Update beets after deleting or moving files?

Help
1

Hi all! Let’s say I deleted some unneeded duplicate music. How do I tell beets the files aren’t there any more?

That’s not my main question, but it’s related. I mainly want to know, if I rename some folders, how do I ask beets to re-synchronize?

I am willing to totally re-import from scratch if necessary, but I don’t know how to do that either besides uninstalling beets and all its metadata files and re-installing…

Thanks!

(edit: this is a bit related, but I don’t think it fixes my issue because beets still has the old files in the database even though they don’t exist anymore)
https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.4.7/faq.html#point-beets-at-a-new-music-directory

2

Hello! This is what the beet update command is supposed to do. It picks up changes to files’ tags and detects deleted files. It cannot, however, detect when you rename files or folders—it will think they were deleted (because filesystems don’t leave behind any evidence of renaming).

3

Thank you Adrian! I appreciate beets in general and you taking the time. I think I can combine “beet update” with something like ‘beet import -A -W beets-library’ and this will solve the rest of my particular issue.

(It’s funny that it’s even called “update” – I feel dumb now – I just assumed that command would install an updated version of beets or something. Here’s a link for others.)
https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.4.7/reference/cli.html#update

1 Like
4

The fact that the update command’s name is a little confusing has come up before, so don’t feel bad about that :slight_smile:.