music library manager and MusicBrainz tagger

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. :bug: 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

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 even when include_paths option is set. #3866
• discogs: Fixed a bug with the index_tracks option that sometimes caused the index to be discarded. Also, remove the extra semicolon that was added when there is no index track.
• subsonicupdate: The API client was using the POST method rather the GET method. Also includes better exception handling, response parsing, and tests.
• the: Fixed incorrect regex for "the" that matched any 3-letter combination of the letters t, h, e. #3701
• fetchart: Fixed a bug that caused the plugin to not take environment variables, such as proxy servers, into account when making requests. #3450
• fetchart: Temporary files for fetched album art that fail validation are now removed.
• inline: In function-style field definitions that refer to flexible attributes, values could stick around from one function invocation to the next. This meant that, when displaying a list of objects, later objects could seem to reuse values from earlier objects when they were missing a value for a given field. These values are now properly undefined. #2406
• bpd: Seeking by fractions of a second now works as intended, fixing crashes in MPD clients like mpDris2 on seek. The playlistid command now works properly in its zero-argument form. #3214
• replaygain: Fix a Python 3 incompatibility in the Python Audio Tools backend. #3305
• importadded: Fixed a crash that occurred when the after_write signal was emitted. #3301
• plugins/replaygain: Fix the storage format for R128 gain tags. #3311 #3314
• discogs: Fixed a crash that occurred when the master URI isn't set in the API response. #2965 #3239
• spotify: Fix handling of year-only release dates returned by the Spotify albums API. Thanks to @rhlahuja. #3343
• Fixed a bug that caused the UI to display incorrect track numbers for tracks with index 0 when the per_disc_numbering option was set. #3346
• none_rec_action does not import automatically when timid is enabled. Thanks to @RollingStar. #3242
• Fix a bug that caused a crash when tagging items with the beatport plugin. #3374
• beet import now logs which files are ignored when in debug mode. #3764
• bpd: Fix the transition to next track when in consume mode. Thanks to @aereaux. #3437
• lyrics: Fix a corner-case with Genius lowercase artist names #3446
• parentwork: Don't save tracks when nothing has changed. #3492
• Added a warning when configuration files defined in the include directive of the configuration file fail to be imported. #3498
• Added normalization to integer values in the database, which should avoid problems where fields like bpm would sometimes store non-integer values. #762 #3507 #3508
• Fix a crash when querying for null values. #3516 #3517
• lyrics: Tolerate a missing lyrics div in the Genius scraper. Thanks to @thejli21. #3535 #3554
• lyrics: Use the artist sort name to search for lyrics, which can help find matches when the artist name has special characters. Thanks to @hashhar. #3340 #3558
• replaygain: Trying to calculate volume gain for an album consisting of some formats using ReplayGain and some using R128 will no longer crash; instead it is skipped and and a message is logged. The log message has also been rewritten for to improve clarity. Thanks to @autrimpo. #3533
• lyrics: Adapt the Genius backend to changes in markup to reduce the scraping failure rate. #3535 #3594
• lyrics: Fix a crash when writing ReST files for a query without results or fetched lyrics. #2805
• fetchart: Attempt to fetch pre-resized thumbnails from Cover Art Archive if the maxwidth option matches one of the sizes supported by the Cover Art Archive API. Thanks to @trolley. #3637
• ipfs: Fix Python 3 compatibility. Thanks to @musoke. #2554
• Fix a bug that caused metadata starting with something resembling a drive letter to be incorrectly split into an extra directory after the colon. #3685
• mpdstats: Don't record a skip when stopping MPD, as MPD keeps the current track in the queue. Thanks to @aereaux. #3722
• String-typed fields are now normalized to string values, avoiding an occasional crash when using both the fetchart and the discogs together. #3773 #3774
• Fix a bug causing PIL to generate poor quality JPEGs when resizing artwork. #3743
• plugins/keyfinder: Catch output from keyfinder-cli that is missing key. #2242
• plugins/replaygain: Disable parallel analysis on import by default. #3819
• mpdstats: Fix Python 2/3 compatibility #3798
• discogs: Replace the deprecated official discogs-client library with the community supported python3-discogs-client library. #3608
• chroma: Fixed submitting AcoustID information for tracks that already have a fingerprint. #3834
• Allow equals within the value part of the --set option to the beet import command. #2984
• Duplicates can now generate checksums. Thanks @wisp3rwind for the pointer to how to solve. Thanks to @arogl. #2873
• Templates that use %ifdef now produce the expected behavior when used in conjunction with non-string fields from the types. #3852
• lyrics: Fix crashes when a website could not be retrieved, affecting at least the Genius source. #3970
• duplicates: Fix a crash when running the dup command with a query that returns no results. #3943
• beatport: Fix the default assignment of the musical key. #3377
• lyrics: Improved searching on the Genius backend when the artist contains special characters. #3634
• parentwork: Also get the composition date of the parent work, instead of just the child work. Thanks to @aereaux. #3650
• lyrics: Fix a bug in the heuristic for detecting valid lyrics in the Google source. #2969
• thumbnails: Fix a crash due to an incorrect string type on Python 3. #3360
• fetchart: The Cover Art Archive source now iterates over all front images instead of blindly selecting the first one.
• lyrics: Removed the LyricWiki source (the site shut down on 21/09/2020).
• subsonicupdate: The plugin is now functional again. A new auth configuration option is required in the configuration to specify the flavor of authentication to use. #4002

For plugin developers:

• MediaFile has been split into a standalone project. Where you used to do from beets import mediafile, now just do import mediafile. Beets re-exports MediaFile at the old location for backwards-compatibility, but a deprecation warning is raised if you do this since we might drop this wrapper in a future release.
• Similarly, we've replaced beets' configuration library (previously called Confit) with a standalone version called Confuse. Where you used to do from beets.util import confit, now just do import confuse. The code is almost identical apart from the name change. Again, we'll re-export at the old location (with a deprecation warning) for backwards compatibility, but we might stop doing this in a future release.
• beets.util.command_output now returns a named tuple containing both the standard output and the standard error data instead of just stdout alone. Client code will need to access the stdout attribute on the return value. Thanks to @zsinskri. #3329
• There were sporadic failures in test.test_player. Hopefully these are fixed. If they resurface, please reopen the relevant issue. #3309 #3330
• The beets.plugins.MetadataSourcePlugin base class has been added to simplify development of plugins which query album, track, and search APIs to provide metadata matches for the importer. Refer to the spotify and the deezer for examples of using this template class. #3355
• Accessing fields on an Item now falls back to the album's attributes. So, for example, item.foo will first look for a field foo on item and, if it doesn't exist, next tries looking for a field named foo on the album that contains item. If you specifically want to access an item's attributes, use Item.get(key, with_album=False). #2988
• Item.keys also has a with_album argument now, defaulting to True.
• A revision attribute has been added to Database. It is increased on every transaction that mutates it. #2988
• The classes AlbumInfo and TrackInfo now convey arbitrary attributes instead of a fixed, built-in set of field names (which was important to address #1547). Thanks to @dosoe.
• Two new events, mb_album_extract and mb_track_extract, let plugins add new fields based on MusicBrainz data. Thanks to @dosoe.

For packagers:

• Beets' library for manipulating media file metadata has now been split to a standalone project called MediaFile, released as mediafile. Beets now depends on this new package. Beets now depends on Mutagen transitively through MediaFile rather than directly, except in the case of one of beets' plugins (in particular, the scrub).
• Beets' library for configuration has been split into a standalone project called Confuse, released as confuse. Beets now depends on this package. Confuse has existed separately for some time and is used by unrelated projects, but until now we've been bundling a copy within beets.
• We attempted to fix an unreliable test, so a patch to skip or repair the test may no longer be necessary.
• This version drops support for Python 3.4.
• We have removed an optional dependency on bs1770gain.

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

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 versions 3.7 and 3.8 are now supported.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Version 1.4 has alpha-level Python 3 support. Thanks to the heroic efforts of @jrobeson, beets should run both under Python 2.7, as before, and now under Python 3.4 and above. The support is still new: it undoubtedly contains bugs, so it may replace all your music with Limp Bizkit—but if you're brave and you have backups, please try installing on Python 3. Let us know how it goes.

If you package beets for distribution, here's what you'll want to know:

• This version of beets now depends on the six library.
• We also bumped our minimum required version of Mutagen to 1.33 (from 1.27).
• Please don't package beets as a Python 3 application yet, even though most things work under Python 3.4 and later.

