Do I need to start over?

Help
1

I’m about a quarter into a multi-TB import when I noticed that I made mistakes. When beets couldn’t find tracks in an album match from discogs or musicbrainz, it left those behind in the source folder rather than importing them. I probably should have imported those albums ‘As Is’.

I used copy not move during import so I still have all my original files. What’s the best way forward? Do I need to start from scratch or can I reimport from my source directory to grab all those orphaned tracks?

2

Hot take-

look at duplicate_action.

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html#duplicate-action

there’s some way to ‘resume’ an import but IDK if it will help you:

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/cli.html?highlight=import#import

1 Like
3

Thanks for your reply but neither of those suggestions are going to help me. I don’t need to deal with any dupes right now. If I select ‘no’ to Resume Import it doesn’t start from the beginning.

How do I just remove all entries in beets and restart my import?

4

I’m not entirely clear on why saying “no” to “resume import” doesn’t restart… but you can delete the ~/.config/beets/state.pickle to clear any memory of an interrupted import. You also may want to be careful about the import.incremental setting, if you’ve ever had that enabled.

5

I’m not sure if that helps but there is a log file that should tell you which folders were skipped. You can run an import from that logfile using the --from-logfile option of the import command. Maybe that helps you to not have to start over completely?

I just checked and realized that there is no default value for that log file setting, so if you haven’t set that on purpose when you’ve set up beets, my suggestions won’t help, sorry :frowning:

6

OK, after a hiatus from Beets I returned to the task of reimporting my Downloads. I used the --noincremental tag and that got beets to start from the beginning. Found that one on Google Groups in 2023!

https://groups.google.com/g/beets-users/c/AhWwRkszFOE

But now I’m finding that extrafiles is leaving files behind or behaving oddly when I import an already existing album As Is. This creates a second folder that contains just the extra files whereas the music files are in their own folder.

I really feel like I need to just delete all my imported albums and start fresh. Can I do that without screwing things up? Will the Update command clear out the database?

7

You saving my life with --noincremental. I’ve done a beet import with a move and auto tag quiet mode to clean my music in first.
beet import -q: quiet mode. Never prompt for input and, instead, conservatively skip any albums that need your opinion. The -ql combination is recommended.

beet import /downloads -ql logsFile-1.txt

But I can’t found how to reimport the music skipped by the quiet mode.
With command beet import /downloads --noincremental he ask me to resume, say no to reimport the skipped files!