Pick some fields from a metadata source, and some other elsewhere?

Help
1

I’d like to default to Musicbrainz for every fields, but fetch genre & style from Discogs, and audio features from Spotify.

The best way I found in my minimal test is to do 3 imports, and choosing the right source each time. This is indeed time consuming and some fields get overwritten as I didn’t found a way to limit the fields a source can fetch & save.

How should I proceed in your opinion?

1 Like
2

There is an open feature request to allow configuring which fields should be overwritten. Currently, a plugin overwrites everything that it can find.

2 Likes
3

I’ve been drafting something that solves my problem: GitHub - raphaelyancey/beets at filters

Takes 4 steps and 3 configs but it works :smile:

# Initial MusicBrainz import
beet import foobar/

# Discogs genre/style
beet -c config_discogs.yaml import foobar/

# Spotify audio features
beet -c config_spotify.yaml import foobar/
beet -c config_spotify.yaml spotifysync

config_discogs.yaml

plugins: discogs

musicbrainz:
    enabled: no

discogs:
    fields:
      - genre 
      - discogs_albumid
      - discogs_labelid
      - discogs_artistid
    append_style_genre: true

config_spotify.yaml

plugins: spotify

musicbrainz:
    enabled: no

spotify:
    fields:
      - spotify_album_id 
      - spotify_artist_id
      - spotify_track_id
      - spotify_track_popularity
      - spotify_acousticness
      - spotify_danceability
      - spotify_energy
      - spotify_instrumentalness
      - spotify_key
      - spotify_liveness
      - spotify_loudness
      - spotify_mode
      - spotify_speechiness
      - spotify_tempo
      - spotify_time_signature
      - spotify_valence
      - spotify_updated
4

I like the idea of splitting up the configs. However, multiple imports are going to be tough for a large library. More importantly, these things are connected already, we just need to figure out a way to translate identifiers from one service to other.

@jojo is already working on extracting Discogs id from MB. It will be great if we can extend it to have a generic function to translate attributes.

5

It will indeed. It’s mostly a workaround with the aim of writing as less code as possible to do what I needed.

Wouldn’t the UI need to be revamped anyway? At the moment you have to manually choose a candidate from a specific source. With n multiples sources, you would have to pick n choices anyway wouldn’t you?

6

The way I anticipate this to work is that we still only import once and use that information to match with other services. For example, let us say we use MB as a tag source. We can then use the mb_album_id to obtain the identifier for the other services (assuming it is available in MB). See this discussion for additional information.

7

@ryancey BTW…do you use the -W flag to prevent writing the tags on subsequent imports (and only get the values for the database)? For example, I want to use the tags from Spotify (in the first import) and then only want to obtain the MB_IDs in the subsequent import without overwriting the tags.

8

Yes as a global option in my configs, but that was kind of custom in my case so I didn’t include it in the examples.

For your case my code won’t help you because it only skip fields for Discogs & Spotify plugins, but it could easily be set as a top-level property now that I think of it… And then you’d use multiple configs to enable/disable sources including MB.

For the record, my goal is then to set “meta-genres” based on Spotify audio features, like # Danceable or # Acoustic.

I’d achieve it with something like

beet modify spotify_danceability:0.6..1.0 genre='$genre; # Danceable'
beet modify spotify_acousticness:0.8..1.0 genre='$genre; # Acoustic'

so it is somewhat “standard” and can be used in any library manager (Emby in my case) to create smart playlists for example.

9

Looks like musicbrainz does not allow configuring fields to be imported. It overwrites everything :frowning:

10

Probably one of the first features that’s required for making some of the ideas in this thread work: Making MB plugin configurable. I think there is a thread/issue/discussion open already for that. Let me check…

11

The issue discussing this feature request currently has a misleading title but here it is: discogs: Add a configuration option to avoid providing the genre field · Issue #4087 · beetbox/beets · GitHub