This version also makes a few changes to the command-line interface and configuration that you may need to know about:

• duplicates: The duplicates command no longer accepts multiple field arguments in the form -k title albumartist album. Each argument must be prefixed with -k, as in -k title -k albumartist -k album.
• The old top-level colors configuration option has been removed (the setting is now under ui).
• The deprecated list_format_album and list_format_item configuration options have been removed (see format_album and format_item).

The are a few new features:

• mpdupdate, mpdstats: When the host option is not set, these plugins will now look for the $MPD_HOST environment variable before falling back to localhost. Thanks to @tarruda. #2175
• web: Added an expand option to show the items of an album. #2050
• embyupdate: The plugin can now use an API key instead of a password to authenticate with Emby. #2045 #2117
• acousticbrainz: The plugin now adds a bpm field.
• beet --version now includes the Python version used to run beets.
• /reference/pathformat can now include unescaped commas (,) when they are not part of a function call. #2166 #2213
• The update command takes a new -F flag to specify the fields to update. Thanks to @dangmai. #2229 #2231

And there are a few bug fixes too:

• convert: The plugin no longer asks for confirmation if the query did not return anything to convert. #2260 #2262
• embedart: The plugin now uses jpg as an extension rather than jpeg, to ensure consistency with the plugins/fetchart. Thanks to @tweitzel. #2254 #2255
• embedart: The plugin now works for all jpeg files, including those that are only recognizable by their magic bytes. #1545 #2255
• web: The JSON output is no longer pretty-printed (for a space savings). #2050
• permissions: Fix a regression in the previous release where the plugin would always fail to set permissions (and log a warning). #2089
• beatport: Use track numbers from Beatport (instead of determining them from the order of tracks) and set the medium_index value.
• With per_disc_numbering enabled, some metadata sources (notably, the beatport) would not set the track number at all. This is fixed. #2085
• play: Fix $args getting passed verbatim to the play command if it was set in the configuration but -A or --args was omitted.
• With ignore_hidden enabled, non-UTF-8 filenames would cause a crash. This is fixed. #2168
• embyupdate: Fixes authentication header problem that caused a problem that it was not possible to get tokens from the Emby API.
• lyrics: Some titles use a colon to separate the main title from a subtitle. To find more matches, the plugin now also searches for lyrics using the part part preceding the colon character. #2206
• Fix a crash when a query uses a date field and some items are missing that field. #1938
• discogs: Subtracks are now detected and combined into a single track, two-sided mediums are treated as single discs, and tracks have media, medium_total and medium set correctly. #2222 #2228.
• missing: missing is now treated as an integer, allowing the use of (for example) ranges in queries.
• smartplaylist: Playlist names will be sanitized to ensure valid filenames. #2258
• The ID3 APIC tag now uses the Latin-1 encoding when possible instead of a Unicode encoding. This should increase compatibility with other software, especially with iTunes and when using ID3v2.3. Thanks to @lazka. #899 #2264 #2270

The last release, 1.3.19, also erroneously reported its version as "1.3.18" when you typed beet version. This has been corrected.

This is primarily a bug fix release: it cleans up a couple of regressions that appeared in the last version. But it also features the triumphant return of the beatport and a modernized bpd.

It's also the first version where beets passes all its tests on Windows! May this herald a new age of cross-platform reliability for beets.

New features:

• beatport: This metadata source plugin has arisen from the dead! It now works with Beatport's new OAuth-based API. Thanks to @jbaiter. #1989 #2067
• bpd: The plugin now uses the modern GStreamer 1.0 instead of the old 0.10. Thanks to @philippbeckmann. #2057 #2062
• A new --force option for the remove command allows removal of items without prompting beforehand. #2042
• A new duplicate_action importer config option controls how duplicate albums or tracks treated in import task. #185

Some fixes for Windows:

• Queries are now detected as paths when they contain backslashes (in addition to forward slashes). This only applies on Windows.
• embedart: Image similarity comparison with ImageMagick should now work on Windows.
• fetchart: The plugin should work more reliably with non-ASCII paths.

And other fixes:

• replaygain: The bs1770gain backend now correctly calculates sample peak instead of true peak. This comes with a major speed increase. #2031
• lyrics: Avoid a crash and a spurious warning introduced in the last version about a Google API key, which appeared even when you hadn't enabled the Google lyrics source.
• Fix a hard-coded path to bash-completion to work better with Homebrew installations. Thanks to @bismark. #2038
• Fix a crash introduced in the previous version when the standard input was connected to a Unix pipe. #2041
• Fix a crash when specifying non-ASCII format strings on the command line with the -f option for many commands. #2063
• fetchart: Determine the file extension for downloaded images based on the image's magic bytes. The plugin prints a warning if result is not consistent with the server-supplied Content-Type header. In previous versions, the plugin would use a .jpg extension for all images. #2053

This update adds a new hook that lets you integrate beets with command-line tools and an export that can dump data from the beets database as JSON. You can also automatically translate lyrics using a machine translation service.

The echonest plugin has been removed in this version because the API it used is shutting down. You might want to try the acousticbrainz instead.

Some of the larger new features:

• The new hook lets you execute commands in response to beets events.
• The new export can export data from beets' database as JSON. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki.
• lyrics: The plugin can now translate the fetched lyrics to your native language using the Bing translation API. Thanks to @Kraymer.
• fetchart: Album art can now be fetched from fanart.tv.

Smaller new things:

• There are two new functions available in templates: %first and %ifdef. See template-functions.
• convert: A new album_art_maxwidth setting lets you resize album art while copying it.
• convert: The extension setting is now optional for conversion formats. By default, the extension is the same as the name of the configured format.
• importadded: A new preserve_write_mtimes option lets you preserve mtime of files even when beets updates their metadata.
• fetchart: The enforce_ratio option now lets you tolerate images that are almost square but differ slightly from an exact 1:1 aspect ratio.
• fetchart: The plugin can now optionally save the artwork's source in an attribute in the database.
• The terminal_encoding configuration option can now also override the input encoding. (Previously, it only affected the encoding of the standard output stream.)
• A new ignore_hidden configuration option lets you ignore files that your OS marks as invisible.
• web: A new values endpoint lets you get the distinct values of a field. Thanks to @sumpfralle. #2010

Fixes:

• Fix a problem with the stats command in exact mode when filenames on Windows use non-ASCII characters. #1891
• Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data. #1895
• mbcollection: The plugin now redacts your MusicBrainz password in the beet config output. #1907
• scrub: Fix an occasional problem where scrubbing on import could undo the id3v23 setting. #1903
• lyrics: Add compatibility with some changes to the LyricsWiki page markup. #1912 #1909
• lyrics: Fix retrieval from Musixmatch by improving the way we guess the URL for lyrics on that service. #1880
• edit: Fail gracefully when the configured text editor command can't be invoked. #1927
• fetchart: Fix a crash in the Wikipedia backend on non-ASCII artist and album names. #1960
• convert: Change the default ogg encoding quality from 2 to 3 (to fit the default from the oggenc(1) manpage). #1982
• convert: The never_convert_lossy_files option now considers AIFF a lossless format. #2005
• web: A proper 404 error, instead of an internal exception, is returned when missing album art is requested. Thanks to @sumpfralle. #2011
• Tolerate more malformed floating-point numbers in metadata tags. #2014
• The ignore configuration option now includes the lost+found directory by default.
• acousticbrainz: AcousticBrainz lookups are now done over HTTPS. Thanks to @Freso. #2007

This release introduces one new plugin to fetch audio information from the AcousticBrainz project and another plugin to make it easier to submit your handcrafted metadata back to MusicBrainz. The importer also gained two oft-requested features: a way to skip the initial search process by specifying an ID ahead of time, and a way to manually provide metadata in the middle of the import process (via the edit plugin).

Also, as of this release, the beets project has some new Internet homes! Our new domain name is beets.io, and we have a shiny new GitHub organization: beetbox.

