Plugin: guess source media from (auxiliary) files

#1

It often happens, that a release has many different media types (CD, Vinyl, Cassette, …) and sometimes beets picks the wrong media type.
To help with this I quickly prototyped a small plugin which checks the media files (bitdepth/samplerates) and any auxiliary files (EAC/XLD logs) to determine if the source media was likely a CD or likely not a CD and applies penalities for candidates accordingly.

The (incomplete) script can be found here:

My question now is: Would such a thing be better suited as a standalone plugin or should it rather be a part of beets itself?
And can anyone think of more checks we can make to further enhance the likelyhood of beets selecting the correct release?

#2

Nice! This seems like something people often need. I like the idea of keeping it a plugin, because it represents a self-contained unit of additional functionality, but it’s the kind of plugin we could imagine shipping with beets.

In general, we don’t have a codified policy for how to decide when a plugin says “third party” and when it can be included. But basically, we need to get it up to a certain level of code quality/maintainability so we can do support for it in the future—and the usage documentation has to be pretty thorough. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to help with the integration.

#3

That sounds great!
Give me some time to polish it and maybe add some other heuristics.
In the meantime other people have the chance to provide their input as well.

#4

I added (same gist link) something to extract the TOC from the EAC/XLD logs, to automatically get the release IDs from musicbrainz based on the TOC, which works quite well for me.
But I’m not sure if the EAC/XLD log parsing / TOC extraction thing should be part of the same plugin.