Set track field on import

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1

Hi,
I managed to import all my “good” albums with beets in a decent amount of time.
The last let of my journey is to import the leftovers: albums with missing tracks or un-matchable info.

I’d like to do a first quick pass of them and then revisit those items later to refine the matches or re-source them.

Is it possible to set a flexible tag during import on the tracks in a way that they’ll be moved to a specific path?

I’ve tried with the --set flag but that seems to set the tag on the album and the path rule is not applied when moving the files.

Thanks for any suggestions!

2

Hello! Sounds like you’re running into the same problem as discussed in this thread:

Unfortunately, there’s not a great solution yet. There is a PR offering a kind of fallback access for item-level attributes, but it has performance trade-offs that make it not a clear winner.

Would you be interested in weighing in there? Maybe somebody else has a better idea, or maybe it will spur action toward a simpler solution.

3

I checked the issue but I don’t think I know enough to have an opinion on that yet, I’ll have to spend some more time thinking about that.

In the mean time, is there a way, after the import, to add a tags on the fields that match an album query?

Just trying to find a way to finish importing the library in the appropriate paths so I can move on to phase two…

Thanks!

4

Yeah, that would be a nice way to do it. I think one good option might be @kergoth’s crossquery plugin:

It lets you do stuff like this:

So you could do beet mod album_has:foo:bar foo=bar to “propagate” album fields to item fields, hypothetically.

5

Thanks for the tip!
I managed to find a good workflow with another of the plugins from that repo:

modifyonimport:
  modify_album_items:
    bad:1:
      '': 'bad=1'

during import, if an album matches the “bad:1” query (which i set with the --set config option when launching the import) it sets bad=1 on all the items of said album. That way the path rules are applied as expected.

The plugin is a bit verbose on the console but I can manage for the few albums I’m left with

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