Here are the big new features:

• A new acousticbrainz fetches acoustic-analysis information from the AcousticBrainz project. Thanks to @opatel99, and thanks to Google Code-In! #1784
• A new mbsubmit lets you print music's current metadata in a format that the MusicBrainz data parser can understand. You can trigger it during an interactive import session. #1779
• A new --search-id importer option lets you manually specify IDs (i.e., MBIDs or Discogs IDs) for imported music. Doing this skips the initial candidate search, which can be important for huge albums where this initial lookup is slow. Also, the enter Id prompt choice now accepts several IDs, separated by spaces. #1808
• edit: You can now edit metadata on the fly during the import process. The plugin provides two new interactive options: one to edit your music's metadata, and one to edit the matched metadata retrieved from MusicBrainz (or another data source). This feature is still in its early stages, so please send feedback if you find anything missing. #1846 #396

There are even more new features:

• fetchart: The Google Images backend has been restored. It now requires an API key from Google. Thanks to @lcharlick. #1778
• info: A new option will print only fields' names and not their values. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki. #1812
• The fields command now displays flexible attributes. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki. #1818
• The modify command lets you interactively select which albums or items you want to change. #1843
• The move command gained a new --timid flag to print and confirm which files you want to move. #1843
• The move command no longer prints filenames for files that don't actually need to be moved. #1583

Fixes:

• play: Fix a regression in the last version where there was no default command. #1793
• lastimport: The plugin now works again after being broken by some unannounced changes to the Last.fm API. #1574
• play: Fixed a typo in a configuration option. The option is now warning_threshold instead of warning_treshold, but we kept the old name around for compatibility. Thanks to @JesseWeinstein. #1802 #1803
• edit: Editing metadata now moves files, when appropriate (like the modify command). #1804
• The stats command no longer crashes when files are missing or inaccessible. #1806
• fetchart: Possibly fix a Unicode-related crash when using some versions of pyOpenSSL. #1805
• replaygain: Fix an intermittent crash with the GStreamer backend. #1855
• lastimport: The plugin now works with the beets API key by default. You can still provide a different key the configuration.
• replaygain: Fix a crash using the Python Audio Tools backend. #1873

The big news in this release is a new interactive editor plugin. It's really nifty: you can now change your music's metadata by making changes in a visual text editor, which can sometimes be far more efficient than the built-in modify-cmd` command. No more carefully retyping the same artist name with slight capitalization changes.

This version also adds an oft-requested "not" operator to beets' queries, so you can exclude music from any operation. It also brings friendlier formatting (and querying!) of song durations.

The big new stuff:

• A new edit lets you manually edit your music's metadata using your favorite text editor. #164 #1706
• Queries can now use "not" logic. Type a ^ before part of a query to exclude matching music from the results. For example, beet list -a beatles ^album:1 will find all your albums by the Beatles except for their singles compilation, "1." See not_query. #819 #1728
• A new embyupdate can trigger a library refresh on an Emby server when your beets database changes.
• Track length is now displayed as "M:SS" rather than a raw number of seconds. Queries on track length also accept this format: for example, beet list length:5:30.. will find all your tracks that have a duration over 5 minutes and 30 seconds. You can turn off this new behavior using the format_raw_length configuration option. #1749

Smaller changes:

• Three commands, modify, update, and mbsync, would previously move files by default after changing their metadata. Now, these commands will only move files if you have the config-import-copy or config-import-move options enabled in your importer configuration. This way, if you configure the importer not to touch your filenames, other commands will respect that decision by default too. Each command also sprouted a --move command-line option to override this default (in addition to the --nomove flag they already had). #1697
• A new configuration option, va_name, controls the album artist name for various-artists albums. The setting defaults to "Various Artists," the MusicBrainz standard. In order to match MusicBrainz, the discogs also adopts the same setting.
• info: The info command now accepts a -f/--format option for customizing how items are displayed, just like the built-in list command. #1737

Some changes for developers:

• Two new plugin hooks , albuminfo_received and trackinfo_received, let plugins intercept metadata as soon as it is received, before it is applied to music in the database. #872
• Plugins can now add options to the interactive importer prompts. See append_prompt_choices. #1758

Fixes:

• plexupdate: Fix a crash when Plex libraries use non-ASCII collection names. #1649
• discogs: Maybe fix a crash when using some versions of the requests library. #1656
• Fix a race in the importer when importing two albums with the same artist and name in quick succession. The importer would fail to detect them as duplicates, claiming that there were "empty albums" in the database even when there were not. #1652
• plugins/lastgenre: Clean up the reggae-related genres somewhat. Thanks to @Freso. #1661
• The importer now correctly moves album art files when re-importing. #314
• fetchart: In auto mode, the plugin now skips albums that already have art attached to them so as not to interfere with re-imports. #314
• fetchart: The plugin now only resizes album art if necessary, rather than always by default. #1264
• fetchart: Fix a bug where a database reference to a non-existent album art file would prevent the command from fetching new art. #1126
• thumbnails: Fix a crash with Unicode paths. #1686
• embedart: The remove_art_file option now works on import (as well as with the explicit command). #1662 #1675
• metasync: Fix a crash when syncing with recent versions of iTunes. #1700
• duplicates: Fix a crash when merging items. #1699
• smartplaylist: More gracefully handle malformed queries and missing configuration.
• Fix a crash with some files with unreadable iTunes SoundCheck metadata. #1666
• thumbnails: Fix a nasty segmentation fault crash that arose with some library versions. #1433
• convert: Fix a crash with Unicode paths in --pretend mode. #1735
• Fix a crash when sorting by nonexistent fields on queries. #1734
• Probably fix some mysterious errors when dealing with images using ImageMagick on Windows. #1721
• Fix a crash when writing some Unicode comment strings to MP3s that used older encodings. The encoding is now always updated to UTF-8. #879
• fetchart: The Google Images backend has been removed. It used an API that has been shut down. #1760
• lyrics: Fix a crash in the Google backend when searching for bands with regular-expression characters in their names, like Sunn O))). #1673
• scrub: In auto mode, the plugin now actually only scrubs files on import, as the documentation always claimed it did---not every time files were written, as it previously did. #1657
• scrub: Also in auto mode, album art is now correctly restored. #1657
• Possibly allow flexible attributes to be used with the %aunique template function. #1775
• lyrics: The Genius backend is now more robust to communication errors. The backend has also been disabled by default, since the API it depends on is currently down. #1770

This release adds a new plugin for checking file quality and a new source for lyrics. The larger features are:

• A new badfiles helps you scan for corruption in your music collection. Thanks to @fxthomas. #1568
• lyrics: You can now fetch lyrics from Genius.com. Thanks to @sadatay. #1626 #1639
• zero: The plugin can now use a "whitelist" policy as an alternative to the (default) "blacklist" mode. Thanks to @adkow. #1621 #1641

And there are smaller new features too:

• Add new color aliases for standard terminal color names (e.g., cyan and magenta). Thanks to @mathstuf. #1548
• play: A new --args option lets you specify options for the player command. #1532
• play: A new raw configuration option lets the command work with players (such as VLC) that expect music filenames as arguments, rather than in a playlist. Thanks to @nathdwek. #1578
• play: You can now configure the number of tracks that trigger a "lots of music" warning. #1577
• embedart: A new remove_art_file option lets you clean up if you prefer only embedded album art. Thanks to @jackwilsdon. #1591 #733
• plexupdate: A new library_name option allows you to select which Plex library to update. #1572 #1595
• A new include option lets you import external configuration files.

This release has plenty of fixes:

• lastgenre: Fix a bug that prevented tag popularity from being considered. Thanks to @svoos. #1559
• Fixed a bug where plugins wouldn't be notified of the deletion of an item's art, for example with the clearart command from the embedart. Thanks to @nathdwek. #1565
• fetchart: The Google Images source is disabled by default (as it was before beets 1.3.9), as is the Wikipedia source (which was causing lots of unnecessary delays due to DBpedia downtime). To re-enable these sources, add wikipedia google to your sources configuration option.
• The list command's help output now has a small query and format string example. Thanks to @pkess. #1582
• fetchart: The plugin now fetches PNGs but not GIFs. (It still fetches JPEGs.) This avoids an error when trying to embed images, since not all formats support GIFs. #1588
• Date fields are now written in the correct order (year-month-day), which eliminates an intermittent bug where the latter two fields would not get written to files. Thanks to @jdetrey. #1303 #1589
• replaygain: Avoid a crash when the PyAudioTools backend encounters an error. #1592
• The case sensitivity of path queries is more useful now: rather than just guessing based on the platform, we now check the case sensitivity of your filesystem. #1586
• Case-insensitive path queries might have returned nothing because of a wrong SQL query.
• Fix a crash when a query contains a "+" or "-" alone in a component. #1605
• Fixed unit of file size to powers of two (MiB, GiB, etc.) instead of powers of ten (MB, GB, etc.). #1623

This is mainly a bugfix release, but we also have a nifty new plugin for ipfs and a bunch of new configuration options.

