Beets imports everything under Compilations directory

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#1

Hi, I’m am just getting started and am having trouble with the initial import. When I import an existing directory of files, beets puts everything under a flat directory structure that looks like:

Compilations/Back In Black/

All tracks appear under this single directory, even though I have for the most part standard albums, not compilations. As far as I can tell, “Back In Black” may have gotten used as the sole album title because it comes from one of the first artists, AC/DC.

Judging from beet info, most of my existing tracks do have compete tags, with albumartist, artist, album, track info, etc. And beets does seem to be aware of this information, based on the output I get from beet ls after importing.

Maybe I’m missing some additional configuration that I need prior to importing? I’m not sure if it matters, but my source tracks are initially contained in a flat directory structure prior to importing.

Any help is appreciated.

#2

That certainly is odd! All of your albums are getting filed under a single directory? Weird!

It might be useful to include your configuration and something about how you imported the files—it seems like something likely went wrong at that point. You can also try beet ls -a to see how many “albums” the beets database currently knows about.

#3

Thanks for the reply! My configuration is:

directory: ~/Music/beets
import:
  move: yes
  write: no
plugins: info

My initial import was:

beet import -A /path/to/source-directory

Interestingly, beet ls -a does indicate that something is up:

$ beet ls -a
Various Artists - Back In Black

But at the same time, beet does seem to be aware of the complete album and artist info for most of my files:

$ beet ls | head -n 5
AC/DC - Back In Black - Hells Bells
AC/DC - Back In Black - Shoot to Thrill
AC/DC - Back In Black - What Do You Do for Money Honey
AC/DC - Back In Black - Givin the Dog a Bone
AC/DC - Back In Black - Let Me Put My Love Into You

and

$ beet ls | tail -n 5
Van Halen - Best of Van Halen, Vol. 1 - Why Can't This Be Love
Van Halen - Best of Van Halen, Vol. 1 - Dreams
Van Halen - Best of Van Halen, Vol. 1 - When It's Love
Van Halen - Best of Van Halen, Vol. 1 - Poundcake
Walter Trout - Unspoiled by Progress - 20th Anniversary - Marie's Mood
#4

Got it. I notice you mentioned:

And yep, that does matter. The autotagger guide explains more:
https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/tagger.html#overview

…and also mentions the --group-albums option, which you might be interested in.

#5

Yep, that did it. Thanks!