beets 1.3.0

Albums and items now have flexible attributes. This means that, when you want to store information about your music in the beets database, you're no longer constrained to the set of fields it supports out of the box (title, artist, track, etc.). Instead, you can use any field name you can think of and treat it just like the built-in fields.

For example, you can use the modify command to set a new field on a track:

$ beet modify mood=sexy artist:miguel

and then query your music based on that field:

$ beet ls mood:sunny

or use templates to see the value of the field:

$ beet ls -f '$title: $mood'

While this feature is nifty when used directly with the usual command-line suspects, it's especially useful for plugin authors and for future beets features. Stay tuned for great things built on this flexible attribute infrastructure.

One side effect of this change: queries that include unknown fields will now match nothing instead of everything. So if you type beet ls fieldThatDoesNotExist:foo, beets will now return no results, whereas previous versions would spit out a warning and then list your entire library.

There's more detail than you could ever need on the beets blog.

beets 1.2.2

This is a bugfix release. We're in the midst of preparing for a large change in beets 1.3, so 1.2.2 resolves some issues that came up over the last few weeks. Stay tuned!

The improvements in this release are:

• A new plugin event, item_moved, is sent when files are moved on disk. Thanks to dsedivec.
• lyrics: More improvements to the Google backend by Fabrice Laporte.
• bpd: Fix for a crash when searching, thanks to Simon Chopin.
• Regular expression queries (and other query types) over paths now work. (Previously, special query types were ignored for the path field.)
• fetchart: Look for images in the Cover Art Archive for the release group in addition to the specific release. Thanks to Filipe Fortes.
• Fix a race in the importer that could cause files to be deleted before they were imported. This happened when importing one album, importing a duplicate album, and then asking for the first album to be replaced with the second. The situation could only arise when importing music from the library directory and when the two albums are imported close in time.

beets 1.2.1

This release introduces a major internal change in the way that similarity scores are handled. It means that the importer interface can now show you exactly why a match is assigned its score and that the autotagger gained a few new options that let you customize how matches are prioritized and recommended.

The refactoring work is due to the continued efforts of Tai Lee. The changes you'll notice while using the autotagger are:

• The top 3 distance penalties are now displayed on the release listing, and all album and track penalties are now displayed on the track changes list. This should make it clear exactly which metadata is contributing to a low similarity score.
• When displaying differences, the colorization has been made more consistent and helpful: red for an actual difference, yellow to indicate that a distance penalty is being applied, and light gray for no penalty (e.g., case changes) or disambiguation data.

There are also three new (or overhauled) configuration options that let you customize the way that matches are selected:

• The ignored setting lets you instruct the importer not to show you matches that have a certain penalty applied.
• The preferred collection of settings specifies a sorted list of preferred countries and media types, or prioritizes releases closest to the original year for an album.
• The max_rec settings can now be used for any distance penalty component. The recommendation will be downgraded if a non-zero penalty is being applied to the specified field.

And some little enhancements and bug fixes:

• Multi-disc directory names can now contain "disk" (in addition to "disc"). Thanks to John Hawthorn.
• web: Item and album counts are now exposed through the API for use with the Tomahawk resolver. Thanks to Uwe L. Korn.
• Python 2.6 compatibility for the beatport plugin, missing, and duplicates. Thanks to Wesley Bitter and Pedro Silva.
• Don't move the config file during a null migration. Thanks to Theofilos Intzoglou.
• Fix an occasional crash in the beatport when a length field was missing from the API response. Thanks to Timothy Appnel.
• scrub: Handle and log I/O errors.
• lyrics: The Google backend should now turn up more results. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
• random: Fix compatibility with Python 2.6. Thanks to Matthias Drochner.