The new features:

• A new ipfs plugin lets you share music via a new, global, decentralized filesystem. #1397
• duplicates: You can now merge duplicate track metadata (when detecting duplicate items), or duplicate album tracks (when detecting duplicate albums).
• duplicates: Duplicate resolution now uses an ordering to prioritize duplicates. By default, it prefers music with more complete metadata, but you can configure it to use any list of attributes.
• metasync: Added a new backend to fetch metadata from iTunes. This plugin is still in an experimental phase. #1450
• The move command has a new --pretend option, making the command show how the items will be moved without actually changing anything.
• The importer now supports matching of "pregap" or HTOA (hidden track-one audio) tracks when they are listed in MusicBrainz. (This feature depends on a new version of the musicbrainzngs library that is not yet released, but will start working when it is available.) Thanks to @ruippeixotog. #1104 #1493
• plexupdate: A new token configuration option lets you specify a key for Plex Home setups. Thanks to @edcarroll. #1494
• zero: A new update_database configuration option nulls out fields in the database along with files' tags. #1516

Fixes:

• fetchart: Complain when the enforce_ratio or min_width options are enabled but no local imaging backend is available to carry them out. #1460
• importfeeds: Avoid generating incorrect m3u filename when both of the m3u and m3u_multi options are enabled. #1490
• duplicates: Avoid a crash when misconfigured. #1457
• mpdstats: Avoid a crash when the music played is not in the beets library. Thanks to @CodyReichert. #1443
• Fix a crash with ArtResizer on Windows systems (affecting embedart, fetchart, and thumbnails). #1448
• permissions: Fix an error with non-ASCII paths. #1449
• Fix sorting by paths when the sort_case_insensitive option is enabled. #1451
• embedart: Avoid an error when trying to embed invalid images into MPEG-4 files.
• fetchart: The Wikipedia source can now better deal artists that use non-standard capitalization (e.g., alt-J, dEUS).
• web: Fix searching for non-ASCII queries. Thanks to @oldtopman. #1470
• mpdupdate: We now recommend the newer python-mpd2 library instead of its unmaintained parent. Thanks to @Somasis. #1472
• The importer interface and log file now output a useful list of files (instead of the word "None") when in album-grouping mode. #1475 #825
• Fix some logging errors when filenames and other user-provided strings contain curly braces. #1481
• Regular expression queries over paths now work more reliably with non-ASCII characters in filenames. #1482
• Fix a bug where the autotagger's ignored setting was sometimes, well, ignored. #1487
• Fix a bug with Unicode strings when generating image thumbnails. #1485
• keyfinder: Fix handling of Unicode paths. #1502
• fetchart: When album art is already present, the message is now printed in the text_highlight_minor color (light gray). Thanks to @Somasis. #1512
• Some messages in the console UI now use plural nouns correctly. Thanks to @JesseWeinstein. #1521
• Sorting numerical fields (such as track) now works again. #1511
• replaygain: Missing GStreamer plugins now cause a helpful error message instead of a crash. #1518
• Fix an edge case when producing sanitized filenames where the maximum path length conflicted with the replace rules. Thanks to Ben Ockmore. #496 #1361
• Fix an incompatibility with OS X 10.11 (where /usr/sbin seems not to be on the user's path by default).
• Fix an incompatibility with certain JPEG files. Here's a relevant Python bug. Thanks to @nathdwek. #1545
• Fix the group_albums importer mode so that it works correctly when files are not already in order by album. #1550
• The fields command no longer separates built-in fields from plugin-provided ones. This distinction was becoming increasingly unreliable.
• duplicates: Fix a Unicode warning when paths contained non-ASCII characters. #1551
• fetchart: Work around a urllib3 bug that could cause a crash. #1555 #1556
• When you edit the configuration file with beet config -e and the file does not exist, beets creates an empty file before editing it. This fixes an error on OS X, where the open command does not work with non-existent files. #1480

This is a tiny bug-fix release. It copes with a dependency upgrade that broke beets. There are just two fixes:

• Fix compatibility with Jellyfish version 0.5.0.
• embedart: In auto mode (the import hook), the plugin now respects the write config option under import. If this is disabled, album art is no longer embedded on import in order to leave files untouched---in effect, auto is implicitly disabled. #1427

This little update makes queries more powerful, sorts music more intelligently, and removes a performance bottleneck. There's an experimental new plugin for synchronizing metadata with music players.

Packagers should also note a new dependency in this version: the Jellyfish Python library makes our text comparisons (a big part of the auto-tagging process) go much faster.

New features:

• Queries can now use "or" logic: if you use a comma to separate parts of a query, items and albums will match either side of the comma. For example, beet ls foo , bar will get all the items matching foo or matching bar. See combiningqueries. #1423
• The autotagger's matching algorithm is faster. We now use the Jellyfish library to compute string similarity, which is better optimized than our hand-rolled edit distance implementation. #1389
• Sorting is now case insensitive by default. This means that artists will be sorted lexicographically regardless of case. For example, the artist alt-J will now properly sort before YACHT. (Previously, it would have ended up at the end of the list, after all the capital-letter artists.) You can turn this new behavior off using the sort_case_insensitive configuration option. See query-sort. #1429
• An experimental new metasync lets you get metadata from your favorite music players, starting with Amarok. #1386
• fetchart: There are new settings to control what constitutes "acceptable" images. The minwidth option constrains the minimum image width in pixels and the enforce_ratio option requires that images be square. #1394

Little fixes and improvements:

• fetchart: Remove a hard size limit when fetching from the Cover Art Archive.
• The output of the fields command is now sorted. Thanks to @multikatt. #1402
• replaygain: Fix a number of issues with the new bs1770gain backend on Windows. Also, fix missing debug output in import mode. #1398
• Beets should now be better at guessing the appropriate output encoding on Windows. (Specifically, the console output encoding is guessed separately from the encoding for command-line arguments.) A bug was also fixed where beets would ignore the locale settings and use UTF-8 by default. #1419
• discogs: Better error handling when we can't communicate with Discogs on setup. #1417
• importadded: Fix a crash when importing singletons in-place. #1416
• fuzzy: Fix a regression causing a crash in the last release. #1422
• Fix a crash when the importer cannot open its log file. Thanks to @barsanuphe. #1426
• Fix an error when trying to write tags for items with flexible fields called date and original_date (which are not built-in beets fields). #1404

In this release, we refactored the logging system to be more flexible and more useful. There are more granular levels of verbosity, the output from plugins should be more consistent, and several kinds of logging bugs should be impossible in the future.

There are also two new plugins: one for filtering the files you import and an evolved plugin for using album art as directory thumbnails in file managers. There's a new source for album art, and the importer now records the source of match data. This is a particularly huge release---there's lots more below.

There's one big change with this release: Python 2.6 is no longer supported. You'll need Python 2.7. Please trust us when we say this let us remove a surprising number of ugly hacks throughout the code.

Major new features and bigger changes:

• There are now multiple levels of output verbosity. On the command line, you can make beets somewhat verbose with -v or very verbose with -vv. For the importer especially, this makes the first verbose mode much more manageable, while still preserving an option for overwhelmingly verbose debug output. #1244
• A new filefilter plugin lets you write regular expressions to automatically avoid importing certain files. Thanks to @mried. #1186
• A new thumbnails plugin generates cover-art thumbnails for album folders for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. (This replaces the freedesktop, which only worked with the Dolphin file manager.)
• replaygain: There is a new backend that uses the bs1770gain analysis tool. Thanks to @jmwatte. #1343
• A new filesize field on items indicates the number of bytes in the file. #1291
• A new searchlimit configuration option allows you to specify how many search results you wish to see when looking up releases at MusicBrainz during import. #1245
• The importer now records the data source for a match in a new flexible attribute data_source on items and albums. #1311
• The colors used in the terminal interface are now configurable via the new config option colors, nested under the option ui. (Also, the color config option has been moved from top-level to under ui. Beets will respect the old color setting, but will warn the user with a deprecation message.) #1238
• fetchart: There's a new Wikipedia image source that uses DBpedia to find albums. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. #1194
• In the config command, the output is now redacted by default. Sensitive information like passwords and API keys is not included. The new --clear option disables redaction. #1376

You should probably also know about these core changes to the way beets works:

• As mentioned above, Python 2.6 is no longer supported.
• The tracktotal attribute is now a track-level field instead of an album-level one. This field stores the total number of tracks on the album, or if the per_disc_numbering config option is set, the total number of tracks on a particular medium (i.e., disc). The field was causing problems with that per_disc_numbering mode: different discs on the same album needed different track totals. The field can now work correctly in either mode.
• To replace tracktotal as an album-level field, there is a new albumtotal computed attribute that provides the total number of tracks on the album. (The per_disc_numbering option has no influence on this field.)
• The list_format_album and list_format_item configuration keys now affect (almost) every place where objects are printed and logged. (Previously, they only controlled the list command and a few other scattered pieces.) #1269
• Relatedly, the beet program now accept top-level options --format-item and --format-album before any subcommand to control how items and albums are displayed. #1271
• list_format_album and list_format_album have respectively been renamed format_album and format_item. The old names still work but each triggers a warning message. #1271
• Path queries are automatically triggered only if the path targeted by the query exists. Previously, just having a slash somewhere in the query was enough, so beet ls AC/DC` wouldn't work to refer to the artist.

