Changelog
*********


1.6.1 (in development)
======================

Changelog goes here! Please add your entry to the bottom of one of the
lists below!

With this release, beets now requires Python 3.7 or later (it removes
support for Python 3.6).

Major new features:

* The beets importer UI received a major overhaul. Several new
  configuration options are available for customizing layout and
  colors: UI Options. #3721 #5028

New features:

* Edit Plugin: Prefer editor from "VISUAL" environment variable over
  "EDITOR".

* config: Prefer editor from "VISUAL" environment variable over
  "EDITOR".

* ListenBrainz Plugin: Add initial support for importing history and
  playlists from *ListenBrainz* #1719

* MusicBrainz Submit Plugin: add new prompt choices helping further to
  submit unmatched tracks to MusicBrainz faster.

* Spotify Plugin: We now fetch track's ISRC, EAN, and UPC identifiers
  from Spotify when using the "spotifysync" command. #4992

* Discogs Plugin: supply a value for the *cover_art_url* attribute,
  for use by *fetchart*. #429

* update: added "`-e`" flag for excluding fields from being updated.

* Deezer Plugin: Import rank and other attributes from Deezer during
  import and add a function to update the rank of existing items.
  #4841

* resolve transl-tracklisting relations for pseudo releases and merge
  data with the actual release #654

* Fetchart: Use the right field (*spotify_album_id*) to obtain the
  Spotify album id #4803

* Prevent reimporting album if it is permanently removed from Spotify
  #4800

* Added option to use *cover_art_url* as an album art source in the
  *fetchart* plugin. #4707

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin can now get album art from *spotify*.

* Added option to specify a URL in the *embedart* plugin. #83

* list *singleton:true* queries have been made faster

* list *singleton:1* and *singleton:0* can now alternatively be used
  in queries, same as *comp*

* --from-logfile now parses log files using a UTF-8 encoding in
  *beets/beets/ui/commands.py*. #4693

* Bare-ASCII Search Plugin lookups have been made faster

* list lookups using the pattern operator *::* have been made faster

* Added additional error handling for *spotify* plugin. #4686

* We now import the remixer field from Musicbrainz into the library.
  #4428

* MusicBrainz Submit Plugin: Added a new *mbsubmit* command to print
  track information to be submitted to MusicBrainz after initial
  import. #4455

* Added *spotify_updated* field to track when the information was last
  updated.

* We now import and tag the *album* information when importing
  singletons using Spotify source. #4398

* Spotify Plugin: The plugin now provides an additional command
  *spotifysync* that allows getting track popularity and audio
  features information from Spotify. #4094

* Spotify Plugin: The plugin now records Spotify-specific IDs in the
  *spotify_album_id*, *spotify_artist_id*, and *spotify_track_id*
  fields. #4348

* Create the parental directories for database if they do not exist.
  #3808 #4327

* MusicBrainz Options: a new enabled option allows disabling the
  MusicBrainz metadata source during the autotagging process

* KodiUpdate Plugin: Now supports multiple kodi instances #4101

* Add the item fields "bitrate_mode", "encoder_info" and
  "encoder_settings".

* Add query prefixes "=" and "~".

* A new configuration option, duplicate_keys, lets you change which
  fields the beets importer uses to identify duplicates. #1133 #4199

* Add exact match queries, using the prefixes "=" and "=~". #4251

* Discogs Plugin: Permit appending style to genre.

* Discogs Plugin: Implement item_candidates for matching singletons.

* Discogs Plugin: Check for compliant discogs_client module.

* Convert Plugin: Add a new *auto_keep* option that automatically
  converts files but keeps the *originals* in the library. #1840 #4302

* Added a "-P" (or "--disable-plugins") flag to specify one/multiple
  plugin(s) to be disabled at startup.

* Options: Add support for re-running the importer on paths in log
  files that were created with the "-l" (or "--logfile") argument.
  #4379 #4387

* Preserve mtimes from archives #4392

* Add %sunique{} template to disambiguate between singletons. #4438

* Add a new "import.ignored_alias_types" config option to allow for
  specific alias types to be skipped over when importing items/albums.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: A new "--pretend" option lets the user see
  what a new or changed smart playlist saved in the config is actually
  returning. #4573

* FromFilename Plugin:  Add debug log messages that inform when the
  plugin replaced bad (missing) artist, title or tracknumber metadata.
  #4561 #4600

* MusicBrainz Options: MusicBrainz release pages often link to related
  metadata sources like Discogs, Bandcamp, Spotify, Deezer and
  Beatport. When enabled via the external_ids options, release ID's
  will be extracted from those URL's and imported to the library.
  #4220

* Convert Plugin: Add support for generating m3u8 playlists together
  with converted media files. #4373

* Fetch the "release_group_title" field from MusicBrainz. :bug: *4809*

* Discogs Plugin: Add support for applying album information on
  singleton imports. :bug: *4716*

* Smart Playlist Plugin: During explicit runs of the "splupdate"
  command, the log message "Creating playlist ..."" is now displayed
  instead of hidden in the debug log, which states some form of
  progress through the UI. #4861

* SubsonicUpdate Plugin: Updates are now triggered whenever either the
  beets database is changed or a smart playlist is created/updated.
  :bug: *4862*

* ImportFeeds Plugin: Add a new output format allowing to save a
  playlist once per import session. :bug: *4863*

* Make ArtResizer work with PIL/pillow 10.0.0 removals. #4869

* A new configuration option, duplicate_verbose_prompt, allows
  changing how duplicates are presented during import. :bug: *4866*

* EmbyUpdate Plugin: Add handling for private users by adding "userid"
  config option. #4402

* Substitute Plugin: Add the new plugin *substitute* as an alternative
  to the *rewrite* plugin. The main difference between them being that
  *rewrite* modifies files' metadata and *substitute* does not. #2786

* Add support for "artists" and "albumartists" multi-valued tags. #505

* AutoBPM Plugin: Add the *autobpm* plugin which uses Librosa to
  calculate the BPM of the audio. #3856

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix the error with CoverArtArchive where the
  *maxwidth* option would not be used to download a pre-sized
  thumbnail for release groups, as is already done with releases.

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix the error with CoverArtArchive where no cover
  would be found when the *maxwidth* option matches a pre-sized
  thumbnail size, but no thumbnail is provided by CAA. We now fallback
  to the raw image.

* Advanced Rewrite Plugin: Add an advanced version of the *rewrite*
  plugin which allows to replace fields based on a given library
  query.

* Lyrics Plugin: Add LRCLIB as a new lyrics provider and a new
  *synced* option to prefer synced lyrics over plain lyrics.

* import: Expose import.quiet_fallback as CLI option.

* import: Expose *import.incremental_skip_later* as CLI option.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Expose config options as CLI options.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Add new option *smartplaylist.output*.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Add new option *smartplaylist.uri_format*.

* Sorted the default configuration file into categories. #4987

* Convert Plugin: Don't treat WAVE (*.wav*) files as lossy anymore
  when using the *never_convert_lossy_files* option. They will get
  transcoded like the other lossless formats.

* Add support for *barcode* field. #3172

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Add new config option *smartplaylist.fields*.

Bug fixes:

* LastImport Plugin: Improve error handling in the *process_tracks*
  function and enable it to be used with other plugins.

* Spotify Plugin: Improve handling of ConnectionError.

* Deezer Plugin: Improve Deezer plugin error handling and set requests
  timeout to 10 seconds. #4983

* Spotify Plugin: Add bad gateway (502) error handling.

* Spotify Plugin: Add a limit of 3 retries, instead of retrying
  endlessly when the API is not available.

* Fix a crash when the Spotify API timeouts or does not return a
  *Retry-After* interval. #4942

* Scrub Plugin: Fixed the import behavior where scrubbed database tags
  were restored to newly imported tracks with config settings
  "scrub.auto: yes" and "import.write: no". #4326

* Deezer Plugin: Fixed the error where Deezer plugin would crash if
  non-Deezer id is passed during import.

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix fetching from Cover Art Archive when the
  *maxwidth* option is set to one of the supported Cover Art Archive
  widths.

* Discogs Plugin: Fix "Discogs plugin replacing Feat. or Ft. with a
  comma" by fixing an oversight that removed a functionality from the
  code base when the MetadataSourcePlugin abstract class was
  introduced in PR's #3335 and #3371. #4401

* Convert Plugin: Set default "max_bitrate" value to "None" to avoid
  transcoding when this parameter is not set. #4472

* ReplayGain Plugin: Avoid a crash when errors occur in the analysis
  backend. #4506

* We now use Python's defaults for command-line argument encoding,
  which should reduce the chance for errors and "file not found"
  failures when invoking other command-line tools, especially on
  Windows. #4507

* We now respect the Spotify API's rate limiting, which avoids
  crashing when the API reports code 429 (too many requests). #4370

* Fix implicit paths OR queries (e.g. "beet list /path/ , /other-
  path/") which have previously been returning the entire library.
  #1865

* The Discogs release ID is now populated correctly to the
  discogs_albumid field again (it was no longer working after Discogs
  changed their release URL format). #4225

* The autotagger no longer considers all matches without a MusicBrainz
  ID as duplicates of each other. #4299

* Convert Plugin: Resize album art when embedding #2116

* Deezer Plugin: Fix auto tagger pagination issues (fetch beyond the
  first 25 tracks of a release).

* Spotify Plugin: Fix auto tagger pagination issues (fetch beyond the
  first 50 tracks of a release).

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix Genius search by using query params instead of
  body.

* Unimported Plugin: The new "ignore_subdirectories" configuration
  option added in 1.6.0 now has a default value if it hasn't been set.

* Deezer Plugin: Tolerate missing fields when searching for singleton
  tracks. #4116

* ReplayGain Plugin: The type of the internal "r128_track_gain" and
  "r128_album_gain" fields was changed from integer to float to fix
  loss of precision due to truncation. #4169

* Fix a regression in the previous release that caused a *TypeError*
  when moving files across filesystems. #4168

* Convert Plugin: Deleting the original files during conversion no
  longer logs output when the "quiet" flag is enabled.

* Web Plugin: Fix handling of "query" requests. Previously queries
  consisting of more than one token (separated by a slash) always
  returned an empty result.

* Discogs Plugin: Skip Discogs query on insufficiently tagged files
  (artist and album tags missing) to prevent arbitrary candidate
  results. #4227

* Lyrics Plugin: Fixed issues with the Tekstowo.pl and Genius backends
  where some non-lyrics content got included in the lyrics

* Limit Query Plugin: Better header formatting to improve index

* ReplayGain Plugin: Correctly handle the "overwrite" config option,
  which forces recomputing ReplayGain values on import even for tracks
  that already have the tags.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Fix a crash when using recent versions of
  ImageMagick and the "compare_threshold" option. #4272

* Lyrics Plugin: Fixed issue with Genius header being included in
  lyrics, added test case of up-to-date Genius html

* ImportAdded Plugin: Fix a bug with recently added reflink import
  option that causes a crash when ImportAdded plugin enabled. #4389

* Convert Plugin: Fix a bug with the *wma* format alias.

* Web Plugin: Fix get file from item.

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix a duplicated entry for trip hop in the default
  genre list. #4510

* Lyrics Plugin: Fixed issue with Tekstowo backend not actually
  checking if the found song matches. #4406

* EmbedArt Plugin: Add support for ImageMagick 7.1.1-12 #4836

* FromFilename Plugin: Fix failed detection of <track> <title>
  filename patterns. #4561 #4600

* Fix issue where deletion of flexible fields on an album doesn't
  cascade to items #4662

* Fix issue where "beet write" continuously retags the "albumtypes"
  metadata field in files. Additionally broken data could have been
  added to the library when the tag was read from file back into the
  library using "beet update". It is required for all users to **check
  if such broken data is present in the library**. Following the
  instructions described here, a sanity check and potential fix is
  easily possible. #4528

* Fix updating "data_source" on re-imports and improve logging when
  flexible attributes are being re-imported. #4726

* FetchArt Plugin: Correctly select the cover art from fanart.tv with
  the highest number of likes

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix a crash with the Google backend when processing
  some web pages. #4875

* Modifying flexible attributes of albums now cascade to the
  individual album tracks, similar to how fixed album attributes have
  been cascading to tracks already. A new option "--noinherit/-I" to
  modify allows changing this behaviour. #4822

* Fix bug where an interrupted import process poisons the database,
  causing a null path that can't be removed. #4906

* Discogs Plugin: Fix bug where empty artist and title fields would
  return None instead of an empty list. #4973

* Fix bug regarding displaying tracks that have been changed not being
  displayed unless the detail configuration is enabled.

* Web Plugin: Fix range request support, allowing to play large audio/
  opus files using e.g. a browser/firefox or gstreamer/mopidy
  directly.

* Fix bug where *zsh* completion script made assumptions about the
  specific variant of *awk* installed and required specific settings
  for *sqlite3* and caching in *zsh*. #3546

* Remove unused functions #5103

* Fix bug where all media types are reported as the first media type
  when importing with MusicBrainz as the data source #4947

* Fix bug where unimported plugin would not ignore children
  directories of ignored directories. #5130

For plugin developers:

* beets now explicitly prevents multiple plugins to define replacement
  functions for the same field. When previously defining
  *template_fields* for the same field in two plugins, the last loaded
  plugin would silently overwrite the function defined by the other
  plugin. Now, beets will raise an exception when this happens. #5002

* Allow reuse of some parts of beets' testing components. This may
  ease the work for externally developed plugins or related software
  (e.g. the beets plugin for Mopidy), if they need to create an in-
  memory instance of a beets music library for their tests.

For packagers:

* As noted above, the minimum Python version is now 3.7.

* We fixed a version for the dependency on the Confuse library. #4167

* The minimum required version of mediafile is now 0.9.0.

Other changes:

* Add "sphinx" and "sphinx_rtd_theme" as dependencies for a new "docs"
  extra #4643

* AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin: Deprecate the "absubmit" plugin since
  AcousticBrainz has stopped accepting new submissions. #4627

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: Deprecate the "acousticbrainz" plugin since
  the AcousticBrainz project has shut down. #4627

* Limit Query Plugin: Limit query results to head or tail ("lslimit"
  command only)

* Fish Plugin: Add "--output" option.

* Lyrics Plugin: Remove Musixmatch from default enabled sources as
  they are currently blocking requests from the beets user agent.
  #4585

* FAQ: …import a multi-disc album?: Elaborated the multi-disc FAQ
  #4806

* FAQ: …run the latest source version of beets?: Removed some long
  lines.

* Refactor the test cases to avoid test smells.


1.6.0 (November 27, 2021)
=========================

This release is our first experiment with time-based releases! We are
aiming to publish a new release of beets every 3 months. We therefore
have a healthy but not dizzyingly long list of new features and fixes.

With this release, beets now requires Python 3.6 or later (it removes
support for Python 2.7, 3.4, and 3.5). There are also a few other
dependency changes---if you're a maintainer of a beets package for a
package manager, thank you for your ongoing efforts, and please see
the list of notes below.

Major new features:

* When fetching genres from MusicBrainz, we now include genres from
  the release group (in addition to the release). We also prioritize
  genres based on the number of votes. Thanks to aereaux.

* Primary and secondary release types from MusicBrainz are now stored
  in a new "albumtypes" field. Thanks to edgars-supe. #2200

* An accompanying new AlbumTypes Plugin includes some options for
  formatting this new "albumtypes" field. Thanks to edgars-supe.

* The modify and import can now use Path Formats formats when setting
  fields. For example, you can now do "beet modify title='$track
  $title'" to put track numbers into songs' titles. #488

Other new things:

* Permissions Plugin: The plugin now sets cover art permissions to
  match the audio file permissions.

* Unimported Plugin: A new configuration option supports excluding
  specific subdirectories in library.

* Info Plugin: Add support for an "--album" flag.

* Export Plugin: Similarly add support for an "--album" flag.

* "beet move" now highlights path differences in color (when enabled).

* When moving files and a direct rename of a file is not possible (for
  example, when crossing filesystems), beets now copies to a temporary
  file in the target folder first and then moves to the destination
  instead of directly copying the target path. This gets us closer to
  always updating files atomically. Thanks to catap. #4060

* FetchArt Plugin: Add a new option to store cover art as non-
  progressive image. This is useful for DAPs that do not support
  progressive images. Set "deinterlace: yes" in your configuration to
  enable this conversion.

* FetchArt Plugin: Add a new option to change the file format of cover
  art images. This may also be useful for DAPs that only support some
  image formats.

* Support flexible attributes in "%aunique". #2678 #3553

* Make "%aunique" faster, especially when using inline fields. #4145

Bug fixes:

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix a crash when Beautiful Soup is not installed.
  #4027

* Discogs Plugin: Support a new Discogs URL format for IDs. #4080

* Discogs Plugin: Remove built-in rate-limiting because the Discogs
  Python library we use now has its own rate-limiting. #4108

* Export Plugin: Fix some duplicated output.

* AURA Plugin: Fix a potential security hole when serving image files.
  #4160

For plugin developers:

* "beets.library.Item.destination()" now accepts a *replacements*
  argument to be used in favor of the default.

* The *pluginload* event is now sent after plugin types and queries
  are available, not before.

* A new plugin event, *album_removed*, is called when an album is
  removed from the library (even when its file is not deleted from
  disk).

Here are some notes for packagers:

* As noted above, the minimum Python version is now 3.6.

