Multiple config files?

I did a quick search on this topic, but came up empty handed… I CANNOT be the first person to ask this…but Is it possible to have more than one config file and reference it accordingly? I have automation set up to pick up albums that meet all criteria, but i periodically have to run this manually to make decisions on albums that don’ t fully meet criteria specified in the config. Therefore, I am constantly having to navigate into the config file and switch timid mode on and off. If would be nice if i could leave a config as is for the automation to run and then also have a config file to ref with timid mode enabled. is this possible?
OR…thinking of it a slightly different way. Is there a way that i can have timid mode disabled in the config and and quiet mode enabled and then run some cmd flags to switch them and then back again when the manual run is completed?

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html#id116

Could you use that?

There are a few areas of the doc that touch on this conceptually being possible…but it doesn’t go into enough detail to come up with anything useful. What would the command syntax be for specifying a separate config file?
“beet --config path\to\directory\config-timid.yaml” doesn’t seem to work, and even if it did, the doc indicates that settings will be merged with the existing config which is not what i’m wanting to do.

It doesn’t sound like it supports a whole separate config file, but supports merging of config files so if you had a base config file that set all of your options that you want to use every time and then you can specify one to merge with it using the option.

While I wouldn’t use it, I agree that having an option to just specify a whole separate config file to use for that invocation would be convenient.

You can also use the BEETSDIR environment variable to swap out the config entirely:
https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html?highlight=BEETSDIR#environment-variable

That also changes the location of the library, doesn’t it?

Edit: Nevermind, you can set the library location explicitly.

After leaving this issue and coming back to it with a fresh set of eyes i had a lightbulb moment and thought…leaving both quiet and timid mode out of the config file altogether and passing them as parameters in the batch file.
Batch 1
beet import -t “\path\to\files”
Batch 2
beet import --quiet “\path\to\files”
It seems so obvious now, at the time it wasn’t lol we can all point and laugh at me now :slight_smile: