# Run autotagger on imported as-is items

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/run-autotagger-on-imported-as-is-items/1048>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [January 3, 2020, 2:22pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/run-autotagger-on-imported-as-is-items/1048 "2020-01-03T14:22:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![lyz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47774/32.png) [@lyz](https://discourse.beets.io/u/lyz)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 2:22pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/run-autotagger-on-imported-as-is-items/1048/1 "2020-01-03T14:22:57Z")

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Hi, first of all, thanks for the awesome program 🙂 .

I’ve got a program that automatically fetches music from internet, around 1000 songs each day, so manually tagging all of them is not doable on a daily basis.

Therefore I thought that I could do an automatic first import with the quiet flag followed by an no autotagged of the skipped elements.

But I also want the benefits of the auto tagger for metadata and duplication removal. So I was wondering if there was a way to run the auto tagger afterwards on an as-is imported item.

As a testcase, I’ve used the `edit` plugin to import a song with the following data:

- artist: The.Pogues
- title: the iris rover

I tried using `beet import -L artist:`The.Pogues"`but nothing happened, so I went to the directory where the file was saved`…/Non-Album/The.Pogues`and run`beet import .`, it correctly used the autotagger, but now I’ve got two database entries for the same song:

- The Pogues - - The Irish Rover
- The.Pogues - - the iris rover

Is there a way to fix the metadata of the item without duplicating it?

Or maybe I’m trying to use beets in a way it’s not intended to. If it’s the case, do you know how can I achieve what I want?

Thank you so much

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 3:00pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/run-autotagger-on-imported-as-is-items/1048/2 "2020-01-03T15:00:33Z")

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Hello! What you have done so far should indeed work. The first thing (with `-L`) perhaps didn’t work because it’s in album mode? You might try `-s` because you’re working with a single song, and trying to query with `artist`, not `albumartist`.

I’m not sure why the second attempt duplicated the song. Maybe you can include a verbose log?

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**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 4:11pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/run-autotagger-on-imported-as-is-items/1048/4 "2020-01-03T16:11:01Z")

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Aha, yes! I think the symlink (i.e., the unequal paths) is probably the reason.