Import SACD with "missing" tracks?

I ripped a hybrid SACD and would like to import the tracks. There are 10 tracks on the disc, but of course that means 10 red book tracks, 10 stereo SACD tracks, and 10 multichannel SACD tracks. I can’t play multichannel from my computer and don’t want to import the redbook tracks, what’s the best way of importing an “incomplete” album like this?

The album in question: https://musicbrainz.org/release/df8fe008-36fa-332d-bca2-8b1c745c09ad

I guess I also have the reverse question since sometimes I do want the redbook tracks and the Music Brainz style guide says, “When a hybrid SACD has the same tracklist on both layers it is acceptable (for the sake of convenience) to enter it as just a single medium (set to “Hybrid SACD”)” Or does beets have logic to handle the “Hybrid SACD” medium?

At the risk of redundancy:

  1. there is an undocumented feature called distance_weights. Lower will reduce the penalty on missing tracks. see config_default.yaml in the main codebase.
  1. There is already a special case to handle/ignore data tracks (like on PlayStation 1 games).

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Abeetbox%2Fbeets%20"data%20track"&type=code

does beets have logic to handle the “Hybrid SACD” medium?

As far as I know, beets takes whatever Musicbrainz gives it. I don’t even think there’s any mapping/normalization to what is provided.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Release/Format

You can see how I handled formats in my config, but it’s untested. This doesn’t change anything about the beets db, just the filenames/folders:

what’s the best way of importing an “incomplete” album like this?

The devs can chime in here. But I wonder if you’re better off just always picking hybrid SACD or SACD non-surround. It’s your library, you can treat it how you want. But I would avoid as-is imports as much as possible, they’re hard to work with and have no backend DB to query.

Thank you very much for this, it’s really helpful.

I think I understand, but just to be clear, if I enter an ID and it complains about missing tracks and I hit apply anyway, that’s not “as-is”, right?

Correct, “as-is” means no Musicbrainz/discogs/spotify back end. If you accept with missing tracks that should still create the MB_ALBUMID etc in your beets library/db and the music tags.

Thanks for responding, In the past year I’ve decided that it’s probably just easiest to import all layers.

I was running into issues doing that in beets so I’ve submitted a PR to fix my issue, but it’s hard to tell how to get folks to review it:

Having the following in the match section of the config:

ignored_media: ['Hybrid SACD (CD layer)', 'Hybrid SACD (SACD layer, multichannel)']

help me a lot in fact