits malformed XML. #2983 #3247

There are many fixes related to compatibility with our dependencies including addressing changes interfaces:

• On Python 2, pin the jellyfish requirement to version 0.6.0 for compatibility.
• Fix compatibility with Python 3.7 and its change to a name in the re module. #2978
• Fix several uses of deprecated standard-library features on Python 3.7. Thanks to @arcresu. #3197
• Fix compatibility with pre-release versions of Python 3.8. #3201 #3202
• web: Fix an error when using more recent versions of Flask with CORS enabled. Thanks to @rveachkc. #2979: #2980
• Avoid some deprecation warnings with certain versions of the MusicBrainz library. Thanks to @zhelezov. #2826 #3092
• Restore iTunes Store album art source, and remove the dependency on python-itunes, which had gone unmaintained and was not Python-3-compatible. Thanks to @ocelma for creating python-itunes in the first place. Thanks to @nathdwek. #2371 #2551 #2718
• lastgenre, edit: Avoid a deprecation warnings from the PyYAML library by switching to the safe loader. Thanks to @translit and @sbraz. #3192 #3225
• Fix a problem when resizing images with PIL/pillow on Python 3. Thanks to @architek. #2504 #3029

And there are many other fixes:

• R128 normalization tags are now properly deleted from files when the values are missing. Thanks to @autrimpo. #2757
• Display the artist credit when matching albums if the artist_credit configuration option is set. #2953
• With the from_scratch configuration option set, only writable fields are cleared. Beets now no longer ignores the format your music is saved in. #2972
• The %aunique template function now works correctly with the -f/--format option. #3043
• Fixed the ordering of items when manually selecting changes while updating tags Thanks to @TaizoSimpson. #3501
• The %title template function now works correctly with apostrophes. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki. #3033
• lastgenre: It's now possible to set the prefer_specific option without also setting canonical. #2973
• fetchart: The plugin now respects the ignore and ignore_hidden settings. #1632
• hook: Fix byte string interpolation in hook commands. #2967 #3167
• the: Log a message when something has changed, not when it hasn't. Thanks to @arcresu. #3195
• lastgenre: The force config option now actually works. #2704 #3054
• Resizing image files with ImageMagick now avoids problems on systems where there is a convert command that is not ImageMagick's by using the magick executable when it is available. Thanks to @ababyduck. #2093 #3236

There is one new thing for plugin developers to know about:

• In addition to prefix-based field queries, plugins can now define named queries that are not associated with any specific field. For example, the new playlist supports queries like playlist:name although there is no field named playlist. See extend-query for details.

And some messages for packagers:

• Note the changes to the dependencies on jellyfish and munkres.
• The optional python-itunes dependency has been removed.
• Python ...

beets 1.4.7

This new release includes lots of new features in the importer and the metadata source backends that it uses. We've changed how the beets importer handles non-audio tracks listed in metadata sources like MusicBrainz:

• The importer now ignores non-audio tracks (namely, data and video tracks) listed in MusicBrainz. Also, a new option, ignore_video_tracks, lets you return to the old behavior and include these video tracks. #1210
• A new importer option, ignored_media, can let you skip certain media formats. #2688

There are other subtle improvements to metadata handling in the importer:

• In the MusicBrainz backend, beets now imports the musicbrainz_releasetrackid field. This is a first step toward #406. Thanks to @Rawrmonkeys.
• A new importer configuration option, artist_credit, will tell beets to prefer the artist credit over the artist when autotagging. #1249

And there are even more new features:

• replaygain: The beet replaygain command now has --force, --write and --nowrite options. #2778
• A new importer configuration option, incremental_skip_later, lets you avoid recording skipped directories to the list of "processed" directories in incremental mode. This way, you can revisit them later with another import. Thanks to @sekjun9878. #2773
• fetchart: The configuration options now support finer-grained control via the sources option. You can now specify the search order for different matching strategies within different backends.
• web: A new cors_supports_credentials configuration option lets in-browser clients communicate with the server even when it is protected by an authorization mechanism (a proxy with HTTP authentication enabled, for example).
• A new sonosupdate plugin automatically notifies Sonos controllers to update the music library when the beets library changes. Thanks to @cgtobi.
• discogs: The plugin now stores master release IDs into mb_releasegroupid. It also "simulates" track IDs using the release ID and the track list position. Thanks to @dbogdanov. #2336
• discogs: Fetch the original year from master releases. #1122

There are lots and lots of fixes:

