Beets config

My very opiniated configuration for the Beets music library utility.

Setup 📥

Note

This configuration assumes that you have NerdFont-patched fonts installed and in use. Without it, some icons will not show correctly.

Here's how to get setup my Beets configuration.

1. Clone this repository

   You can clone it in the default location if you prefer. Just don't forget to set up your backups to include it.

2. Configure a BEETSDIR environment variable to point to this repository
3. Configure the Editor environment variable to point to preferred text editor as I'm using the Edit plugin which depends on that

   In my case, for VSCode obtained from WinGet, it is : code.cmd --wait .

4. Prepare your system with required packages

   1. Windows

      winget import --import-file winget-packages.json

      or

      winget install Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.BuildTools --force --override "--wait --passive --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows11SDK.22000" # https://stackoverflow.com/a/55053709
      winget install Rustlang.Rustup
      winget install ImageMagick.ImageMagick
      winget install Gyan.FFmpeg
      winget install gstreamerproject.gstreamer
      winget install AcoustID.Chromaprint
      winget install Python.Python.3.12

      then

      # Refresh environment variables
      $env:Path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine") + ";" + [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","User")

   2. Python

      # Launcher : py -3.12 -m venv .venv --upgrade-deps
      # Direct : python3 -m venv .venv --upgrade-deps
      # Activate virtual environment
      # Windows : & .venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1
      # Linux : source .venv/bin/activate
      pip install --requirement requirements.txt

Voilà! Now, you can use Beets as always. 🎉

Contributing 🏗️

Of course you can contribute! Check the CONTRIBUTING.md file about it. 💛

But why is it setup that way? 🤔

So, you'll find in those configs that some things are a bit different than the typical norms. Especially when it comes to file naming. Those Python functions actually serve to keep the filenames as clean as possible while also being useful with my media apps (gonic & Jellyfin) and, most importantly, for DJing.

This is that last part (DJing) that pushed me to make some decisions taken here.

Simplify artist folder structure

When there's multiple people as an album's artist, only use the first one for creating the directory that will contain its albums

Before	After
* […]	* […]
* Ofenbach	* Ofenbach
* Oliver Heldens	* Oliver Heldens
* Oliver Heldens, Anabel Englund	* Oliver Tree
* Oliver Heldens, Boy Matthews	* […]
* Oliver Heldens, DJs From Mars, JD Davis
* Oliver Heldens, Funkin Matt, Bright Sparks
* Oliver Heldens, KAREN HARDING
* Oliver Heldens, Kylie Minogue
* Oliver Heldens, Mesto
* Oliver Heldens, Nile Rodgers, House Gospel Choir
* Oliver Heldens, Piero Pirupa
* Oliver Heldens, Vula
* Oliver Heldens, Shantel
* […]
* Oliver Tree
* […]

See how many directories do we have here already and I only wrote a fraction of OH's stuff. It becomes absolutely cluttered really fast just by following a single artist. I usually put the most significant artist (for me) at the beginning anyway and simplifying that enables not having multiple directories containing only a single album for basically the same artist like shown.

Now, for probably the most crucial part, let's hypothesize that my prepped library does not get recognized on my drive plugged on the setup I need to perform or maybe I didn't account for the venue's setup prior to stepping in :

• I'll most likely have to navigate through files instead because the players' OS probably didn't check the files' data for tags (looking at you, Rekordbox OS and the way you handle user settings).
• In those cases, it (the enormous amount of folders) makes it really slow to go through my library when scrolling with the browsing knob with so many folders and even frustrating when looking for a song but don't know which other artists other than the main (OH in this case) were involved.

So, that cleans up things and saves me time and stress while performing on stage.

Keeping track of labels and catalog numbers for releases

The catalog numbers especially are lifesavers for publishing tracklists with the right info or providing the promoters and broadcasters with the right music info for royalties.

So, I put them in the album's folder name just in case it gets lost in the tags or something.

Cover art strategy

Have high quality cover arts residing as a file on the side (cover.png) and have resized to lower resolution (max 1280px) version embedded in files.

That way, autonomous devices, especially DJ players, that may only use embedded cover arts won't freeze when loading tracks due to the processing time required for cover arts. (looking at you, CDJ-3000s...)

On the other hand, I still keep the great cover art qualities that are really useful for playing media on TVs during social gatherings as a separate file that media apps prioritize over the embedded one anyway.

Convert lossless files to FLAC

I have yet to encounter setups that don't support FLAC files in my use cases.

Sure, if speaking of DJing, CDJ-2000s and earlier won't support it for example. But when I had to use a venue's setup, they were equipped with either DJ software on a computer (therefore defacto supporting FLAC files) or at least CDJ-2000NXS players (which also support them). Those CDJ-2000NXS came out in 2016 by the way!

[!info] Sure. AIFF is basically akin to TIFF (that I like) but for audio and, like TIFF, has some pretty cool features. Although, I like that FLAC uses (lossless) compression by default and has more flexibility with metadata. It's really handy for saving some storage space when you're broke and for leasure listening when streaming out and abroad. 😅

Track naming conventions 🏷️

Note

This section is meant more as a mental note in case I forgor or something. But hey, if that's inspiring you, have fun!

Getting rid of parentheses in titles as much as possible (usually versions / mix mentions), ie. Spotify's way

Basically replacing them with a simple hyphen.

Before	After
Forever (Stay Like This) (Club Mix)	Forever (Stay Like This) - Club Mix

[!info] It's really clearer for me when reading track names really quickly on the players' screens and it keeps the little lyrics mention available for checking and searching.

Unify version names in titles

Radio edits or shorter versions become the « normal » versions and Original or whatever that's suitable for mixing is called « extended » unless it's the only existing version.

Before	After	Length
Going Down - Radio Edit	Going Down	3:03
Going Down	Going Down - Extended	4:38

[!info] Indeed, this does not follow the artist's intent but I'm trying to keep some sanity when managing my library on Engine and Rekordbox and doing that allows me to then filter really fast for longer / mixable versions.

Move « feat.(ured) » artists to the artists fields

This is not typical format but not necessarily false as those featured artist still worked on the track in some way and are normally still getting royalties for those. So, I move them to the end of the artists field and remove the « feat. » mention. That declutters the title for easy reading (again).

[!info] Search will still function without issue and it'll have the advantage of making the tracks of the « featured » artist show up on their artist page when I'm browsing for listening. Otherwise, it's been pretty handy for finding tracks by let's say David Guetta where he is only a featured artist. I can just type his name in the Artist attribute search and his « feat.(ured) » artist tracks will still show up. In the end, kinda solving a problem while making things a bit nicer.

Useful extra tools 🛠️

These are soo useful when building your library. I recommend you check them out.

• Beets documentation
• COV - Cover Search Engine
• Ben Dodson's Apple Music Artwork Finder
• Ben Dodson's iTunes Artwork Finder
• Tunebat Song Key & BPM Finder

Useful extra tid bits ℹ️

Here's a Regular Expression for finding all the (feat. [...])

\s\(?feat\. (\w[éèà]*\s?[.,&]?\s?)+\)?