* We fixed a flaky test, named *test_album_art* in the *test_zero.py*
  file, that some distributions had disabled. Disabling this test
  should no longer be necessary. #4037 #4038

* This version of beets no longer depends on the six library. #4030

* The *gmusic* plugin was removed since Google Play Music has been
  shut down. Thus, the optional dependency on *gmusicapi* does not
  exist anymore. #4089


1.5.0 (August 19, 2021)
=======================

This long overdue release of beets includes far too many exciting and
useful features than could ever be satisfactorily enumerated. As a
technical detail, it also introduces two new external libraries:
MediaFile and Confuse used to be part of beets but are now reusable
dependencies---packagers, please take note. Finally, this is the last
version of beets where we intend to support Python 2.x and 3.5; future
releases will soon require Python 3.6.

One non-technical change is that we moved our official "#beets" home
on IRC from freenode to Libera.Chat.

Major new features:

* Fields in queries now fall back to an item's album and check its
  fields too. Notably, this allows querying items by an album's
  attribute: in other words, "beet list foo:bar" will not only find
  tracks with the *foo* attribute; it will also find tracks *on
  albums* that have the *foo* attribute. This may be particularly
  useful in the Path Format Configuration, which matches individual
  items to decide which path to use. Thanks to FichteFoll. #2797 #2988

* A new reflink config option instructs the importer to create fast,
  copy-on-write file clones on filesystems that support them. Thanks
  to rubdos.

* A new Unimported Plugin lets you find untracked files in your
  library directory.

* The AURA Plugin has arrived! Try out the future of remote music
  library access today.

* We now fetch information about works from MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz
  matches provide the fields "work" (the title), "mb_workid" (the
  MBID), and "work_disambig" (the disambiguation string). Thanks to
  dosoe. #2580 #3272

* A new ParentWork Plugin gets information about the original work,
  which is useful for classical music. Thanks to dosoe. #2580 #3279

* BPD Plugin: BPD now supports most of the features of version 0.16 of
  the MPD protocol. This is enough to get it talking to more
  complicated clients like ncmpcpp, but there are still some
  incompatibilities, largely due to MPD commands we don't support yet.
  (Let us know if you find an MPD client that doesn't get along with
  BPD!) #3214 #800

* A new Deezer Plugin can autotag tracks and albums using the Deezer
  database. Thanks to rhlahuja. #3355

* A new Bare-ASCII Search Plugin provides a new query type: "bare
  ASCII" queries that ignore accented characters, treating them as
  though they were plain ASCII characters. Use the "#" prefix with
  list or other commands. #3882

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin can now get album art from last.fm.
  #3530

* Web Plugin: The API now supports the HTTP *DELETE* and *PATCH*
  methods for modifying items. They are disabled by default; set
  "readonly: no" in your configuration file to enable modification via
  the API. #3870

Other new things:

* "beet remove" now also allows interactive selection of items from
  the query, similar to "beet modify".

* Enable HTTPS for MusicBrainz by default and add configuration option
  *https* for custom servers. See MusicBrainz Options for more
  details.

* MPDStats Plugin: Add a new *strip_path* option to help build the
  right local path from MPD information.

* Convert Plugin: Conversion can now parallelize conversion jobs on
  Python 3.

* LastGenre Plugin: Add a new *title_case* config option to make
  title-case formatting optional.

* There's a new message when running "beet config" when there's no
  available configuration file. #3779

* When importing a duplicate album, the prompt now says "keep all"
  instead of "keep both" to reflect that there may be more than two
  albums involved. #3569

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: The plugin now updates file metadata
  after generating fingerprints through the *submit* command.

* LastGenre Plugin: Added more heavy metal genres to the built-in
  genre filter lists.

* A new Subsonic Playlist Plugin can import playlists from a Subsonic
  server.

* SubsonicUpdate Plugin: The plugin now automatically chooses between
  token- and password-based authentication based on the server
  version.

* A new extra_tags configuration option lets you use more metadata in
  MusicBrainz queries to further narrow the search.

* A new Fish Plugin adds Fish shell tab autocompletion to beets.

* FetchArt Plugin and EmbedArt Plugin: Added a new "quality" option
  that controls the quality of the image output when the image is
  resized.

* Key Finder Plugin: Added support for keyfinder-cli. Thanks to
  BrainDamage.

* FetchArt Plugin: Added a new "high_resolution" config option to
  allow downloading of higher resolution iTunes artwork (at the
  expense of file size). #3391

* Discogs Plugin: The plugin applies two new fields: *discogs_labelid*
  and *discogs_artistid*. #3413

* Export Plugin: Added a new "-f" ("--format") flag, which can export
  your data as JSON, JSON lines, CSV, or XML. Thanks to austinmm.
  #3402

* Convert Plugin: Added a new "-l" ("--link") flag and "link" option
  as well as the "-H" ("--hardlink") flag and "hardlink" option, which
  symlink or hardlink files that do not need to be converted (instead
  of copying them). #2324

* ReplayGain Plugin: The plugin now supports a "per_disc" option that
  enables calculation of album ReplayGain on disc level instead of
  album level. Thanks to samuelnilsson. #293

* ReplayGain Plugin: The new "ffmpeg" ReplayGain backend supports
  "R128_" tags. #3056

* ReplayGain Plugin: A new "r128_targetlevel" configuration option
  defines the reference volume for files using "R128_" tags.
  "targetlevel" only configures the reference volume for "REPLAYGAIN_"
  files. #3065

* Discogs Plugin: The plugin now collects the "style" field. Thanks to
  thedevilisinthedetails. #2579 #3251

* AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin: By default, the plugin now avoids re-
  analyzing files that already have AcousticBrainz data. There are new
  "force" and "pretend" options to help control this new behavior.
  Thanks to SusannaMaria. #3318

* Discogs Plugin: The plugin now also gets genre information and a new
  "discogs_albumid" field from the Discogs API. Thanks to
  thedevilisinthedetails. #465 #3322

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: The plugin now fetches two more additional
  fields: "moods_mirex" and "timbre". Thanks to malcops. #2860

* Playlist Plugin and Smart Playlist Plugin: A new "forward_slash"
  config option facilitates compatibility with MPD on Windows. Thanks
  to MartyLake. #3331 #3334

* The *data_source* field, which indicates which metadata source was
  used during an autotagging import, is now also applied as an album-
  level flexible attribute. #3350 #1693

* Beatport Plugin: The plugin now gets the musical key, BPM, and genre
  for each track. #2080

* A new BPSync Plugin can synchronize metadata changes from the
  Beatport database (like the existing MBSync Plugin for MusicBrainz).

* Hook Plugin: The plugin now treats non-zero exit codes as errors.
  #3409

* SubsonicUpdate Plugin: A new "url" configuration replaces the older
  (and now deprecated) separate "host", "port", and "contextpath"
  config options. As a consequence, the plugin can now talk to
  Subsonic over HTTPS. Thanks to jef. #3449

* Discogs Plugin: The new "index_tracks" option enables incorporation
  of work names and intra-work divisions into imported track titles.
  Thanks to cole-miller. #3459

* Web Plugin: The query API now interprets backslashes as path
  separators to support path queries. Thanks to nmeum. #3567

* "beet import" now handles tar archives with bzip2 or gzip
  compression. #3606

* "beet import" *also* now handles 7z archives, via the py7zr library.
  Thanks to arogl. #3906

* PlexUpdate Plugin: Added an option to use a secure connection to
  Plex server, and to ignore certificate validation errors if
  necessary. #2871

* Convert Plugin: A new "delete_originals" configuration option can
  delete the source files after conversion during import. Thanks to
  logan-arens. #2947

* There is a new "--plugins" (or "-p") CLI flag to specify a list of
  plugins to load.

* A new genres option fetches genre information from MusicBrainz. This
  functionality depends on functionality that is currently unreleased
  in the python-musicbrainzngs library: see PR #266. Thanks to
  aereaux.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Analysis now happens in parallel using the
  "command" and "ffmpeg" backends. #3478

* ReplayGain Plugin: The bs1770gain backend is removed. Thanks to
  SamuelCook.

* Added "trackdisambig" which stores the recording disambiguation from
  MusicBrainz for each track. #1904

* FetchArt Plugin: The new "max_filesize" configuration sets a maximum
  target image file size.

* Bad Files Plugin: Checkers can now run during import with the
  "check_on_import" config option.

* Export Plugin: The plugin is now much faster when using the
  *--include-keys* option is used. Thanks to ssssam.

* The importer's set_fields option now saves all updated fields to on-
  disk metadata. #3925 #3927

* We now fetch ISRC identifiers from MusicBrainz. Thanks to aereaux.

* MetaSync Plugin: The plugin now also fetches the "Date Added" field
  from iTunes databases and stores it in the "itunes_dateadded" field.
  Thanks to sandersantema.

* Lyrics Plugin: Added a new Tekstowo.pl lyrics provider. Thanks to
  various people for the implementation and for reporting issues with
  the initial version. #3344 #3904 #3905 #3994

* "beet update" will now confirm that the user still wants to update
  if their library folder cannot be found, preventing the user from
  accidentally wiping out their beets database. Thanks to user:
  *logan-arens*. #1934

Fixes:

* Adapt to breaking changes in Python's "ast" module in Python 3.8.

* Beatport Plugin: Fix the assignment of the *genre* field, and rename
  *musical_key* to *initial_key*. #3387

* Lyrics Plugin: Fixed the Musixmatch backend for lyrics pages when
  lyrics are divided into multiple elements on the webpage, and when
  the lyrics are missing.

* Web Plugin: Allow use of the backslash character in regex queries.
  #3867

* Web Plugin: Fixed a small bug that caused the album art path to be
  redacted even when "include_paths" option is set. #3866

* Discogs Plugin: Fixed a bug with the "index_tracks" option that
  sometimes caused the index to be discarded. Also, remove the extra
  semicolon that was added when there is no index track.

* SubsonicUpdate Plugin: The API client was using the *POST* method
  rather the *GET* method. Also includes better exception handling,
  response parsing, and tests.

* The Plugin: Fixed incorrect regex for "the" that matched any
  3-letter combination of the letters t, h, e. #3701

* FetchArt Plugin: Fixed a bug that caused the plugin to not take
  environment variables, such as proxy servers, into account when
  making requests. #3450

* FetchArt Plugin: Temporary files for fetched album art that fail
  validation are now removed.

* Inline Plugin: In function-style field definitions that refer to
  flexible attributes, values could stick around from one function
  invocation to the next. This meant that, when displaying a list of
  objects, later objects could seem to reuse values from earlier
  objects when they were missing a value for a given field. These
  values are now properly undefined. #2406

* BPD Plugin: Seeking by fractions of a second now works as intended,
  fixing crashes in MPD clients like mpDris2 on seek. The "playlistid"
  command now works properly in its zero-argument form. #3214

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix a Python 3 incompatibility in the Python
  Audio Tools backend. #3305

* ImportAdded Plugin: Fixed a crash that occurred when the
  "after_write" signal was emitted. #3301

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix the storage format for R128 gain tags. #3311
  #3314

* Discogs Plugin: Fixed a crash that occurred when the master URI
  isn't set in the API response. #2965 #3239

* Spotify Plugin: Fix handling of year-only release dates returned by
  the Spotify albums API. Thanks to rhlahuja. #3343

* Fixed a bug that caused the UI to display incorrect track numbers
  for tracks with index 0 when the "per_disc_numbering" option was
  set. #3346

* "none_rec_action" does not import automatically when "timid" is
  enabled. Thanks to RollingStar. #3242

* Fix a bug that caused a crash when tagging items with the beatport
  plugin. #3374

* "beet import" now logs which files are ignored when in debug mode.
  #3764

* BPD Plugin: Fix the transition to next track when in consume mode.
  Thanks to aereaux. #3437

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix a corner-case with Genius lowercase artist names
  #3446

* ParentWork Plugin: Don't save tracks when nothing has changed. #3492

* Added a warning when configuration files defined in the *include*
  directive of the configuration file fail to be imported. #3498

* Added normalization to integer values in the database, which should
  avoid problems where fields like "bpm" would sometimes store non-
  integer values. #762 #3507 #3508

* Fix a crash when querying for null values. #3516 #3517

* Lyrics Plugin: Tolerate a missing lyrics div in the Genius scraper.
  Thanks to thejli21. #3535 #3554

* Lyrics Plugin: Use the artist sort name to search for lyrics, which
  can help find matches when the artist name has special characters.
  Thanks to hashhar. #3340 #3558

* ReplayGain Plugin: Trying to calculate volume gain for an album
  consisting of some formats using "ReplayGain" and some using "R128"
  will no longer crash; instead it is skipped and and a message is
  logged. The log message has also been rewritten for to improve
  clarity. Thanks to autrimpo. #3533

* Lyrics Plugin: Adapt the Genius backend to changes in markup to
  reduce the scraping failure rate. #3535 #3594

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix a crash when writing ReST files for a query
  without results or fetched lyrics. #2805

* FetchArt Plugin: Attempt to fetch pre-resized thumbnails from Cover
  Art Archive if the "maxwidth" option matches one of the sizes
  supported by the Cover Art Archive API. Thanks to trolley. #3637

* IPFS Plugin: Fix Python 3 compatibility. Thanks to musoke. #2554

* Fix a bug that caused metadata starting with something resembling a
  drive letter to be incorrectly split into an extra directory after
  the colon. #3685

* MPDStats Plugin: Don't record a skip when stopping MPD, as MPD keeps
  the current track in the queue. Thanks to aereaux. #3722

* String-typed fields are now normalized to string values, avoiding an
  occasional crash when using both the FetchArt Plugin and the Discogs
  Plugin together. #3773 #3774

* Fix a bug causing PIL to generate poor quality JPEGs when resizing
  artwork. #3743

* Key Finder Plugin: Catch output from "keyfinder-cli" that is missing
  key. #2242

* ReplayGain Plugin: Disable parallel analysis on import by default.
  #3819

* MPDStats Plugin: Fix Python 2/3 compatibility #3798

* Discogs Plugin: Replace the deprecated official *discogs-client*
  library with the community supported python3-discogs-client library.
  #3608

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fixed submitting AcoustID information
  for tracks that already have a fingerprint. #3834

* Allow equals within the value part of the "--set" option to the
  "beet import" command. #2984

* Duplicates can now generate checksums. Thanks wisp3rwind for the
  pointer to how to solve. Thanks to arogl. #2873

* Templates that use "%ifdef" now produce the expected behavior when
  used in conjunction with non-string fields from the Types Plugin.
  #3852

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix crashes when a website could not be retrieved,
  affecting at least the Genius source. #3970

* Duplicates Plugin: Fix a crash when running the "dup" command with a
  query that returns no results. #3943

* Beatport Plugin: Fix the default assignment of the musical key.
  #3377

* Lyrics Plugin: Improved searching on the Genius backend when the
  artist contains special characters. #3634

* ParentWork Plugin: Also get the composition date of the parent work,
  instead of just the child work. Thanks to aereaux. #3650

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix a bug in the heuristic for detecting valid lyrics
  in the Google source. #2969

* Thumbnails Plugin: Fix a crash due to an incorrect string type on
  Python 3. #3360

* FetchArt Plugin: The Cover Art Archive source now iterates over all
  front images instead of blindly selecting the first one.

* Lyrics Plugin: Removed the LyricWiki source (the site shut down on
  21/09/2020).

* SubsonicUpdate Plugin: The plugin is now functional again. A new
  *auth* configuration option is required in the configuration to
  specify the flavor of authentication to use. #4002

For plugin developers:

* MediaFile has been split into a standalone project. Where you used
  to do "from beets import mediafile", now just do "import mediafile".
  Beets re-exports MediaFile at the old location for backwards-
  compatibility, but a deprecation warning is raised if you do this
  since we might drop this wrapper in a future release.

* Similarly, we've replaced beets' configuration library (previously
  called Confit) with a standalone version called Confuse. Where you
  used to do "from beets.util import confit", now just do "import
  confuse". The code is almost identical apart from the name change.
  Again, we'll re-export at the old location (with a deprecation
  warning) for backwards compatibility, but we might stop doing this
  in a future release.

* "beets.util.command_output" now returns a named tuple containing
  both the standard output and the standard error data instead of just
  stdout alone. Client code will need to access the "stdout" attribute
  on the return value. Thanks to zsinskri. #3329

* There were sporadic failures in "test.test_player". Hopefully these
  are fixed. If they resurface, please reopen the relevant issue.
  #3309 #3330

* The "beets.plugins.MetadataSourcePlugin" base class has been added
  to simplify development of plugins which query album, track, and
  search APIs to provide metadata matches for the importer. Refer to
  the Spotify Plugin and the Deezer Plugin for examples of using this
  template class. #3355

* Accessing fields on an *Item* now falls back to the album's
  attributes. So, for example, "item.foo" will first look for a field
  *foo* on *item* and, if it doesn't exist, next tries looking for a
  field named *foo* on the album that contains *item*. If you
  specifically want to access an item's attributes, use "Item.get(key,
  with_album=False)". #2988

* "Item.keys" also has a "with_album" argument now, defaulting to
  "True".

* A "revision" attribute has been added to "Database". It is increased
  on every transaction that mutates it. #2988

* The classes "AlbumInfo" and "TrackInfo" now convey arbitrary
  attributes instead of a fixed, built-in set of field names (which
  was important to address #1547). Thanks to dosoe.

* Two new events, "mb_album_extract" and "mb_track_extract", let
  plugins add new fields based on MusicBrainz data. Thanks to dosoe.

For packagers:

* Beets' library for manipulating media file metadata has now been
  split to a standalone project called MediaFile, released as
  mediafile. Beets now depends on this new package. Beets now depends
  on Mutagen transitively through MediaFile rather than directly,
  except in the case of one of beets' plugins (in particular, the
  Scrub Plugin).

* Beets' library for configuration has been split into a standalone
  project called Confuse, released as confuse. Beets now depends on
  this package. Confuse has existed separately for some time and is
  used by unrelated projects, but until now we've been bundling a copy
  within beets.

* We attempted to fix an unreliable test, so a patch to skip or repair
  the test may no longer be necessary.