There are also lots of medium-sized features in this update:

• duplicates: The command has a new --strict option that will only report duplicates if all attributes are explicitly set. #1000
• smartplaylist: Playlist updating should now be faster: the plugin detects, for each playlist, whether it needs to be regenerated, instead of obliviously regenerating all of them. The splupdate command can now also take additional parameters that indicate the names of the playlists to regenerate.
• play: The command shows the output of the underlying player command and lets you interact with it. #1321
• The summary shown to compare duplicate albums during import now displays the old and new filesizes. #1291
• lastgenre: Add comedy, humor, and stand-up as well as a longer list of classical music genre tags to the built-in whitelist and canonicalization tree. #1206 #1239 #1240
• web: Add support for cross-origin resource sharing for more flexible in-browser clients. Thanks to Andre Miller. #1236 #1237
• plugins/mbsync: A new -f/--format option controls the output format when listing unrecognized items. The output is also now more helpful by default. #1246
• fetchart: A new option, -n, extracts the cover art of all matched albums into their respective directories. Another new flag, -a, associates the extracted files with the albums in the database. #1261
• info: A new option, -i, can display only a specified subset of properties. #1287
• The number of missing/unmatched tracks is shown during import. #1088
• permissions: The plugin now also adjusts the permissions of the directories. (Previously, it only affected files.) #1308 #1324
• ftintitle: You can now configure the format that the plugin uses to add the artist to the title. Thanks to @amishb. #1377

And many little fixes and improvements:

• replaygain: Stop applying replaygain directly to source files when using the mp3gain backend. #1316
• Path queries are case-sensitive on non-Windows OSes. #1165
• lyrics: Silence a warning about insecure requests in the new MusixMatch backend. #1204
• Fix a crash when beet is invoked without arguments. #1205 #1207
• fetchart: Do not attempt to import directories as album art. #1177 #1211
• mpdstats: Avoid double-counting some play events. #773 #1212
• Fix a crash when the importer deals with Unicode metadata in --pretend mode. #1214
• smartplaylist: Fix album_query so that individual files are added to the playlist instead of directories. #1225
• Remove the beatport plugin. Beatport_ has shut off public access to their API and denied our request for an account. We have not heard from the company since 2013, so we are assuming access will not be restored.
• Incremental imports now (once again) show a "skipped N directories" message.
• embedart: Handle errors in ImageMagick's output. #1241
• keyfinder: Parse the underlying tool's output more robustly. #1248
• embedart: We now show a comprehensible error message when beet embedart -f FILE is given a non-existent path. #1252
• Fix a crash when a file has an unrecognized image type tag. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1260
• importfeeds and smartplaylist: Automatically create parent directories for playlist files (instead of crashing when the parent directory does not exist). #1266
• The write-cmd` command no longer tries to "write" non-writable fields, such as the bitrate. #1268
• The error message when MusicBrainz is not reachable on the network is now much clearer. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. #1190 #1272
• Improve error messages when parsing query strings with shlex. #1290
• embedart: Fix a crash that occured when used together with the check plugin. #1241
• scrub: Log an error instead of stopping when the beet scrub command cannot write a file. Also, avoid problems on Windows with Unicode filenames. #1297
• discogs: Handle and log more kinds of communication errors. #1299 #1305
• lastgenre: Bugs in the pylast library can no longer crash beets.
• convert: You can now configure the temporary directory for conversions. Thanks to @autochthe. #1382 #1383
• rewrite: Fix a regression that prevented the plugin's rewriting from applying to album-level fields like $albumartist. #1393
• play: The plugin now sorts items according to the configuration in album mode.
• fetchart: The name for extracted art files is taken from the art_filename configuration option. #1258
• When there's a parse error in a query (for example, when you type a malformed date in a date query), beets now stops with an error instead of silently ignoring the query component.

For developers:

• The database_change event now sends the item or album that is subject to a change.
• The OptionParser is now a CommonOptionsParser that offers facilities for adding usual options (--album, --path and --format). See add_subcommands. #1271
• The logging system in beets has been overhauled. Plugins now each have their own logger, which helps by automatically adjusting the verbosity level in import mode and by prefixing the plugin's name. Logging levels are dynamically set when a plugin is called, depending on how it is called (import stage, event or direct command). Finally, logging calls can (and should!) use modern {}-style string formatting lazily. See plugin-logging in the plugin API docs.
• A new import_task_created event lets you manipulate import tasks immediately after they are initialized. It's also possible to replace the originally created tasks by returning new ones using this event.

This version adds a healthy helping of new features and fixes a critical MPEG-4--related bug. There are more lyrics sources, there new plugins for managing permissions and integrating with Plex, and the importer has a new --pretend flag that shows which music would be imported.

One backwards-compatibility note: the lyrics now requires the requests_ library. If you use this plugin, you will need to install the library by typing pip install requests or the equivalent for your OS.

Also, as an advance warning, this will be one of the last releases to support Python 2.6. If you have a system that cannot run Python 2.7, please consider upgrading soon.

The new features are:

• A new permissions makes it easy to fix permissions on music files as they are imported. Thanks to xsteadfastx. #1098
• A new plexupdate lets you notify a Plex server when the database changes. Thanks again to xsteadfastx. #1120
• The import-cmdcommand now has a--pretend` flag that lists the files that will be imported. Thanks to mried. #1162
• lyrics: Add Musixmatch source and introduce a new sources config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for lyrics and in which order.
• lyrics: Add Brazilian and Spanish sources to Google custom search engine.
• Add a warning when importing a directory that contains no music. #1116 #1127
• zero: Can now remove embedded images. #1129 #1100
• The config command can now be used to edit the configuration even when it has syntax errors. #1123 #1128
• lyrics: Added a new force config option. #1150

As usual, there are loads of little fixes and improvements:

• Fix a new crash with the latest version of Mutagen (1.26).
• lyrics: Avoid fetching truncated lyrics from the Google backed by merging text blocks separated by empty ` tags before scraping.
• We now print a better error message when the database file is corrupted.
• discogs: Only prompt for authentication when running the import command. #1123
• When deleting fields with the modify command, do not crash when the field cannot be removed (i.e., when it does not exist, when it is a built-in field, or when it is a computed field). #1124
• The deprecated echonest_tempo plugin has been removed. Please use the echonest instead.
• echonest: Fingerprint-based lookup has been removed in accordance with API changes. #1121
• echonest: Avoid a crash when the song has no duration information. #896
• lyrics: Avoid a crash when retrieving non-ASCII lyrics from the Google backend. #1135 #1136
• smartplaylist: Sort specifiers are now respected in queries. Thanks to djl. #1138 #1137
• ftintitle and lyrics: Featuring artists can now be detected when they use the Spanish word con. #1060 #1143
• mbcollection: Fix an "HTTP 400" error caused by a change in the MusicBrainz API. #1152
• The % and _ characters in path queries do not invoke their special SQL meaning anymore. #1146
• convert: Command-line argument construction now works on Windows. Thanks to mluds. #1026 #1157 #1158
• embedart: Fix an erroneous missing-art error on Windows. Thanks to mluds. #1163
• importadded: Now works with in-place and symlinked imports. #1170
• ftintitle: The plugin is now quiet when it runs as part of the import process. Thanks to Freso. #1176 #1172
• ftintitle: Fix weird behavior when the same artist appears twice in the artist string. Thanks to Marc Addeo. #1179 #1181
• lastgenre: Match songs more robustly when they contain dashes. Thanks to djl. #1156
• The config command can now use $EDITOR variables with arguments.

This release adds two new standard plugins to beets: one for synchronizing Last.fm listening data and one for integrating with Linux desktops. And at long last, imports can now create symbolic links to music files instead of copying or moving them. We also gained the ability to search for album art on the iTunes Store and a new way to compute ReplayGain levels.

