Importing untagged albums is borderline useless

Development
1

Asking beets to import an untagged track/album is almost pointless. It depends on manual work from the user.

(17 items)
No matching release found for 17 tracks.
For help, see: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#nomatch
[S]kip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums, Enter search, enter Id, aBort?

“As-is” will import to a path set by the user. My tracks go to a rather unhelpful [no artist] [no track name] path. There’s nothing to do when you don’t have metadata to work from.

Would it make sense to automatically try a fromfilename match if no matches are found? To me this is a friendlier fallback. It would still ask for confirmation. Fromfilename ships with beets, but if we wanted to be really ambitious, we could even try a chroma acoustid match. Chroma has some dependencies that must be installed by the user, however.

2

Yo! The fromfilename plugin already works that way, in a sense—it only really “activates” and attempts to provide stand-in metadata for albums that are mostly/entirely missing metadata. (It has been suggested in the past that it should be enabled by default, and I certainly see the argument there.)

3

Yeah, I think that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t see the use case for not enabling it.

4

I’ve never tried it for identifying items with no information, but theoretically you could also try the Acoustid plugin.

1 Like
5

I specify a separate paths for unmatched albums with “mb_trackid::^$:path/goes/here/etc”