• replaygain: Fix a corner-case with the bs1770gain backend where ReplayGain values were assigned to the wrong files. The plugin now requires version 0.4.6 or later of the bs1770gain tool. #2777
• lyrics: The plugin no longer crashes in the Genius source when BeautifulSoup is not found. Instead, it just logs a message and disables the source. #2911
• lyrics: Handle network and API errors when communicating with Genius. #2771
• lyrics: The lyrics command previously wrote ReST files by default, even when you didn't ask for them. This default has been fixed.
• lyrics: When writing ReST files, the lyrics command now groups lyrics by the albumartist field, rather than artist. #2924
• Plugins can now see updated import task state, such as when rejecting the initial candidates and finding new ones via a manual search. Notably, this means that the importer prompt options that the edit provides show up more reliably after doing a secondary import search. #2441 #2731
• importadded: Fix a crash on non-autotagged imports. Thanks to @m42i. #2601 #1918
• plexupdate: The Plex token is now redacted in configuration output. Thanks to @Kovrinic. #2804
• Avoid a crash when importing a non-ASCII filename when using an ASCII locale on Unix under Python 3. #2793 #2803
• Fix a problem caused by time zone misalignment that could make date queries fail to match certain dates that are near the edges of a range. For example, querying for dates within a certain month would fail to match dates within hours of the end of that month. #2652
• convert: The plugin now runs before other plugin-provided import stages, which addresses an issue with generating ReplayGain data incompatible between the source and target file formats. Thanks to @autrimpo. #2814
• ftintitle: The drop config option had no effect; it now does what it says it should do. #2817
• Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the event based on the order of your preferred countries rather than the order of release events in MusicBrainz. #2816
• web: The time display in the web interface would incorrectly jump at the 30-second mark of every minute. Now, it correctly changes over at zero seconds. #2822
• web: Fetching album art now works (instead of throwing an exception) under Python 3. Additionally, the server will now return a 404 response when the album ID is unknown (instead of throwing an exception and producing a 500 response). #2823
• web: Fix an exception on Python 3 for filenames with non-Latin1 characters. (These characters are now converted to their ASCII equivalents.) #2815
• Partially fix bash completion for subcommand names that contain hyphens. Thanks to @jhermann. #2836 #2837
• replaygain: Really fix album gain calculation using the GStreamer backend. #2846
• Avoid an error when doing a "no-op" move on non-existent files (i.e., moving a file onto itself). #2863
• discogs: Fix the medium and medium_index values, which were occasionally incorrect for releases with two-sided mediums such as vinyl. Also fix the medium_total value, which now contains total number of tracks on the medium to which a track belongs, not the total number of different mediums present on the release. Thanks to @dbogdanov. #2887
• The importer now supports audio files contained in data tracks when they are listed in MusicBrainz: the corresponding audio tracks are now merged into the main track list. Thanks to @jdetrey. #1638
• keyfinder: Avoid a crash when trying to process unmatched tracks. #2537
• mbsync: Support MusicBrainz recording ID changes, relying on release track IDs instead. Thanks to @jdetrey. #1234
• mbsync: We can now successfully update albums even when the first track has a missing MusicBrainz recording ID. #2920

There are a couple of changes for developers:

• Plugins can now run their import stages early, before other plugins. Use the early_import_stages list instead of plain import_stages to request this behavior. #2814
• We again properly send albuminfo_received and trackinfo_received in all cases, most notably when using the mbsync plugin. This was a regression since version 1.4.1. #2921

beets 1.4.6

The highlight of this release is "album merging," an oft-requested option in the importer to add new tracks to an existing album you already have in your library. This way, you no longer need to resort to removing the partial album from your library, combining the files manually, and importing again.

Here are the larger new features in this release:

• When the importer finds duplicate albums, you can now merge all the tracks—old and new—together and try importing them as a single, combined album. Thanks to @udiboy1209. #112 #2725
• lyrics: The plugin can now produce reStructuredText files for beautiful, readable books of lyrics. Thanks to @anarcat. #2628
• A new from_scratch configuration option makes the importer remove old metadata before applying new metadata. This new feature complements the zero and scrub plugins but is slightly different: beets clears out all the old tags it knows about and only keeps the new data it gets from the remote metadata source. Thanks to @tummychow. #934 #2755

There are also somewhat littler, but still great, new features:

• convert: A new no_convert option lets you skip transcoding items matching a query. Instead, the files are just copied as-is. Thanks to @Stunner. #2732 #2751
• fetchart: A new quiet switch that only prints out messages when album art is missing. Thanks to @euri10. #2683
• mbcollection: You can configure a custom MusicBrainz collection via the new collection configuration option. #2685
• mbcollection: The collection update command can now remove albums from collections that are longer in the beets library.
• fetchart: The clearart command now asks for confirmation before touching your files. Thanks to @konman2. #2708 #2427
• mpdstats: The plugin now correctly updates song statistics when MPD switches from a song to a stream and when it plays the same song multiple times consecutively. #2707
• acousticbrainz: The plugin can now be configured to write only a specific list of tags. Thanks to @woparry.