The major new features are:

• A new lastimport lets you download your play count data from Last.fm into a flexible attribute. Thanks to Rafael Bodill.
• A new freedesktop creates metadata files for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. Thanks to kerobaros. #1056, #707
• A new link option in the import section creates symbolic links during import instead of moving or copying. Thanks to Rovanion Luckey. #710, #114
• fetchart: You can now search for art on the iTunes Store. There's also a new sources config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for images and in which order.
• replaygain: A new Python Audio Tools backend was added. Thanks to Francesco Rubino. #1070
• embedart: You can now automatically check that new art looks similar to existing art---ensuring that you only get a better "version" of the art you already have. See image-similarity-check.
• ftintitle: The plugin now runs automatically on import. To disable this, unset the auto config flag.

There are also core improvements and other substantial additions:

• The media attribute is now a track-level field instead of an album-level one. This field stores the delivery mechanism for the music, so in its album-level incarnation, it could not represent heterogeneous releases---for example, an album consisting of a CD and a DVD. Now, tracks accurately indicate the media they appear on. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.
• Re-imports of your existing music now preserve its added date and flexible attributes. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
• Slow queries, such as those over flexible attributes, should now be much faster when used with certain commands---notably, the play.
• bpd: Add a new configuration option for setting the default volume. Thanks to IndiGit.
• embedart: A new ifempty config option lets you only embed album art when no album art is present. Thanks to kerobaros.
• discogs: Authenticate with the Discogs server. The plugin now requires a Discogs account due to new API restrictions. Thanks to multikatt. #1027, #1040

And countless little improvements and fixes:

• Standard cover art in APEv2 metadata is now supported. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1042
• convert: Avoid a crash when embedding cover art fails.
• mpdstats: Fix an error on start (introduced in the previous version). Thanks to Zach Denton.
• convert: The --yes command-line flag no longer expects an argument.
• play: Remove the temporary .m3u file after sending it to the player.
• The importer no longer tries to highlight partial differences in numeric quantities (track numbers and durations), which was often confusing.
• Date-based queries that are malformed (not parse-able) no longer crash beets and instead fail silently.
• duplicates: Emit an error when the checksum config option is set incorrectly.
• The migration from pre-1.1, non-YAML configuration files has been removed. If you need to upgrade an old config file, use an older version of beets temporarily.
• discogs: Recover from HTTP errors when communicating with the Discogs servers. Thanks to Dustin Rodriguez.
• embedart: Do not log "embedding album art into..." messages during the import process.
• Fix a crash in the autotagger when files had only whitespace in their metadata.
• play: Fix a potential crash when the command outputs special characters. #1041
• web: Queries typed into the search field are now treated as separate query components. #1045
• Date tags that use slashes instead of dashes as separators are now interpreted correctly. And WMA (ASF) files now map the comments field to the "Description" tag (in addition to "WM/Comments"). Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1043
• embedart: Avoid resizing the image multiple times when embedding into an album. Thanks to kerobaros. #1028, #1036
• discogs: Avoid a situation where a trailing comma could be appended to some artist names. #1049
• The output of the stats command is slightly different: the approximate size is now marked as such, and the total number of seconds only appears in exact mode.
• convert: A new copy_album_art option puts images alongside converted files. Thanks to Ángel Alonso. #1050, #1055
• There is no longer a "conflict" between two plugins that declare the same field with the same type. Thanks to Peter Schnebel. #1059 #1061
• chroma: Limit the number of releases and recordings fetched as the result of an Acoustid match to avoid extremely long processing times for very popular music. #1068
• Fix an issue where modifying an album's field without actually changing it would not update the corresponding tracks to bring differing tracks back in line with the album. #856
• echonest: When communicating with the Echo Nest servers fails repeatedly, log an error instead of exiting. #1096
• lyrics: Avoid an error when the Google source returns a result without a title. Thanks to Alberto Leal. #1097
• Importing an archive will no longer leave temporary files behind in /tmp. Thanks to multikatt. #1067, #1091

This release has two big new chunks of functionality. Queries now support sorting and user-defined fields can now have types.

If you want to see all your songs in reverse chronological order, just type beet list year-. It couldn't be easier.

Flexible field types mean that some functionality that has previously only worked for built-in fields, like range queries, can now work with plugin- and user-defined fields too. For starters, the /plugins/echonest/ and mpdstats now mark the types of the fields they provide---so you can now say, for example, beet ls liveness:0.5..1.5 for the Echo Nest "liveness" attribute. The types makes it easy to specify field types in your config file.

One upgrade note: if you use the discogs, you will need to upgrade the Discogs client library to use this version. Just type pip install -U discogs-client.

Other new features:

• info: Target files can now be specified through library queries (in addition to filenames). The --library option prints library fields instead of tags. Multiple files can be summarized together with the new --summarize option.
• mbcollection: A new option lets you automatically update your collection on import. Thanks to Olin Gay.
• convert: A new never_convert_lossy_files option can prevent lossy transcoding. Thanks to Simon Kohlmeyer.
• convert: A new --yes command-line flag skips the confirmation.

Still more fixes and little improvements:

• Invalid state files don't crash the importer.
• lyrics: Only strip featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes if no lyrics for the original artist and title were found.
• Fix a crash when reading some files with missing tags.
• discogs: Compatibility with the new 2.0 version of the discogs_client Python library. If you were using the old version, you wil need to upgrade to the latest version of the library to use the correspondingly new version of the plugin (e.g., with pip install -U discogs-client). Thanks to Andriy Kohut.
• Fix a crash when writing files that can't be read. Thanks to Jocelyn De La Rosa.
• The stats command now counts album artists. The album count also more accurately reflects the number of albums in the database.
• convert: Avoid crashes when tags cannot be written to newly converted files.
• Formatting templates with item data no longer confusingly shows album-level data when the two are inconsistent.
• Resuming imports and beginning incremental imports should now be much faster when there is a lot of previously-imported music to skip.
• lyrics: Remove <script> tags from scraped lyrics. Thanks to Bombardment.
• play: Add a relative_to config option. Thanks to BrainDamage.
• Fix a crash when a MusicBrainz release has zero tracks.
• The --version flag now works as an alias for the version command.
• lastgenre: Remove some unhelpful genres from the default whitelist. Thanks to gwern.
• importfeeds: A new echo output mode prints files' paths to standard error. Thanks to robotanarchy.
• replaygain: Restore some error handling when mp3gain output cannot be parsed. The verbose log now contains the bad tool output in this case.
• convert: Fix filename extensions when converting automatically.
• The write plugin event allows plugins to change the tags that are written to a media file.
• zero: Do not delete database values; only media file tags are affected.

This release of beets fixes all the bugs, and you can be confident that you will never again find any bugs in beets, ever. It also adds support for plain old AIFF files and adds three more plugins, including a nifty one that lets you measure a song's tempo by tapping out the beat on your keyboard. The importer deals more elegantly with duplicates and you can broaden your cover art search to the entire web with Google Image Search.

The big new features are:

• Support for AIFF files. Tags are stored as ID3 frames in one of the file's IFF chunks. Thanks to Evan Purkhiser for contributing support to Mutagen.
• The new importadded reads files' modification times to set their "added" date. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
• The new bpm lets you manually measure the tempo of a playing song. Thanks to aroquen.
• The new spotify generates playlists for your Spotify account. Thanks to Olin Gay.
• A new required configuration option for the importer skips matches that are missing certain data. Thanks to oprietop.
• When the importer detects duplicates, it now shows you some details about the potentially-replaced music so you can make an informed decision. Thanks to Howard Jones.
• fetchart: You can now optionally search for cover art on Google Image Search. Thanks to Lemutar.
• A new asciify-paths configuration option replaces all non-ASCII characters in paths.

