Plugin: Pitchfork Album Reviews (looking for testers)

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1

I’ve created a hacky plugin that grabs album reviews from Pitchfork, you can find it here: https://github.com/fortes/beets-pitchfork

To install, run:

pip install git+git://github.com/fortes/beets-pitchfork.git@master

And add pitchfork to your plugin list.

You can now add reviews via the pitchfork command, like this: beet pitchfork kendrick lamar (be nice to Pitchfork’s servers, and don’t try to query your entire library at once!)

The plugin adds the following flexible album attributes:

  • pitchfork_bnm: Whether the album was awarded “Best New Music”
  • pitchfork_description: Album abstract
  • pitchfork_score: Numeric score given by p4k
  • pitchfork_url: The URL to the review

The plugin uses the full album name & album artist name, which means matches are not always found. I’m not yet sure how to best fix this, so I’m open to ideas!

A help question from me: I’ve tried using %ifdef{pitchfork_score,$pitchfork_score} in format_album config, but it will output $pitchfork_score when the value isn’t present. What am I doing wrong?

4 Likes
2

Wow; this looks awesome! Nice work.

Your syntax for ifdef seems right, so this might be a beets bug. In fact, just %ifdef{pitchfork_score} should do it. Maybe something’s wrong with our implementation of the function?

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Ah, looks like %ifdef{pitchfork_score} returns 0.0, which I can live with. Thanks.

Related: Is there anything like the inline plugin’s album_type for format_album?

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Hmm, I’m not quite sure I understand—what’s the album_type you’re referring to? Is this something inline-specific?

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Sorry, that’s a typo – I meant album_fields: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.4.7/plugins/inline.html#album-fields

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It should be possible to use inline-defined album fields in format_album; sure.

Or perhaps you’re asking whether it’s possible to use template syntax to define new fields? Not currently, unfortunately, but it would be pretty cool…

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Another stupid typo on my part, got it working now. Thanks!

1 Like
8

This is really cool! Any chance you might extend this plugin to support other websites, CritiqueBrainz for example?

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Glad you liked it @reg, I’m open to adding other sites, however I haven’t really found much that has a lot of reviews and easy access. I looked at CritiqueBrainz, but it seems to have very few reviews.

I’d love to use rateyoumusic, but they don’t have an API and scraping is against their TOS

1 Like
10

I think this is awesome. Still in the process of importing my albums, but will let you know if I find any bugs.

1 Like
11

Regarding use of template syntax for fields, format_fields plugin might be of interest. I do think it’d be nice to provide the apply_template function to inline functions, though, so inline can explicitly evaluate a template.

I use it in combination with inline. A bit messy, might be cleaner to try to combine the two, but it works for now and avoids some duplication in my path formats.

Ex.:

format_fields:
  album_fields:
    incomplete: '%if{$tracktotal,%if{$missing,1,0},0}'

    # Used in path formats
    albumsdir: '%if{$tracktotal,%if{$missing,Incomplete ,}}Albums'
    album_directory_alldiscs: '%the{$album%aunique{}}$explicit_or_clean_album'
    _album_directory: '$album%aunique{}%if{$multidisc, Disc $trim_disc}%if{$disctitle,: $disctitle}$explicit_or_clean_album'
    albumartistdir: '%asciify{%first{$comp_albumartist}}'
   
    # Fallback from item for other contexts
    album_directory: '$album_directory_alldiscs'
  item_fields:
    # Used in path formats
    # singleton is an item field, not an album field, obviously..
    album_directory: '%if{$singleton,[non-album tracks],$album_directory_alldiscs}'
    full_title: '$title%ifdef{itunesadvisory,$explicit_or_clean}'
    comp_filename: '%if{$singleton,,$disc_and_track_pre}%if{$comp,$artist - $full_title,$full_title}'

alternatives:
  dap:
    default: '%if{$single_track,Single Tracks/$artist - $title,$albumsdir/$albumartistdir/$album_directory/$comp_filename}'
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Agreed, I’m playing with this plugin now, thanks much @fortes.

1 Like
13

One thing you might add to the documentation is that you need to have an lxml parser installed. I was able to resolve errors with pip3 install lxml.

Looks good to me so far otherwise.

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Strange, I don’t have lxml installed in my virtualenv at all, and I’m not getting any error but I’m on Linux. beets-pitchfork doesn’t call into lxml at all, maybe one of the dependencies does outside of Linux?

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Here’s the error I get:

Error trying to get review: Couldn’t find a tree builder with the features you requested: lxml. Do you need to install a parser library?

Along with the error “Could not fetch review”

This is on Ubuntu Server 18.04. A more or less clean install, since all I do with it is mpd, icecast and beets.

Installing lxml resolved the issue, however. Are there other logs I can grab for you?

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Hm, looks like this is an issue that some people hit with BeautifulSoup (which the pitchfork library used by beets-pitchfork uses): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24398302/bs4-featurenotfound-couldnt-find-a-tree-builder-with-the-features-you-requeste/42151504