* This version drops support for Python 3.4.

* We have removed an optional dependency on bs1770gain.


1.4.9 (May 30, 2019)
====================

This small update is part of our attempt to release new versions more
often! There are a few important fixes, and we're clearing the deck
for a change to beets' dependencies in the next version.

The new feature is:

* You can use the NO_COLOR environment variable to disable terminal
  colors. #3273

There are some fixes in this release:

* Fix a regression in the last release that made the image resizer
  fail to detect older versions of ImageMagick. #3269

* Gmusic Plugin: The "oauth_file" config option now supports more
  flexible path values, including "~" for the home directory. #3270

* Gmusic Plugin: Fix a crash when using version 12.0.0 or later of the
  "gmusicapi" module. #3270

* Fix an incompatibility with Python 3.8's AST changes. #3278

Here's a note for packagers:

* "pathlib" is now an optional test dependency on Python 3.4+,
  removing the need for a Debian patch. #3275


1.4.8 (May 16, 2019)
====================

This release is far too long in coming, but it's a good one. There is
the usual torrent of new features and a ridiculously long line of
fixes, but there are also some crucial maintenance changes. We
officially support Python 3.7 and 3.8, and some performance
optimizations can (anecdotally) make listing your library more than
three times faster than in the previous version.

The new core features are:

* A new aunique configuration option allows setting default options
  for the Album Disambiguation template function.

* The "albumdisambig" field no longer includes the MusicBrainz release
  group disambiguation comment. A new "releasegroupdisambig" field has
  been added. #3024

* The modify command now allows resetting fixed attributes. For
  example, "beet modify -a artist:beatles artpath!" resets "artpath"
  attribute from matching albums back to the default value. #2497

* A new importer option, ignore_data_tracks, lets you skip audio
  tracks contained in data files. #3021

There are some new plugins:

* The Playlist Plugin can query the beets library using M3U playlists.
  Thanks to Holzhaus and Xenopathic. #123 #3145

* The Load Extension Plugin allows loading of SQLite extensions,
  primarily for use with the ICU SQLite extension for
  internationalization. #3160 #3226

* The SubsonicUpdate Plugin can automatically update your Subsonic
  library. Thanks to maffo999. #3001

And many improvements to existing plugins:

* LastGenre Plugin: Added option "-A" to match individual tracks and
  singletons. #3220 #3219

* Play Plugin: The plugin can now emit a UTF-8 BOM, fixing some issues
  with foobar2000 and Winamp. Thanks to mz2212. #2944

* Gmusic Plugin:
     * Add a new option to automatically upload to Google Play Music
       library on track import. Thanks to shuaiscott.

     * Add new options for Google Play Music authentication. Thanks to
       thetarkus. #3002

* ReplayGain Plugin: "albumpeak" on large collections is calculated as
  the average, not the maximum. #3008 #3009

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin:
     * Now optionally has a bias toward looking up more relevant
       releases according to the preferred configuration options.
       Thanks to archer4499. #3017

     * Fingerprint values are now properly stored as strings, which
       prevents strange repeated output when running "beet write".
       Thanks to Holzhaus. #3097 #2942

* Convert Plugin: The plugin now has an "id3v23" option that allows
  you to override the global "id3v23" option. Thanks to Holzhaus.
  #3104

* Spotify Plugin:
     * The plugin now uses OAuth for authentication to the Spotify
       API. Thanks to rhlahuja. #2694 #3123

     * The plugin now works as an import metadata provider: you can
       match tracks and albums using the Spotify database. Thanks to
       rhlahuja. #3123

* IPFS Plugin: The plugin now supports a "nocopy" option which passes
  that flag to ipfs. Thanks to wildthyme.

* Discogs Plugin: The plugin now has rate limiting for the Discogs
  API. #3081

* MPDStats Plugin, MPDUpdate Plugin: These plugins now use the
  "MPD_PORT" environment variable if no port is specified in the
  configuration file. #3223

* BPD Plugin:
     * MPD protocol commands "consume" and "single" are now supported
       along with updated semantics for "repeat" and "previous" and
       new fields for "status". The bpd server now understands and
       ignores some additional commands. #3200 #800

     * MPD protocol command "idle" is now supported, allowing the MPD
       version to be bumped to 0.14. #3205 #800

     * MPD protocol command "decoders" is now supported. #3222

     * The plugin now uses the main beets logging system. The special-
       purpose "--debug" flag has been removed. Thanks to arcresu.
       #3196

* MBSync Plugin: The plugin no longer queries MusicBrainz when either
  the "mb_albumid" or "mb_trackid" field is invalid. See also the
  discussion on Google Groups Thanks to arogl.

* Export Plugin: The plugin now also exports "path" field if the user
  explicitly specifies it with "-i" parameter. This only works when
  exporting library fields. #3084

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: The plugin now declares types for all its
  fields, which enables easier querying and avoids a problem where
  very small numbers would be stored as strings. Thanks to rain0r.
  #2790 #3238

Some improvements have been focused on improving beets' performance:

* Querying the library is now faster:
     * We only convert fields that need to be displayed. Thanks to
       pprkut. #3089

     * We now compile templates once and reuse them instead of
       recompiling them to print out each matching object. Thanks to
       SimonPersson. #3258

     * Querying the library for items is now faster, for all queries
       that do not need to access album level properties. This was
       implemented by lazily fetching the album only when needed.
       Thanks to SimonPersson. #3260

* AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin, Bad Files Plugin: Analysis now works
  in parallel (on Python 3 only). Thanks to bemeurer. #2442 #3003

* MPDStats Plugin: Use the "currentsong" MPD command instead of
  "playlist" to get the current song, improving performance when the
  playlist is long. Thanks to ray66. #3207 #2752

Several improvements are related to usability:

* The disambiguation string for identifying albums in the importer now
  shows the catalog number. Thanks to 8h2a. #2951

* Added whitespace padding to missing tracks dialog to improve
  readability. Thanks to jams2. #2962

* The move command now lists the number of items already in-place.
  Thanks to RollingStar. #3117

* Modify selection can now be applied early without selecting every
  item. #3083

* Beets now emits more useful messages during startup if SQLite
  returns an error. The SQLite error message is now attached to the
  beets message. #3005

* Fixed a confusing typo when the Convert Plugin plugin copies the art
  covers. #3063

Many fixes have been focused on issues where beets would previously
crash:

* Avoid a crash when archive extraction fails during import. #3041

* Missing album art file during an update no longer causes a fatal
  exception (instead, an error is logged and the missing file path is
  removed from the library). #3030

* When updating the database, beets no longer tries to move album art
  twice. #3189

* Fix an unhandled exception when pruning empty directories. #1996
  #3209

* FetchArt Plugin: Added network connection error handling to backends
  so that beets won't crash if a request fails. Thanks to Holzhaus.
  #1579

* Bad Files Plugin: Avoid a crash when the underlying tool emits
  undecodable output. #3165

* Beatport Plugin: Avoid a crash when the server produces an error.
  #3184

* BPD Plugin: Fix crashes in the bpd server during exception handling.
  #3200

* BPD Plugin: Fix a crash triggered when certain clients tried to list
  the albums belonging to a particular artist. #3007 #3215

* ReplayGain Plugin: Avoid a crash when the "bs1770gain" tool emits
  malformed XML. #2983 #3247

There are many fixes related to compatibility with our dependencies
including addressing changes interfaces:

* On Python 2, pin the jellyfish requirement to version 0.6.0 for
  compatibility.

* Fix compatibility with Python 3.7 and its change to a name in the re
  module. #2978

* Fix several uses of deprecated standard-library features on Python
  3.7. Thanks to arcresu. #3197

* Fix compatibility with pre-release versions of Python 3.8. #3201
  #3202

* Web Plugin: Fix an error when using more recent versions of Flask
  with CORS enabled. Thanks to rveachkc. #2979: #2980

* Avoid some deprecation warnings with certain versions of the
  MusicBrainz library. Thanks to zhelezov. #2826 #3092

* Restore iTunes Store album art source, and remove the dependency on
  python-itunes, which had gone unmaintained and was not
  Python-3-compatible. Thanks to ocelma for creating python-itunes in
  the first place. Thanks to nathdwek. #2371 #2551 #2718

* LastGenre Plugin, Edit Plugin: Avoid a deprecation warnings from the
  PyYAML library by switching to the safe loader. Thanks to translit
  and sbraz. #3192 #3225

* Fix a problem when resizing images with PIL/pillow on Python 3.
  Thanks to architek. #2504 #3029

And there are many other fixes:

* R128 normalization tags are now properly deleted from files when the
  values are missing. Thanks to autrimpo. #2757

* Display the artist credit when matching albums if the artist_credit
  configuration option is set. #2953

* With the from_scratch configuration option set, only writable fields
  are cleared. Beets now no longer ignores the format your music is
  saved in. #2972

* The "%aunique" template function now works correctly with the
  "-f/--format" option. #3043

* Fixed the ordering of items when manually selecting changes while
  updating tags Thanks to TaizoSimpson. #3501

* The "%title" template function now works correctly with apostrophes.
  Thanks to GuilhermeHideki. #3033

* LastGenre Plugin: It's now possible to set the "prefer_specific"
  option without also setting "canonical". #2973

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin now respects the "ignore" and
  "ignore_hidden" settings. #1632

* Hook Plugin: Fix byte string interpolation in hook commands. #2967
  #3167

* The Plugin: Log a message when something has changed, not when it
  hasn't. Thanks to arcresu. #3195

* LastGenre Plugin: The "force" config option now actually works.
  #2704 #3054

* Resizing image files with ImageMagick now avoids problems on systems
  where there is a "convert" command that is *not* ImageMagick's by
  using the "magick" executable when it is available. Thanks to
  ababyduck. #2093 #3236

There is one new thing for plugin developers to know about:

* In addition to prefix-based field queries, plugins can now define
  *named queries* that are not associated with any specific field. For
  example, the new Playlist Plugin supports queries like
  "playlist:name" although there is no field named "playlist". See
  Extend the Query Syntax for details.