And the multitude of little improvements and fixes:

• Compatibility with the latest version of Mutagen, 1.23.
• web: Lyrics now display readably with correct line breaks. Also, the detail view scrolls to reveal all of the lyrics. Thanks to Meet Udeshi.
• play: The command config option can now contain arguments (rather than just an executable). Thanks to Alessandro Ghedini.
• Fix an error when using the modify command to remove a flexible attribute. Thanks to Pierre Rust.
• info: The command now shows audio properties (e.g., bitrate) in addition to metadata. Thanks Alessandro Ghedini.
• Avoid a crash on Windows when writing to files with special characters in their names.
• play: Playing albums now generates filenames by default (as opposed to directories) for better compatibility. The use_folders option restores the old behavior. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
• Fix an error when importing an empty directory with the --flat option.
• mpdstats: The last song in a playlist is now correctly counted as played. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
• zero: Prevent accidental nulling of dangerous fields (IDs and paths). Thanks to brunal.
• The remove command now shows the paths of files that will be deleted. Thanks again to brunal.
• Don't display changes for fields that are not in the restricted field set. This fixes write showing changes for fields that are not written to the file.
• The write command avoids displaying the item name if there are no changes for it.
• When using both the convert and the scrub, avoid scrubbing the source file of conversions. (Fix a regression introduced in the previous release.)
• replaygain: Logging is now quieter during import. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
• fetchart: When loading art from the filesystem, we now prioritize covers with more keywords in them. This means that cover-front.jpg will now be taken before cover-back.jpg because it contains two keywords rather than one. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
• lastgenre: Remove duplicates from canonicalized genre lists. Thanks again to Fabrice Laporte.
• The importer now records its progress when skipping albums. This means that incremental imports will no longer try to import albums again after you've chosen to skip them, and erroneous invitations to resume "interrupted" imports should be reduced. Thanks to jcassette.
• bucket: You can now customize the definition of alphanumeric "ranges" using regular expressions. And the heuristic for detecting years has been improved. Thanks to sotho.
• Already-imported singleton tracks are skipped when resuming an import.
• chroma: A new auto configuration option disables fingerprinting on import. Thanks to ddettrittus.
• convert: A new --format option to can select the transcoding preset from the command-line.
• convert: Transcoding presets can now omit their filename extensions (extensions default to the name of the preset).
• convert: A new --pretend option lets you preview the commands the plugin will execute without actually taking any action. Thanks to Dietrich Daroch.
• Fix a crash when a float-valued tag field only contained a + or - character.
• Fixed a regression in the core that caused the scrub not to work in auto mode. Thanks to Harry Khanna.
• The write command now has a --force flag. Thanks again to Harry Khanna.
• mbsync: Track alignment now works with albums that have multiple copies of the same recording. Thanks to Rui Gonçalves.

This is primarily a bugfix release, but it also brings two new plugins: one for playing music in desktop players and another for organizing your directories into "buckets." It also brings huge performance optimizations to queries—your beet ls commands will now go much faster.

New features:

• The new play lets you start your desktop music player with the songs that match a query. Thanks to David Hamp-Gonsalves.
• The new bucket provides a %bucket{} function for path formatting to generate folder names representing ranges of years or initial letter. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
• Item and album queries are much faster.
• ftintitle: A new option lets you remove featured artists entirely instead of moving them to the title. Thanks to SUTJael.

And those all-important bug fixes:

• mbsync: Fix a regression in 1.3.5 that broke the plugin entirely.
• Shell completion now searches more common paths for its bash_completion dependency.
• Fix encoding-related logging errors in convert and replaygain.
• replaygain: Suppress a deprecation warning emitted by later versions of PyGI.
• Fix a crash when reading files whose iTunes SoundCheck tags contain non-ASCII characters.
• The %if{} template function now appropriately interprets the condition as false when it contains the string "false". Thanks to Ayberk Yilmaz.
• convert: Fix conversion for files that include a video stream by ignoring it. Thanks to brunal.
• fetchart: Log an error instead of crashing when tag manipulation fails.
• convert: Log an error instead of crashing when embedding album art fails.
• convert: Embed cover art into converted files. Previously they were embedded into the source files.
• New plugin event: before_item_moved. Thanks to Robert Speicher.

This is a short-term release that adds some great new stuff to beets. There's support for tracking and calculating musical keys, the ReplayGain plugin was expanded to work with more music formats via GStreamer, we can now import directly from compressed archives, and the lyrics plugin is more robust.

One note for upgraders and packagers: this version of beets has a new dependency in enum34, which is a backport of the new enum standard library module.

The major new features are:

• Beets can now import zip, tar and rar archives. Just type beet import music.zip to have beets transparently extract the files to import.
• replaygain: Added support for calculating ReplayGain values with GStreamer as well the mp3gain program. This enables ReplayGain calculation for any audio format. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
• lyrics: Lyrics should now be found for more songs. Searching is now sensitive to featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes. When a song has multiple titles, lyrics from all the named songs are now concatenated. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte and Paul Phillips.

In particular, a full complement of features for supporting musical keys are new in this release:

• A new initial_key field is available in the database and files' tags. You can set the field manually using a command like beet modify initial_key=Am.
• The echonest plugin sets the initial_key field if the data is available.
• A new keyfinder runs a command-line tool to get the key from audio data and store it in the initial_key field.

There are also many bug fixes and little enhancements:

• echonest: Truncate files larger than 50MB before uploading for analysis.
• fetchart: Fix a crash when the server does not specify a content type. Thanks to Lee Reinhardt.
• convert: The --keep-new flag now works correctly and the library includes the converted item.
• The importer now logs a message instead of crashing when errors occur while opening the files to be imported.
• embedart: Better error messages in exceptional conditions.
• Silenced some confusing error messages when searching for a non-MusicBrainz ID. Using an invalid ID (of any kind—Discogs IDs can be used there too) at the "Enter ID:" importer prompt now just silently returns no results. More info is in the verbose logs.
• mbsync: Fix application of album-level metadata. Due to a regression a few releases ago, only track-level metadata was being updated.
• On Windows, paths on network shares (UNC paths) no longer cause "invalid filename" errors.
• replaygain: Fix crashes when attempting to log errors.
• The modify-cmd command can now accept query arguments that contain = signs. An argument is considered a query part when a : appears before any =s. Thanks to mook.

This release brings a hodgepodge of medium-sized conveniences to beets. A new config command manages your configuration, we now have bash completion, and the modify command can delete attributes. There are also some significant performance optimizations to the autotagger's matching logic.

One note for upgraders: if you use the fetchart plugin, it has a new dependency, the requests module.

New stuff:

• Added a config command to manage your configuration. It can show you what you currently have in your config file, point you at where the file should be, or launch your text editor to let you modify the file. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• Beets now ships with a shell command completion script! See completion. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• The modify command now allows removing flexible attributes. For example, beet modify artist:beatles oldies! deletes the oldies attribute from matching items. Thanks to brilnius.
• Internally, beets has laid the groundwork for supporting multi-valued fields. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• The importer interface now shows the URL for MusicBrainz matches. Thanks to johtso.
• smartplaylist: Playlists can now be generated from multiple queries (combined with "or" logic). Album-level queries are also now possible and automatic playlist regeneration can now be disabled. Thanks to brilnius.
• echonest: Echo Nest similarity now weights the tempo in better proportion to other metrics. Also, options were added to specify custom thresholds and output formats. Thanks to Adam M.
• Added the after_write plugin event.
• lastgenre: Separator in genre lists can now be configured. Thanks to brilnius.
• We now only use "primary" aliases for artist names from MusicBrainz. This eliminates some strange naming that could occur when the languages config option was set. Thanks to Filipe Fortes.
• The performance of the autotagger's matching mechanism is vastly improved. This should be noticeable when matching against very large releases such as box sets.
• The import command can now accept individual files as arguments even in non-singleton mode. Files are imported as one-track albums.

Fixes:

• Error messages involving paths no longer escape non-ASCII characters (for legibility).
• Fixed a regression that made it impossible to use the modify command to add new flexible fields. Thanks to brilnius.
• echonest: Avoid crashing when the audio analysis fails. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
• duplicates: Fix checksumming command execution for files with quotation marks in their names. Thanks again to Pedro Silva.
• Fix a crash when importing with both of the group_albums and incremental options enabled. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• Give a sensible error message when BEETSDIR points to a file. Thanks again to geigerzaehler.
• Fix a crash when reading WMA files whose boolean-valued fields contain strings. Thanks to johtso.
• fetchart: The plugin now sends "beets" as the User-Agent when making scraping requests. This helps resolve some blocked requests. The plugin now also depends on the requests Python library.
• The write command now only shows the changes to fields that will actually be written to a file.
• duplicates: Spurious reports are now avoided for tracks with missing values (e.g., no MBIDs). Thanks to Pedro Silva.
• The default replace sanitation options now remove leading whitespace by default. Thanks to brilnius.
• importfeeds: Fix crash when importing albums containing / with the m3u_multi format.
• Avoid crashing on Mutagen bugs while writing files' tags.
• convert: Display a useful error message when the FFmpeg executable can't be found.

Version 1.3.3 brings a bunch changes to how item and album fields work internally. Along with laying the groundwork for some great things in the future, this brings a number of improvements to how you interact with beets. Here's what's new with fields in particular:

• Plugin-provided fields can now be used in queries. For example, if you use the inline plugin to define a field called era, you can now filter your library based on that field by typing something like beet list era:goldenage.
• Album-level flexible attributes and plugin-provided attributes can now be used in path formats (and other item-level templates).
• Date-based queries are now possible. Try getting every track you added in February 2014 with beet ls added:2014-02 or in the whole decade with added:2010... Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
• The modify-cmd command is now better at parsing and formatting fields. You can assign to boolean fields like comp, for example, using either the words "true" or "false" or the numerals 1 and 0. Any boolean-esque value is normalized to a real boolean. The update-cmd and write-cmd commands also got smarter at formatting and colorizing changes.

