# Is it possible to accept only some tag changes when importing?

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [November 3, 2021, 4:20am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925 "2021-11-03T04:20:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![qwertygnu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/b9e5f3/32.png) [@qwertygnu](https://discourse.beets.io/u/qwertygnu)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 4:20am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/1 "2021-11-03T04:20:04Z")

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Sorry I’m super new to beets and certainly haven’t discovered every single option/tutorial/resource. I’m trying to take my mostly organized music library and import it into beets mostly for the purposes of getting everything tagged properly\*. One problem I’m having is that when importing, beets finds a match but when showing the changes it will make (I’m using timid mode), they’re either not correct or go against the formatting I like. This comes up mostly when the musicbrainz album data doesn’t perfectly fit my local files. So I have to make the right changes manually, which will get tedious. Is there a way to tell it to ignore only specific corrections?

Example:

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/beets/original/1X/c1510edae56489faf8ef5c09ab65fa4e35e0bb47.jpeg)  
The version of Low End Theory I have contains a bonus track which none of the musicbrainz entries have. beets tried to make a fix but it’s not right. Can I tell it to ignore that one track but keep the rest of the data and changes?

Thanks!

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**Author:** ![qwertygnu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/b9e5f3/32.png) [@qwertygnu](https://discourse.beets.io/u/qwertygnu)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 4:31am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/2 "2021-11-03T04:31:17Z")

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Another question: What does this mean here where it looks like (media) is not a match?

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/beets/original/1X/a348662f180eb6135ac0de1ada2a935902cb1986.jpeg)  
As far as I know the release-type of the album isn’t stored…so how can CD/Digital Release/etc. be a (mis)match?  
Same deal with (label). and (mediums).

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**Author:** ![qwertygnu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/b9e5f3/32.png) [@qwertygnu](https://discourse.beets.io/u/qwertygnu)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 4:39am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/3 "2021-11-03T04:39:26Z")

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Here’s another. The track lengths are apparently wonky, but what would this correction do??? I didn’t know track length was modifiable…A mismatched track length to the music file seems like a bad thing. What am I to do here? (Again, I _do_ want to import it and get things like album art, lyrics, genre tags, etc.)

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/beets/original/1X/fb46546063ecc0fdeb4da59dd54bf97c23ccf64e.jpeg)

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**Author:** ![qwertygnu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/b9e5f3/32.png) [@qwertygnu](https://discourse.beets.io/u/qwertygnu)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 4:46am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/4 "2021-11-03T04:46:55Z")

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What is (id) changing?

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/beets/original/1X/c4f6d49a1d1e75b73c1301d0b60bb325ecb53088.jpeg)

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 11:30am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/5 "2021-11-03T11:30:02Z")

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- I’m not sure it applies in your setting, but the `edit` plugin might help with manually modifying matches.
- There are metadata tags that record media.
- Length mismatches are just mismatches for your information; the tagger won’t change anything.
- `(id)` refers to the MusicBrainz ID in the files’ metadata.

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**Author:** ![kergoth](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/kergoth/32/240_2.png) [@kergoth](https://discourse.beets.io/u/kergoth)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 3:54pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/6 "2021-11-03T15:54:43Z")

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I find if I need to customize things beyond what the importer provides, like letting it update certain fields but not others, or the like, I use MusicBrainz Picard to tag them externally and import with as-is. At a certain point it’s just hard to do everything you need to do in an interactive import prompt 🙂

That said, maybe there’d be value in some sort of apply-and-edit operation. That is, edit the metadata being applied in this match, not directly editing the _current_ metadata.

In this particular case, I’m not sure that’d help anyway, though, as I don’t know if there’s a way to keep unmatched tracks in the album while still applying the match metadata, I think if you match with unmatched tracks, it’ll just not import the unmatched tracks. @Adrian mind filling in there?

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 7:57pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/7 "2021-11-03T19:57:43Z")

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I actually think the edit plugin has a kind of version of that. The “edit Candidates” interactive prompt option lets you change the _to-be-appllied_ metadata instead of the current metadata:  
[https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/edit.html](https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/edit.html)

Is that close to the intended use case here?

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**Author:** ![qwertygnu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/b9e5f3/32.png) [@qwertygnu](https://discourse.beets.io/u/qwertygnu)\
**Post date:** [November 4, 2021, 2:19am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/is-it-possible-to-accept-only-some-tag-changes-when-importing/1925/8 "2021-11-04T02:19:44Z")

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@adrian @kergoth Thanks for the info and help! Edit candidates is pretty close to what I’m looking for. (though I’m getting this error when trying to use `edit` during import)

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/beets/original/1X/5f2cd5b3d256ab1e7503513e11dc9391633482e2.jpeg)  
I can make a separate thread if this error is unusual. The temp file is getting deleted immediate after being created, quicker than vscode can even open it. I’m on Mac. Perhaps `edit` expects the terminal to hang until the editor is closed but it doesn’t.