And some messages for packagers:

* Note the changes to the dependencies on jellyfish and munkres.

* The optional python-itunes dependency has been removed.

* Python versions 3.7 and 3.8 are now supported.


1.4.7 (May 29, 2018)
====================

This new release includes lots of new features in the importer and the
metadata source backends that it uses. We've changed how the beets
importer handles non-audio tracks listed in metadata sources like
MusicBrainz:

* The importer now ignores non-audio tracks (namely, data and video
  tracks) listed in MusicBrainz. Also, a new option,
  ignore_video_tracks, lets you return to the old behavior and include
  these video tracks. #1210

* A new importer option, ignored_media, can let you skip certain media
  formats. #2688

There are other subtle improvements to metadata handling in the
importer:

* In the MusicBrainz backend, beets now imports the
  "musicbrainz_releasetrackid" field. This is a first step toward
  #406. Thanks to Rawrmonkeys.

* A new importer configuration option, artist_credit, will tell beets
  to prefer the artist credit over the artist when autotagging. #1249

And there are even more new features:

* ReplayGain Plugin: The "beet replaygain" command now has "--force",
  "--write" and "--nowrite" options. #2778

* A new importer configuration option, incremental_skip_later, lets
  you avoid recording skipped directories to the list of "processed"
  directories in incremental mode. This way, you can revisit them
  later with another import. Thanks to sekjun9878. #2773

* FetchArt Plugin: The configuration options now support finer-grained
  control via the "sources" option. You can now specify the search
  order for different *matching strategies* within different backends.

* Web Plugin: A new "cors_supports_credentials" configuration option
  lets in-browser clients communicate with the server even when it is
  protected by an authorization mechanism (a proxy with HTTP
  authentication enabled, for example).

* A new SonosUpdate Plugin plugin automatically notifies Sonos
  controllers to update the music library when the beets library
  changes. Thanks to cgtobi.

* Discogs Plugin: The plugin now stores master release IDs into
  "mb_releasegroupid". It also "simulates" track IDs using the release
  ID and the track list position. Thanks to dbogdanov. #2336

* Discogs Plugin: Fetch the original year from master releases. #1122

There are lots and lots of fixes:

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix a corner-case with the "bs1770gain" backend
  where ReplayGain values were assigned to the wrong files. The plugin
  now requires version 0.4.6 or later of the "bs1770gain" tool. #2777

* Lyrics Plugin: The plugin no longer crashes in the Genius source
  when BeautifulSoup is not found. Instead, it just logs a message and
  disables the source. #2911

* Lyrics Plugin: Handle network and API errors when communicating with
  Genius. #2771

* Lyrics Plugin: The "lyrics" command previously wrote ReST files by
  default, even when you didn't ask for them. This default has been
  fixed.

* Lyrics Plugin: When writing ReST files, the "lyrics" command now
  groups lyrics by the "albumartist" field, rather than "artist".
  #2924

* Plugins can now see updated import task state, such as when
  rejecting the initial candidates and finding new ones via a manual
  search. Notably, this means that the importer prompt options that
  the Edit Plugin provides show up more reliably after doing a
  secondary import search. #2441 #2731

* ImportAdded Plugin: Fix a crash on non-autotagged imports. Thanks to
  m42i. #2601 #1918

* PlexUpdate Plugin: The Plex token is now redacted in configuration
  output. Thanks to Kovrinic. #2804

* Avoid a crash when importing a non-ASCII filename when using an
  ASCII locale on Unix under Python 3. #2793 #2803

* Fix a problem caused by time zone misalignment that could make date
  queries fail to match certain dates that are near the edges of a
  range. For example, querying for dates within a certain month would
  fail to match dates within hours of the end of that month. #2652

* Convert Plugin: The plugin now runs before other plugin-provided
  import stages, which addresses an issue with generating ReplayGain
  data incompatible between the source and target file formats. Thanks
  to autrimpo. #2814

* FtInTitle Plugin: The "drop" config option had no effect; it now
  does what it says it should do. #2817

* Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the
  event based on the order of your preferred countries rather than the
  order of release events in MusicBrainz. #2816

* Web Plugin: The time display in the web interface would incorrectly
  jump at the 30-second mark of every minute. Now, it correctly
  changes over at zero seconds. #2822

* Web Plugin: Fetching album art now works (instead of throwing an
  exception) under Python 3. Additionally, the server will now return
  a 404 response when the album ID is unknown (instead of throwing an
  exception and producing a 500 response). #2823

* Web Plugin: Fix an exception on Python 3 for filenames with non-
  Latin1 characters. (These characters are now converted to their
  ASCII equivalents.) #2815

* Partially fix bash completion for subcommand names that contain
  hyphens. Thanks to jhermann. #2836 #2837

* ReplayGain Plugin: Really fix album gain calculation using the
  GStreamer backend. #2846

* Avoid an error when doing a "no-op" move on non-existent files
  (i.e., moving a file onto itself). #2863

* Discogs Plugin: Fix the "medium" and "medium_index" values, which
  were occasionally incorrect for releases with two-sided mediums such
  as vinyl. Also fix the "medium_total" value, which now contains
  total number of tracks on the medium to which a track belongs, not
  the total number of different mediums present on the release. Thanks
  to dbogdanov. #2887

* The importer now supports audio files contained in data tracks when
  they are listed in MusicBrainz: the corresponding audio tracks are
  now merged into the main track list. Thanks to jdetrey. #1638

* Key Finder Plugin: Avoid a crash when trying to process unmatched
  tracks. #2537

* MBSync Plugin: Support MusicBrainz recording ID changes, relying on
  release track IDs instead. Thanks to jdetrey. #1234

* MBSync Plugin: We can now successfully update albums even when the
  first track has a missing MusicBrainz recording ID. #2920

There are a couple of changes for developers:

* Plugins can now run their import stages *early*, before other
  plugins. Use the "early_import_stages" list instead of plain
  "import_stages" to request this behavior. #2814

* We again properly send "albuminfo_received" and "trackinfo_received"
  in all cases, most notably when using the "mbsync" plugin. This was
  a regression since version 1.4.1. #2921


1.4.6 (December 21, 2017)
=========================

The highlight of this release is "album merging," an oft-requested
option in the importer to add new tracks to an existing album you
already have in your library. This way, you no longer need to resort
to removing the partial album from your library, combining the files
manually, and importing again.

Here are the larger new features in this release:

* When the importer finds duplicate albums, you can now merge all the
  tracks---old and new---together and try importing them as a single,
  combined album. Thanks to udiboy1209. #112 #2725

* Lyrics Plugin: The plugin can now produce reStructuredText files for
  beautiful, readable books of lyrics. Thanks to anarcat. #2628

* A new from_scratch configuration option makes the importer remove
  old metadata before applying new metadata. This new feature
  complements the zero and scrub plugins but is slightly different:
  beets clears out all the old tags it knows about and only keeps the
  new data it gets from the remote metadata source. Thanks to
  tummychow. #934 #2755

There are also somewhat littler, but still great, new features:

* Convert Plugin: A new "no_convert" option lets you skip transcoding
  items matching a query. Instead, the files are just copied as-is.
  Thanks to Stunner. #2732 #2751

* FetchArt Plugin: A new quiet switch that only prints out messages
  when album art is missing. Thanks to euri10. #2683

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: You can configure a custom
  MusicBrainz collection via the new "collection" configuration
  option. #2685

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: The collection update command can now
  remove albums from collections that are longer in the beets library.

* FetchArt Plugin: The "clearart" command now asks for confirmation
  before touching your files. Thanks to konman2. #2708 #2427

* MPDStats Plugin: The plugin now correctly updates song statistics
  when MPD switches from a song to a stream and when it plays the same
  song multiple times consecutively. #2707

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: The plugin can now be configured to write
  only a specific list of tags. Thanks to woparry.

