How do I get beets to stop using typographic or curly quotes?

I really like the fact that beets uses proper typographic quotes.

But it’s causing me a little bit of grief. I use mpd to play my music and on my iPhone I use Rigelian to control it. Rigelian has Siri support, so I can use it to start playing an album with a simple voice command.

Of course, this has it’s own challenges for me now.

I told Siri “Hey Siri, play Let’s Dance by David Bowie on mpd.” And it could not find the album because it’s looking for “Let’s Dance” and beets tagged it as “Let’s Dance.”

Is there a command I can put in my beets config to make it stop using curly quotes? I did a quick search of the doc and did not see anything.

I’m running into a similar issue in SubSonic where it won’t list popular songs if the curly apostrophe character (unicode 02BC) appears anywhere in artist/album/title in the ID3 tag instead of the normal apostrophe (unicode 0027).

I believe beets is populating the ID3 tag with whatever is stored in the musicbrainz database. You’ll notice all of the album titles for Let’s Dance contain the curly single quote that is not getting recognized by MPD or SubSonic.

So far I haven’t found a way to manipulate characters in the ID3 tag using beets. I would love to know if anyone else has encountered this issue and if there are any available solutions.

I can probably put together a small python or bash script that can convert everything.

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If you do create a script, please share it if you can.

I use the artist top-songs feature a lot when building playlists on the fly, and it’s unfortunate when songs are missing from that list due to the apostrophe mismatch.