For developers, the short version of the story is that Item and Album objects provide uniform access across fixed, flexible, and computed attributes. You can write item.foo to access the foo field without worrying about where the data comes from.

Unrelated new stuff:

• The importer has a new interactive option (G for "Group albums"), command-line flag (--group-albums), and config option (group_albums) that lets you split apart albums that are mixed together in a single directory. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• A new --config command-line option lets you specify an additional configuration file. This option combines config settings with your default config file. (As part of this change, the BEETSDIR environment variable no longer combines---it replaces your default config file.) Thanks again to geigerzaehler.
• ihate: The plugin's configuration interface was overhauled. Its configuration is now much simpler---it uses beets queries instead of an ad-hoc per-field configuration. This is backwards-incompatible---if you use this plugin, you will need to update your configuration. Thanks to BrainDamage.

Other little fixes:

• echonest: Tempo (BPM) is now always stored as an integer. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.
• Fix Python 2.6 compatibility in some logging statements in chroma and lastgenre.
• Prevent some crashes when things go really wrong when writing file metadata at the end of the import process.
• New plugin events: item_removed (thanks to Romuald Conty) and item_copied (thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen).
• The pluginpath config option can now point to the directory containing plugin code. (Previously, it awkwardly needed to point at a directory containing a beetsplug directory, which would then contain your code. This is preserved as an option for backwards compatibility.) This change should also work around a long-standing issue when using pluginpath when beets is installed using pip. Many thanks to geigerzaehler.
• web: The /item/ and /album/ API endpoints now produce full details about albums and items, not just lists of IDs. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• Fix a potential crash when using image resizing with the fetchart or embedart without ImageMagick installed.
• Also, when invoking convert for image resizing fails, we now log an error instead of crashing.
• fetchart: The beet fetchart command can now associate local images with albums (unless --force is provided). Thanks to brilnius.
• fetchart: Command output is now colorized. Thanks again to brilnius.
• The modify-cmd command avoids writing files and committing to the database when nothing has changed. Thanks once more to brilnius.
• The importer now uses the album artist field when guessing existing metadata for albums (rather than just the track artist field). Thanks to geigerzaehler.
• fromfilename: Fix a crash when a filename contained only a track number (e.g., 02.mp3).
• convert: Transcoding should now work on Windows.
• duplicates: The move and copy destination arguments are now treated as directories. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
• The modify-cmd command now skips confirmation and prints a message if no changes are necessary. Thanks to brilnius.
• fetchart: When using the remote_priority config option, local image files are no longer completely ignored.
• echonest: Fix an issue causing the plugin to appear twice in the output of the beet version command.
• lastgenre: Fix an occasional crash when no tag weight was returned by Last.fm.
• mpdstats: Restore the last_played field. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
• The modify-cmd command's output now clearly shows when a file has been deleted.
• Album art in files with Vorbis Comments is now marked with the "front cover" type. Thanks to Jason Lefley.

This update brings new plugins for fetching acoustic metrics and listening statistics, many more options for the duplicate detection plugin, and flexible options for fetching multiple genres.

The "core" of beets gained a new built-in command: beet write updates the metadata tags for files, bringing them back into sync with your database. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.

We added some plugins and overhauled some existing ones:

• The new echonest plugin can fetch a wide range of acoustic attributes from The Echo Nest, including the "speechiness" and "liveness" of each track. The new plugin supersedes an older version (echonest_tempo) that only fetched the BPM field. Thanks to Pedro Silva and Peter Schnebel.
• The duplicates plugin got a number of new features, thanks to Pedro Silva:
  • The keys option lets you specify the fields used detect duplicates.
  • You can now use checksumming (via an external command) to find duplicates instead of metadata via the checksum option.
  • The plugin can perform actions on the duplicates it find. The new copy, move, delete, delete_file, and tag options perform those actions.
• The new mpdstats plugin collects statistics about your listening habits from MPD. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and Johann Klähn.
• lastgenre: The new multiple option has been replaced with the count option, which lets you limit the number of genres added to your music. (No more thousand-character genre fields!) Also, the min_weight field filters out nonsense tags to make your genres more relevant. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and rashley60.
• lyrics: A new --force option optionally re-downloads lyrics even when files already have them. Thanks to Bitdemon.

As usual, there are also innumerable little fixes and improvements:

• When writing ID3 tags for ReplayGain normalization, tags are written with both upper-case and lower-case TXXX frame descriptions. Previous versions of beets used only the upper-case style, which seems to be more standard, but some players (namely, Quod Libet and foobar2000) seem to only use lower-case names.
• missing: Avoid a possible error when an album's tracktotal field is missing.
• ftintitle: Fix an error when the sort artist is missing.
• echonest_tempo: The plugin should now match songs more reliably (i.e., fewer "no tempo found" messages). Thanks to Peter Schnebel.
• convert: Fix an "Item has no library" error when using the auto config option.
• convert: Fix an issue where files of the wrong format would have their transcoding skipped (and files with the right format would be needlessly transcoded). Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer.
• Fix an issue that caused the id3v23 option to work only occasionally.
• Also fix using id3v23 in conjunction with the scrub and embedart plugins. Thanks to Chris Cogburn.
• ihate: Fix an error when importing singletons. Thanks to Mathijs de Bruin.
• The clutter option can now be a whitespace-separated list in addition to a YAML list.
• Values for the replace option can now be empty (i.e., null is equivalent to the empty string).
• lastgenre: Fix a conflict between canonicalization and multiple genres.
• When a match has a year but not a month or day, the autotagger now "zeros out" the month and day fields after applying the year.
• For plugin developers: added an optparse callback utility function for performing actions based on arguments. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
• scrub: Fix scrubbing of MPEG-4 files. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.

This release boasts a host of new little features, many of them contributed by beets' amazing and prolific community. It adds support for Opus files, transcoding to any format, and two new plugins: one that guesses metadata for "blank" files based on their filenames and one that moves featured artists into the title field.

Here's the new stuff:

• Add Opus audio support. Thanks to Rowan Lewis.
• convert: You can now transcode files to any audio format, rather than just MP3. Thanks again to Rowan Lewis.
• The new fromfilename plugin guesses tags from the filenames during import when metadata tags themselves are missing. Thanks to Jan-Erik Dahlin.
• The ftintitle, by @Verrus, is now distributed with beets. It helps you rewrite tags to move "featured" artists from the artist field to the title field.
• The MusicBrainz data source now uses track artists over recording artists. This leads to better metadata when tagging classical music. Thanks to Henrique Ferreiro.
• lastgenre: You can now get multiple genres per album or track using the multiple config option. Thanks to rashley60 on GitHub.
• A new id3v23 config option makes beets write MP3 files' tags using the older ID3v2.3 metadata standard. Use this if you want your tags to be visible to Windows and some older players.

And some fixes:

• fetchart: Better error message when the image file has an unrecognized type.
• mbcollection: Detect, log, and skip invalid MusicBrainz IDs (instead of failing with an API error).
• info: Fail gracefully when used erroneously with a directory.
• echonest_tempo: Fix an issue where the plugin could use the tempo from the wrong song when the API did not contain the requested song.
• Fix a crash when a file's metadata included a very large number (one wider than 64 bits). These huge numbers are now replaced with zeroes in the database.
• When a track on a MusicBrainz release has a different length from the underlying recording's length, the track length is now used instead.
• With per_disc_numbering enabled, the tracktotal field is now set correctly (i.e., to the number of tracks on the disc).
• scrub: The scrub command now restores album art in addition to other (database-backed) tags.
• mpdupdate: Domain sockets can now begin with a tilde (which is correctly expanded to $HOME) as well as a slash. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
• lastgenre: Fix a regression that could cause new genres found during import not to be persisted.
• Fixed a crash when imported album art was also marked as "clutter" where the art would be deleted before it could be moved into place. This led to a "image.jpg not found during copy" error. Now clutter is removed (and directories pruned) much later in the process, after the import_task_files hook.
• missing: Fix an error when printing missing track names. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
• Fix an occasional KeyError in the update-cmd command introduced in 1.3.0.
• scrub: Avoid preserving certain non-standard ID3 tags such as NCON.