There are lots and lots of bug fixes:

* Hook Plugin: Fixed a problem where accessing non-string properties
  of "item" or "album" (e.g., "item.track") would cause a crash.
  Thanks to broddo. #2740

* Play Plugin: When "relative_to" is set, the plugin correctly emits
  relative paths even when querying for albums rather than tracks.
  Thanks to j000. #2702

* We suppress a spurious Python warning about a "BrokenPipeError"
  being ignored. This was an issue when using beets in simple shell
  scripts. Thanks to Azphreal. #2622 #2631

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix a regression in the previous release related
  to the new R128 tags. #2615 #2623

* Lyrics Plugin: The MusixMatch backend now detects and warns when the
  server has blocked the client. Thanks to anarcat. #2634 #2632

* ImportFeeds Plugin: Fix an error on Python 3 in certain
  configurations. Thanks to djl. #2467 #2658

* Edit Plugin: Fix a bug when editing items during a re-import with
  the "-L" flag. Previously, diffs against against unrelated items
  could be shown or beets could crash. #2659

* KodiUpdate Plugin: Fix the server URL and add better error
  reporting. #2662

* Fixed a problem where "no-op" modifications would reset files'
  mtimes, resulting in unnecessary writes. This most prominently
  affected the Edit Plugin when saving the text file without making
  changes to some music. #2667

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix a crash when running the "submit"
  command on Python 3 on Windows with non-ASCII filenames. #2671

* AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin: Fix an occasional crash on Python 3
  when the AB analysis tool produced non-ASCII metadata. #2673

* Duplicates Plugin: Use the default tiebreak for items or albums when
  the configuration only specifies a tiebreak for the other kind of
  entity. Thanks to cgevans. #2758

* Duplicates Plugin: Fix the "--key" command line option, which was
  ignored.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix album ReplayGain calculation with the
  GStreamer backend. #2636

* Scrub Plugin: Handle errors when manipulating files using newer
  versions of Mutagen. #2716

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin no longer gets skipped during import
  when the "Edit Candidates" option is used from the Edit Plugin.
  #2734

* Fix a crash when numeric metadata fields contain just a minus or
  plus sign with no following numbers. Thanks to eigengrau. #2741

* FromFilename Plugin: Recognize file names that contain *only* a
  track number, such as *01.mp3*. Also, the plugin now allows
  underscores as a separator between fields. Thanks to Vrihub. #2738
  #2759

* Fixed an issue where images would be resized according to their
  longest edge, instead of their width, when using the "maxwidth"
  config option in the FetchArt Plugin and EmbedArt Plugin. Thanks to
  sekjun9878. #2729

There are some changes for developers:

* "Fixed fields" in Album and Item objects are now more strict about
  translating missing values into type-specific null-like values. This
  should help in cases where a string field is unexpectedly *None*
  sometimes instead of just showing up as an empty string. #2605

* Refactored the move functions the *beets.library* module and the
  *manipulate_files* function in *beets.importer* to use a single
  parameter describing the file operation instead of multiple Boolean
  flags. There is a new numerated type describing how to move, copy,
  or link files. #2682


1.4.5 (June 20, 2017)
=====================

Version 1.4.5 adds some oft-requested features. When you're importing
files, you can now manually set fields on the new music. Date queries
have gotten much more powerful: you can write precise queries down to
the second, and we now have *relative* queries like "-1w", which means
*one week ago*.

Here are the new features:

* You can now set fields to certain values during import, using either
  a "--set field=value" command-line flag or a new set_fields
  configuration option under the *importer* section. Thanks to bartkl.
  #1881 #2581

* Date queries can now include times, so you can filter your music
  down to the second. Thanks to discopatrick. #2506 #2528

* Date queries can also be *relative*. You can say "added:-1w.." to
  match music added in the last week, for example. Thanks to euri10.
  #2598

* A new Gmusic Plugin lets you interact with your Google Play Music
  library. Thanks to tigranl. #2553 #2586

* ReplayGain Plugin: We now keep R128 data in separate tags from
  classic ReplayGain data for formats that need it (namely, Ogg Opus).
  A new *r128* configuration option enables this behavior for specific
  formats. Thanks to autrimpo. #2557 #2560

* The move command gained a new "--export" flag, which copies files to
  an external location without changing their paths in the library
  database. Thanks to SpirosChadoulos. #435 #2510

There are also some bug fixes:

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix a crash when using the *prefer_specific* and
  *canonical* options together. Thanks to yacoob. #2459 #2583

* Web Plugin: Fix a crash on Windows under Python 2 when serving non-
  ASCII filenames. Thanks to robot3498712. #2592 #2593

* MetaSync Plugin: Fix a crash in the Amarok backend when filenames
  contain quotes. Thanks to aranc23. #2595 #2596

* More informative error messages are displayed when the file format
  is not recognized. #2599


1.4.4 (June 10, 2017)
=====================

This release built up a longer-than-normal list of nifty new features.
We now support DSF audio files and the importer can hard-link your
files, for example.

Here's a full list of new features:

* Added support for DSF files, once a future version of Mutagen is
  released that supports them. Thanks to docbobo. #459 #2379

* A new hardlink config option instructs the importer to create hard
  links on filesystems that support them. Thanks to jacobwgillespie.
  #2445

* A new KodiUpdate Plugin lets you keep your Kodi library in sync with
  beets. Thanks to Pauligrinder. #2411

* A new bell configuration option under the "import" section enables a
  terminal bell when input is required. Thanks to SpirosChadoulos.
  #2366 #2495

* A new field, "composer_sort", is now supported and fetched from
  MusicBrainz. Thanks to dosoe. #2519 #2529

* The MusicBrainz backend and  Discogs Plugin now both provide a new
  attribute called "track_alt" that stores more nuanced, possibly non-
  numeric track index data. For example, some vinyl or tape media will
  report the side of the record using a letter instead of a number in
  that field. #1831 #2363

* Web Plugin: Added a new endpoint, "/item/path/foo", which will
  return the item info for the file at the given path, or 404.

* Web Plugin: Added a new config option, "include_paths", which will
  cause paths to be included in item API responses if set to true.

* The "%aunique" template function for Album Disambiguation now takes
  a third argument that specifies which brackets to use around the
  disambiguator value.  The argument can be any two characters that
  represent the left and right brackets. It defaults to *[]* and can
  also be blank to turn off bracketing. #2397 #2399

* Added a "--move" or "-m" option to the importer so that the files
  can be moved to the library instead of being copied or added "in
  place." #2252 #2429

* Bad Files Plugin: Added a "--verbose" or "-v" option. Results are
  now displayed only for corrupted files by default and for all the
  files when the verbose option is set. #1654 #2434

* EmbedArt Plugin: The explicit "embedart" command now asks for
  confirmation before embedding art into music files. Thanks to
  Stunner. #1999

* You can now run beets by typing *python -m beets*. #2453

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Different playlist specifications that
  generate identically-named playlist files no longer conflict;
  instead, the resulting lists of tracks are concatenated. #2468

* Missing Plugin: A new mode lets you see missing albums from artists
  you have in your library. Thanks to qlyoung. #2481

* Web Plugin : Add new *reverse_proxy* config option to allow serving
  the web plugins under a reverse proxy.

* Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the
  event based on your preferred countries. #2501

* Play Plugin: A new "-y" or "--yes" parameter lets you skip the
  warning message if you enqueue more items than the warning threshold
  usually allows.

* Fix a bug where commands which forked subprocesses would sometimes
  prevent further inputs. This bug mainly affected Convert Plugin.
  Thanks to jansol. #2488 #2524

There are also quite a few fixes:

* In the replace configuration option, we now replace a leading hyphen
  (-) with an underscore. #549 #2509

* AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin: We no longer filter audio files for
  specific formats---we will attempt the submission process for all
  formats. #2471

* MPDUpdate Plugin: Fix Python 3 compatibility. #2381

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix Python 3 compatibility in the "bs1770gain"
  backend. #2382

* BPD Plugin: Report playback times as integers. #2394

* MPDStats Plugin: Fix Python 3 compatibility. The plugin also now
  requires version 0.4.2 or later of the "python-mpd2" library. #2405

* MPDStats Plugin: Improve handling of MPD status queries.

* Bad Files Plugin: Fix Python 3 compatibility.

* Fix some cases where album-level ReplayGain/SoundCheck metadata
  would be written to files incorrectly. #2426

* Bad Files Plugin: The command no longer bails out if the validator
  command is not found or exits with an error. #2430 #2433

* Lyrics Plugin: The Google search backend no longer crashes when the
  server responds with an error. #2437

* Discogs Plugin: You can now authenticate with Discogs using a
  personal access token. #2447

* Fix Python 3 compatibility when extracting rar archives in the
  importer. Thanks to Lompik. #2443 #2448

* Duplicates Plugin: Fix Python 3 compatibility when using the "copy"
  and "move" options. #2444

* MusicBrainz Submit Plugin: The tracks are now sorted properly.
  Thanks to awesomer. #2457

* Thumbnails Plugin: Fix a string-related crash on Python 3. #2466

* Beatport Plugin: More than just 10 songs are now fetched per album.
  #2469

* On Python 3, the terminal_encoding setting is respected again for
  output and printing will no longer crash on systems configured with
  a limited encoding.

