Lost Newbie seeking guidance

Help
1

First off, thanks to whoever is involved in developing this. I think I’m going to love it, but I’m having a hard time finding out if what I want to do is possible and how to do it if it is. I’ve got a mess of a music “library”. Much of it looks like:
\music
\music1
\unknown album
\track1
\track2
\unk album2
\track A
you get the idea.

web search helped me find and install beets, get it configured, and successfully move some music out of the jumbled mess into actual folders with real names. But oh my gosh, I didn’t know I’d have to OK so many of the changes.

So then I looked into the fingerprint thing. That seemed to work a bit better, but still an awful lot of verifying the change or pick another more suitable one.

I would much rather run everything through fingerprint. If I get anything back, use it automatically. After I get a much more organized library from this, then I can finetune things. I’m thinking it couldn’t possibly be more of a mess than I have now and I could just let it run for hours until it finishes.

Failing that, is there a way to say x% is good enough match for me, go ahead and fix it?
Is there a way to put the current filename with folder into a tag somewhere? That’s really the only clue I have for answering if I want to apply the suggested change or not anyway, and if things go horribly wrong I could still have that as a hint.

Sorry if this is a jumbled mess. I honestly don’t know which words to use to search. Especially since beets are an actual thing other than this software. I had no idea how many recipes there are for beets!

Anyway, thanks in advance for any help.

Here is my current config.yaml
directory: D:\Music
library: D:\Music\musiclibrary.db
import:
move: yes
write: yes
plugins: the chroma scrub
acoustid:
apikey: 4zlgU3mcqC
embedart:
auto: no
per_disc_numbering: yes
threaded: yes
paths:
default: $albumartist/$album%aunique{}/$track $title
singleton: Non-Album/$artist/$title
comp: Compilations/$album%aunique{}/$track $title
chroma:
auto: yes

2

Does this mean if I add this to my config.yaml, it will be ok with anything above 70% and not ask me?

match:
strong_rec_thresh: 0.30

Why yes, yes it does! awesome

3

Yes! That would certainly help. You can also use quiet mode (-q) to avoid any prompts at all, and quiet_fallback to control what happens below the strong-recommendation threshold.

4

Just a word of advice since I had a similar problem initially:
check to make sure that beets detects the right metadata.

I had some instances where beets proposed metadata changes that were simply wrong. Most of it had to do with the fact that the music was not in the musicbrainz DB and I had to make sure to import those files ‘as is’. I would recommend not touching the threshold at first and maybe use timid for the first import. That would mean that only files with a high confidence will be imported and moved. After that you can go in and check the files that are left over and maybe lower the threshold. I know that it is annoying to have to sift through the library like that but better be safe than sorry.

oh, and backups! backup the files that you want to import so you can go back if anything goes horribly wrong. :wink:

2 Likes
5

Oh, trust me, I’m paranoid about backups. That’s what got me in this mess. I’ve got a copy of every music folder I’ve ever had on every computer. I just got them all combined in one place and made a copy of that. I did find Simpletag which appears to do what I need for the first pass through this. But if it all goes horribly wrong, I’ll still have music.org folder that is a copy of how things were before I started messing with any of it.
Having said that, Music.org is 2tb+ and almost 700k files, so it would take two lifetimes to OK every one of the changes.
I know there are duplicates, stuff I’ll never listen to, most likely corrupted files. I’m pretty much just overwhelmed at this point.