Unable to delete albums "No matching items found" while in library

Help
1

Hi, I ran into the following problem.
When trying to delete the following albums:

BLØF - Blauwe ruis
BLØF - Hier - Het Beste Van 20 Jaar BLØF

When running:

beet -vv rm -fd /Volumes/Tunez/Albums/BLØF/Blauwe\ ruis\ \(2002\)\ \(MP3\ 192\)

I get the following output

user configuration: /Users/jpeeters/.config/beets/config.yaml
data directory: /Users/jpeeters/.config/beets
plugin paths: 
Sending event: pluginload
inline: adding item field multidisc
inline: adding item field my_samplerate
inline: adding item field is_flac
inline: adding album field format
inline: adding album field av_bitrate
inline: adding album field album_bitdepth
inline: adding album field album_samplerate
library database: /Users/jpeeters/Music/Beets/musiclibrary.db
library directory: /Volumes/Tunez
Sending event: library_opened
error: No matching items found.

It doesn’t find any items to delete, while they do exist in the library:

beet -vv ls -a BLØF
user configuration: /Users/jpeeters/.config/beets/config.yaml
data directory: /Users/jpeeters/.config/beets
plugin paths: 
Sending event: pluginload
inline: adding item field multidisc
inline: adding item field my_samplerate
inline: adding item field is_flac
inline: adding album field format
inline: adding album field av_bitrate
inline: adding album field album_bitdepth
inline: adding album field album_samplerate
library database: /Users/jpeeters/Music/Beets/musiclibrary.db
library directory: /Volumes/Tunez
Sending event: library_opened
BLØF - Blauwe ruis
BLØF - Blauwe Ruis
BLØF - Hier - Het Beste Van 20 Jaar BLØF
BLØF - Hier - Het beste van 20 jaar BLØF
BLØF - Omarm
BLØF - Umoja
Sending event: cli_exit

Any idea what might cause this and how I can fix it?
Thanks,

Jan

2

Hello! This is likely a path encoding problem. Can you try cding to the directory and doing something like beet rm ./?

Or if this query matches what you want, just doing beet rm BLØF?

3

Hi @adrian, thanks!
The beet rm ./ suggestion worked.
What could be the problem with path encoding to prevent this in the future?
Thanks, Jan

4

It’s a very long and complicated story, but the gist is that command-line arguments happen in one encoding and filesystems are often in another encoding. Beets tries to preserve the exact bytes all the way through, but it’s hard. And sometimes it may not be beets’s fault at all—it might look like the paths are the same but the underlying bytes are different.

It’s a big mess and it’s hard to tell exactly which of many different problems occurred here.

5

Your explanation is clear. I understand the essence of the problem now. So thanks for that and the workaround. That’ll help in case I encounter it again.

Best to you!