Re-doing lastgenre [lastgenre plugin question]

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Apologies all. This is surely a noob question. I’ve spent some time in readthedocs - but am still not sure. Generally I’d play around - but last night I almost changed all my track genres to “other” by mistake, so I thought I better post asking for help.

In short, I’ve added all my music to beets. Got my config file working well. Generally I am really happy and impressed with beets.

However during the process, I realised my last genre canonicalize file wasn’t working ideally. Specifically it wasn’t, for example, picking up “trip-hop” and “hip-hop”, as the list included only “trip hop” and “hip hop”. So I ended up with lots of “other” - my fallback option in the configuration.

So now, I’d like to either:

  • run the tracks in my library with genre currently set to other through the lastgenre plugin again.

  • run all the tracks in my library through the lastgenre plugin again - with the expectation that nothing else will need to change so it will be quick(ish).

But how do I this? I think (perhaps wrongly) that “beet lastgenre” will just fetch relevant tracks from my library or change genre settings on my commad. How do I update tracks by getting the plugin to query last.fm again? Do I need to import again? or update? or modify? (And if so, is it possible / useful to just have the lastgenre plugin working to speed up the process?)

Thanks in advance for all your help.

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Yep! The lastgenre command should do it. (It may require a --force option to fetch genres for music that already has genres.) In fact, you can use beet lastgenre genre:other to only do this to music whose genre is currently “other.”

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Thank you so much Adrian.

I had run that command: beet lastgenre genre:other… before but it had “kept” everything, so I just assumed it was listing things from the library.

Now I see that adding the --force command at the end was the vital addition. Now it does exactly what I wanted it to. Thank you so much. So useful.

Might it be worth adding the usefulness of --force to the readthedocs documentation for the lastgenre plugin?