No performers and few other MusicBrainz tags imported/saved?

Hi,

I just discovered beets: it is great!

I am playing with it to civilize and properly tag my music library, which contains also quite some classical music. I noticed that the import of tags from beets differs from what picard is giving, despite both querying MusicBrainz. Few fields are missing, and in particular those concerning the performers, which are obviously a very useful information for classical (some of the others missing are “Original Year”, “Release Status”, “Release Type”, “Work”, and few more).

Is this expected? Is there a way/option to tag with more MusicBrainz information?

Many thanks, and in case apologies for the naive question, I could not find anything related in the docs/forum/web.

It’s true; we don’t yet parse all the same information from MB that Picard does! We’re always working to expand what we can obtain.

You might be interested in the recently added parentwork plugin.

OK - thanks for the quick reply.

Yes, I tried parentwork already, it is very nice, but it does not fetch the extra info, and even seems not to write the fetched information into new tags in the files, I am trying to understand why. The info is in the DB, though, beet info -l <query> shows it. Do you have suggestions on where in the code to look for a fix, e.g. the write function, parentwork itself?

Also, would you suggest expanding the parsing of the Picard-like information in the autotag feature? If you could point me to the file(s) where this should be done, I might give it a try at some point.

  • About storing the parent work in tags: the fields are currently flexible attributes, which means that they do not have backing tag mappings set up. Tag mappings happen in MediaFile: https://github.com/beetbox/mediafile
  • For pointers about how to extend the autotagger to fetch more stuff from MusicBrainz, consider taking a look at recent pull requests that did something similar. For example, here’s a PR that added the mb_releasetrackid field: https://github.com/beetbox/beets/pull/2896/files