There are lots and lots of bug fixes:

• hook: Fixed a problem where accessing non-string properties of item or album (e.g., item.track) would cause a crash. Thanks to @broddo. #2740
• play: When relative_to is set, the plugin correctly emits relative paths even when querying for albums rather than tracks. Thanks to @j000. #2702
• We suppress a spurious Python warning about a BrokenPipeError being ignored. This was an issue when using beets in simple shell scripts. Thanks to @Azphreal. #2622 #2631
• replaygain: Fix a regression in the previous release related to the new R128 tags. #2615 #2623
• lyrics: The MusixMatch backend now detects and warns when the server has blocked the client. Thanks to @anarcat. #2634 #2632
• importfeeds: Fix an error on Python 3 in certain configurations. Thanks to @djl. #2467 #2658
• edit: Fix a bug when editing items during a re-import with the -L flag. Previously, diffs against against unrelated items could be shown or beets could crash. #2659
• kodiupdate: Fix the server URL and add better error reporting. #2662
• Fixed a problem where "no-op" modifications would reset files' mtimes, resulting in unnecessary writes. This most prominently affected the edit plugin when saving the text file without making changes to some music. #2667
• chroma: Fix a crash when running the submit command on Python 3 on Windows with non-ASCII filenames. #2671
• absubmit: Fix an occasional crash on Python 3 when the AB analysis tool produced non-ASCII metadata. #2673
• duplicates: Use the default tiebreak for items or albums when the configuration only specifies a tiebreak for the other kind of entity. Thanks to @cgevans. #2758
• duplicates: Fix the --key command line option, which was ignored.
• replaygain: Fix album ReplayGain calculation with the GStreamer backend. #2636
• scrub: Handle errors when manipulating files using newer versions of Mutagen. #2716
• fetchart: The plugin no longer gets skipped during import when the "Edit Candidates" option is used from the edit plugin. #2734
• Fix a crash when numeric metadata fields contain just a minus or plus sign with no following numbers. Thanks to @eigengrau. #2741
• fromfilename: Recognize file names that contain only a track number, such as 01.mp3. Also, the plugin now allows underscores as a separator between fields. Thanks to @Vrihub. #2738 #2759
• Fixed an issue where images would be resized according to their longest edge, instead of their width, when using the maxwidth config option in the fetchart and embedart plugins.

There are some changes for developers:

• "Fixed fields" in Album and Item objects are now more strict about translating missing values into type-specific null-like values. This should help in cases where a string field is unexpectedly None sometimes instead of just showing up as an empty string. #2605
• Refactored the move functions the beets.library module and the manipulate_files function in beets.importer to use a single parameter describing the file operation instead of multiple Boolean flags. There is a new numerated type describing how to move, copy, or link files. #2682

beets 1.4.5

Version 1.4.5 adds some oft-requested features. When you're importing files, you can now manually set fields on the new music. Date queries have gotten much more powerful: you can write precise queries down to the second, and we now have relative queries like -1w, which means one week ago.

Here are the new features:

• You can now set fields to certain values during import, using either a --set field=value command-line flag or a new set_fields configuration option under the importer section. Thanks to @bartkl. #1881 #2581
• Date queries can now include times, so you can filter your music down to the second. Thanks to @discopatrick. #2506 #2528
• Date queries can also be relative. You can say added:-1w.. to match music added in the last week, for example. Thanks to @euri10. #2598
• A new gmusic lets you interact with your Google Play Music library. Thanks to @tigranl. #2553 #2586
• replaygain: We now keep R128 data in separate tags from classic ReplayGain data for formats that need it (namely, Ogg Opus). A new r128 configuration option enables this behavior for specific formats. Thanks to @autrimpo. #2557 #2560
• The move command gained a new --export flag, which copies files to an external location without changing their paths in the library database. Thanks to @SpirosChadoulos. #435 #2510

There are also some bug fixes:

• lastgenre: Fix a crash when using the prefer_specific and canonical options together. Thanks to @yacoob. #2459 #2583
• web: Fix a crash on Windows under Python 2 when serving non-ASCII filenames. Thanks to @robot3498712. #2592 #2593
• metasync: Fix a crash in the Amarok backend when filenames contain quotes. Thanks to @aranc23. #2595 #2596
• More informative error messages are displayed when the file format is not recognized. #2599

beets 1.4.4

This release built up a longer-than-normal list of nifty new features. We now support DSF audio files and the importer can hard-link your files, for example.

Here's a full list of new features:

• Added support for DSF files, once a future version of Mutagen is released that supports them. Thanks to @docbobo. #459 #2379
• A new hardlink config option instructs the importer to create hard links on filesystems that support them. Thanks to @jacobwgillespie. #2445
• A new kodiupdate lets you keep your Kodi library in sync with beets. Thanks to @Pauligrinder. #2411
• A new bell configuration option under the import section enables a terminal bell when input is required. Thanks to @SpirosChadoulos. #2366 #2495
• A new field, composer_sort, is now supported and fetched from MusicBrainz. Thanks to @dosoe. #2519 #2529
• The MusicBrainz backend and discogs now both provide a new attribute called track_alt that stores more nuanced, possibly non-numeric track index data. For example, some vinyl or tape media will report the side of the record using a letter instead of a number in that field. #1831 #2363
• web: Added a new endpoint, /item/path/foo, which will return the item info for the file at the given path, or 404.
• web: Added a new config option, include_paths, which will cause paths to be included in item API responses if set to true.
• The %aunique template function for aunique now takes a third argument that specifies which brackets to use around the disambiguator value. The argument can be any two characters that represent the left and right brackets. It defaults to [] and can also be blank to turn off bracketing. #2397 #2399
• Added a --move or -m option to the importer so that the files can be moved to the library instead of being copied or added "in place." #2252 #2429
• badfiles: Added a --verbose or -v option. Results are now displayed only for corrupted files by default and for all the files when the verbose option is set. #1654 #2434
• embedart: The explicit embedart command now asks for confirmation before embedding art into music files. Thanks to
  @Stunner. #1999
• You can now run beets by typing python -m beets. #2453
• smartplaylist: Different playlist specifications that generate identically-named playlist files no longer conflict; instead, the resulting lists of tracks are concatenated. #2468
• missing: A new mode lets you see missing albums from artists you have in your library. Thanks to @qlyoung. #2481
• web : Add new reverse_proxy config option to allow serving the web plugins under a reverse proxy.
• Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the event based on your preferred countries. #2501
• play: A new -y or --yes parameter lets you skip the warning message if you enqueue more items than the warning threshold usually allows.
• Fix a bug where commands which forked subprocesses would sometimes prevent further inputs. This bug mainly affected convert. Thanks to @jansol. #2488 #2524

There are also quite a few fixes:

• In the replace configuration option, we now replace a leading hyphen (-) with an underscore. #549 #2509
• absubmit: We no longer filter audio files for specific formats---we will attempt the submission process for all formats. #2471
• mpdupdate: Fix Python 3 compatibility. #2381
• replaygain: Fix Python 3 compatibility in the bs1770gain backend. #2382
• bpd: Report playback times as integers. #2394
• mpdstats: Fix Python 3 compatibility. The plugin also now requires version 0.4.2 or later of the python-mpd2 library. #2405
• mpdstats: Improve handling of MPD status queries.
• badfiles: Fix Python 3 compatibility.
• Fix some cases where album-level ReplayGain/SoundCheck metadata would be written to files incorrectly. #2426
• badfiles: The command no longer bails out if the validator command is not found or exits with an error. #2430 #2433
• lyrics: The Google search backend no longer crashes when the server responds with an error. #2437
• discogs: You can now authenticate with Discogs using a personal access token. #2447
• Fix Python 3 compatibility when extracting rar archives in the importer. Thanks to @Lompik. #2443 #2448
• duplicates: Fix Python 3 compatibility when using the copy and move options. #2444
• mbsubmit: The tracks are now sorted properly. Thanks to
  @awesomer. #2457
• thumbnails: Fix a string-related crash on Python 3. #2466
• beatport: More than just 10 songs are now fetched per album. #2469
• On Python 3, the terminal_encoding setting is respected again for output and printing will no longer crash on systems configured with a limited encoding.
• convert: The default configuration uses FFmpeg's built-in AAC codec instead of faac. Thanks to @jansol. #2484
• Fix the importer's detection of multi-disc albums when other subdirectories are present. #2493
• Invalid date queries now print an error message instead of being silently ignored. Thanks to @discopatrick. #2513 #2517
• When the SQLite database stops being accessible, we now print a friendly error message. Thanks to @Mary011196. #1676 #2508
• web: Avoid a crash when sending binary data, such as Chromaprint fingerprints, in music attributes. #2542 #2532
• Fix a hang when parsing templates that end in newlines. #2562
• Fix a crash when reading non-ASCII characters in configuration files on Windows under Python 3. #2456 #2565 #2566

