Been using this for several years now. It's definitely not for the average user. But nothing is quite so flexible.

Thanks. I was looking for something like this.

I love beets - the one thing I can't figure out is how to set the genre very wide.

I like having a small number of broad genres - Rock, Hip-Hop, Jazz etc - but the tagging comes up with hundreds of distinct genres :(

I recently looked into beets, but it seems it’s focused on automation, is that correct? I often buy stuff that has just been released, and that’s not yet in any database, so no automation works.

My current workflow is download, unzip and manually tag (mainly genres, sometimes badly named artists/albums) with MusicBee (which gives me autocomplete for genres so I can reuse existing ones), and then copy the files to the server for Navidrome to pick them up.

Throwing this out here to see if beets would actually work well with what I want after all.

Whatever happened to MusicBrainz Picard?

I spent a couple of nights working out how to configure beets to my liking and have loved it ever since. My “workflow” is now:

- buy album on Bandcamp

- download zip

- beet import {zip file name}

And beets extracts the zip, matches the album to musicbrainz, updates any metadata, and drops the files into the directory structure that I like (naming the files how I like them, too).

Very rarely an album will need some more attention, in which case I use Picard to fix it before using beets to import it.

  beet import "Iron Maiden.zip" -S 4500ad36-5f92-4e4c-bb24-3a9a57faf550

If you're using Navidrome or similar to stream your music then check out beets-alternatives [0]. It lets you sync (and optionally convert) your library or a subset of it to another location, in my case my music storage mounted with Rclone. It's especially useful if you need to have a different naming structure in your target directory for whatever reason. I like to keep each disc of a multi-disc album in in its own subdirectory but most streaming servers seem to prefer all tracks of an album to be in the same directory. With Beets-alternatives I can have a different naming structure for each collection vs. having to rename my primary collection to suit whatever streaming server I happen to be using.

[0]: https://github.com/geigerzaehler/beets-alternatives

Been using with Claude via MCP to tag a bunch of old ripped CDs - fun with mixed results.