We removed backends from two metadata plugins because of bitrot:

• lyrics: The Lyrics.com backend has been removed. (It stopped working because of changes to the site's URL structure.) #2548 #2549
• fetchart: The documentation no longer recommends iTunes Store artwork lookup because the unmaintained python-itunes is broken. Want to adopt it? #2371 #1610

beets 1.4.3

Happy new year! This new version includes a cornucopia of new features from contributors, including new tags related to classical music and a new AcousticBrainz Submit plugin for performing acoustic analysis on your music. The Random plugin has a new mode that lets you generate time-limited music---for example, you might generate a random playlist that lasts the perfect length for your walk to work. We also access as many Web services as possible over secure connections now---HTTPS everywhere!

The most visible new features are:

• We now support the composer, lyricist, and arranger tags. The MusicBrainz data source will fetch data for these fields when the next version of python-musicbrainzngs_ is released. Thanks to @ibmibmibm. #506 #507 #1547 #2333
• A new absubmit lets you run acoustic analysis software and upload the results for others to use. Thanks to @inytar. #2253 #2342
• play: The plugin now provides an importer prompt choice to play the music you're about to import. Thanks to @diomekes. #2008 #2360
• We now use SSL to access Web services whenever possible. That includes MusicBrainz itself, several album art sources, some lyrics sources, and other servers. Thanks to @tigranl. #2307
• random: A new --time option lets you generate a random playlist that takes a given amount of time. Thanks to @diomekes. #2305 #2322

Some smaller new features:

• zero: A new zero command manually triggers the zero plugin. Thanks to @SJoshBrown. #2274 #2329
• acousticbrainz: The plugin will avoid re-downloading data for files that already have it by default. You can override this behavior using a new force option. Thanks to @SusannaMaria. #2347 #2349
• bpm: The import.write configuration option now decides whether or not to write tracks after updating their BPM. #1992

And the fixes:

• bpd: Fix a crash on non-ASCII MPD commands. #2332
• scrub: Avoid a crash when files cannot be read or written. #2351
• scrub: The image type values on scrubbed files are preserved instead of being reset to "other." #2339
• web: Fix a crash on Python 3 when serving files from the filesystem. #2353
• discogs: Improve the handling of releases that contain subtracks. #2318
• discogs: Fix a crash when a release does not contain format information, and increase robustness when other fields are missing. #2302
• lyrics: The plugin now reports a beets-specific User-Agent header when requesting lyrics. #2357
• embyupdate: The plugin now checks whether an API key or a password is provided in the configuration.
• play: The misspelled configuration option warning_treshold is no longer supported.

For plugin developers: when providing new importer prompt choices (see append_prompt_choices), you can now provide new candidates for the user to consider. For example, you might provide an alternative strategy for picking between the available alternatives or for looking up a release on MusicBrainz.

beets 1.4.2

This is just a little bug fix release. With 1.4.2, we're also confident enough to recommend that anyone who's interested give Python 3 a try: bugs may still lurk, but we've deemed things safe enough for broad adoption. If you can, please install beets with pip3 instead of pip2 this time and let us know how it goes!

Here are the fixes:

• badfiles: Fix a crash on non-ASCII filenames. #2299
• The %asciify{} path formatting function and the asciify-paths setting properly substitute path separators generated by converting some Unicode characters, such as ½ and ¢, into ASCII.
• convert: Fix a logging-related crash when filenames contain curly braces. Thanks to @kierdavis. #2323
• We've rolled back some changes to the included zsh completion script that were causing problems for some users. #2266

Also, we've removed some special handling for logging in the discogs that we believe was unnecessary. If spurious log messages appear in this version, please let us know by filing a bug.