* Convert Plugin: The default configuration uses FFmpeg's built-in AAC
  codec instead of faac. Thanks to jansol. #2484

* Fix the importer's detection of multi-disc albums when other
  subdirectories are present. #2493

* Invalid date queries now print an error message instead of being
  silently ignored. Thanks to discopatrick. #2513 #2517

* When the SQLite database stops being accessible, we now print a
  friendly error message. Thanks to Mary011196. #1676 #2508

* Web Plugin: Avoid a crash when sending binary data, such as
  Chromaprint fingerprints, in music attributes. #2542 #2532

* Fix a hang when parsing templates that end in newlines. #2562

* Fix a crash when reading non-ASCII characters in configuration files
  on Windows under Python 3. #2456 #2565 #2566

We removed backends from two metadata plugins because of bitrot:

* Lyrics Plugin: The Lyrics.com backend has been removed. (It stopped
  working because of changes to the site's URL structure.) #2548 #2549

* FetchArt Plugin: The documentation no longer recommends iTunes Store
  artwork lookup because the unmaintained python-itunes is broken.
  Want to adopt it? #2371 #1610


1.4.3 (January 9, 2017)
=======================

Happy new year! This new version includes a cornucopia of new features
from contributors, including new tags related to classical music and a
new AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin for performing acoustic analysis on
your music. The Random Plugin has a new mode that lets you generate
time-limited music---for example, you might generate a random playlist
that lasts the perfect length for your walk to work. We also access as
many Web services as possible over secure connections now---HTTPS
everywhere!

The most visible new features are:

* We now support the composer, lyricist, and arranger tags. The
  MusicBrainz data source will fetch data for these fields when the
  next version of python-musicbrainzngs is released. Thanks to
  ibmibmibm. #506 #507 #1547 #2333

* A new AcousticBrainz Submit Plugin lets you run acoustic analysis
  software and upload the results for others to use. Thanks to inytar.
  #2253 #2342

* Play Plugin: The plugin now provides an importer prompt choice to
  play the music you're about to import. Thanks to diomekes. #2008
  #2360

* We now use SSL to access Web services whenever possible. That
  includes MusicBrainz itself, several album art sources, some lyrics
  sources, and other servers. Thanks to tigranl. #2307

* Random Plugin: A new "--time" option lets you generate a random
  playlist that takes a given amount of time. Thanks to diomekes.
  #2305 #2322

Some smaller new features:

* Zero Plugin: A new "zero" command manually triggers the zero plugin.
  Thanks to SJoshBrown. #2274 #2329

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: The plugin will avoid re-downloading data for
  files that already have it by default. You can override this
  behavior using a new "force" option. Thanks to SusannaMaria. #2347
  #2349

* BPM Plugin: The "import.write" configuration option now decides
  whether or not to write tracks after updating their BPM. #1992

And the fixes:

* BPD Plugin: Fix a crash on non-ASCII MPD commands. #2332

* Scrub Plugin: Avoid a crash when files cannot be read or written.
  #2351

* Scrub Plugin: The image type values on scrubbed files are preserved
  instead of being reset to "other." #2339

* Web Plugin: Fix a crash on Python 3 when serving files from the
  filesystem. #2353

* Discogs Plugin: Improve the handling of releases that contain
  subtracks. #2318

* Discogs Plugin: Fix a crash when a release does not contain format
  information, and increase robustness when other fields are missing.
  #2302

* Lyrics Plugin: The plugin now reports a beets-specific User-Agent
  header when requesting lyrics. #2357

* EmbyUpdate Plugin: The plugin now checks whether an API key or a
  password is provided in the configuration.

* Play Plugin: The misspelled configuration option "warning_treshold"
  is no longer supported.

For plugin developers: when providing new importer prompt choices (see
Append Prompt Choices), you can now provide new candidates for the
user to consider. For example, you might provide an alternative
strategy for picking between the available alternatives or for looking
up a release on MusicBrainz.


1.4.2 (December 16, 2016)
=========================

This is just a little bug fix release. With 1.4.2, we're also
confident enough to recommend that anyone who's interested give Python
3 a try: bugs may still lurk, but we've deemed things safe enough for
broad adoption. If you can, please install beets with "pip3" instead
of "pip2" this time and let us know how it goes!

Here are the fixes:

* Bad Files Plugin: Fix a crash on non-ASCII filenames. #2299

* The "%asciify{}" path formatting function and the asciify_paths
  setting properly substitute path separators generated by converting
  some Unicode characters, such as ½ and ¢, into ASCII.

* Convert Plugin: Fix a logging-related crash when filenames contain
  curly braces. Thanks to kierdavis. #2323

* We've rolled back some changes to the included zsh completion script
  that were causing problems for some users. #2266

Also, we've removed some special handling for logging in the Discogs
Plugin that we believe was unnecessary. If spurious log messages
appear in this version, please let us know by filing a bug.


1.4.1 (November 25, 2016)
=========================

Version 1.4 has **alpha-level** Python 3 support. Thanks to the heroic
efforts of jrobeson, beets should run both under Python 2.7, as
before, and now under Python 3.4 and above. The support is still new:
it undoubtedly contains bugs, so it may replace all your music with
Limp Bizkit---but if you're brave and you have backups, please try
installing on Python 3. Let us know how it goes.

If you package beets for distribution, here's what you'll want to
know:

* This version of beets now depends on the six library.

* We also bumped our minimum required version of Mutagen to 1.33 (from
  1.27).

* Please don't package beets as a Python 3 application *yet*, even
  though most things work under Python 3.4 and later.

This version also makes a few changes to the command-line interface
and configuration that you may need to know about:

* Duplicates Plugin: The "duplicates" command no longer accepts
  multiple field arguments in the form "-k title albumartist album".
  Each argument must be prefixed with "-k", as in "-k title -k
  albumartist -k album".

* The old top-level "colors" configuration option has been removed
  (the setting is now under "ui").

* The deprecated "list_format_album" and "list_format_item"
  configuration options have been removed (see format_album and
  format_item).

The are a few new features:

* MPDUpdate Plugin, MPDStats Plugin: When the "host" option is not
  set, these plugins will now look for the "$MPD_HOST" environment
  variable before falling back to "localhost". Thanks to tarruda.
  #2175

* Web Plugin: Added an "expand" option to show the items of an album.
  #2050

* EmbyUpdate Plugin: The plugin can now use an API key instead of a
  password to authenticate with Emby. #2045 #2117

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: The plugin now adds a "bpm" field.

* "beet --version" now includes the Python version used to run beets.

* Path Formats can now include unescaped commas (",") when they are
  not part of a function call. #2166 #2213

* The update command takes a new "-F" flag to specify the fields to
  update. Thanks to dangmai. #2229 #2231

And there are a few bug fixes too:

* Convert Plugin: The plugin no longer asks for confirmation if the
  query did not return anything to convert. #2260 #2262

* EmbedArt Plugin: The plugin now uses "jpg" as an extension rather
  than "jpeg", to ensure consistency with the FetchArt Plugin. Thanks
  to tweitzel. #2254 #2255

* EmbedArt Plugin: The plugin now works for all jpeg files, including
  those that are only recognizable by their magic bytes. #1545 #2255

* Web Plugin: The JSON output is no longer pretty-printed (for a space
  savings). #2050

* Permissions Plugin: Fix a regression in the previous release where
  the plugin would always fail to set permissions (and log a warning).
  #2089

* Beatport Plugin: Use track numbers from Beatport (instead of
  determining them from the order of tracks) and set the
  *medium_index* value.

* With per_disc_numbering enabled, some metadata sources (notably, the
  Beatport Plugin) would not set the track number at all. This is
  fixed. #2085

* Play Plugin: Fix "$args" getting passed verbatim to the play command
  if it was set in the configuration but "-A" or "--args" was omitted.

* With ignore_hidden enabled, non-UTF-8 filenames would cause a crash.
  This is fixed. #2168

* EmbyUpdate Plugin: Fixes authentication header problem that caused a
  problem that it was not possible to get tokens from the Emby API.

* Lyrics Plugin: Some titles use a colon to separate the main title
  from a subtitle. To find more matches, the plugin now also searches
  for lyrics using the part part preceding the colon character. #2206

* Fix a crash when a query uses a date field and some items are
  missing that field. #1938

* Discogs Plugin: Subtracks are now detected and combined into a
  single track, two-sided mediums are treated as single discs, and
  tracks have "media", "medium_total" and "medium" set correctly.
  #2222 #2228.

* Missing Plugin: "missing" is now treated as an integer, allowing the
  use of (for example) ranges in queries.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Playlist names will be sanitized to ensure
  valid filenames. #2258

* The ID3 APIC tag now uses the Latin-1 encoding when possible instead
  of a Unicode encoding. This should increase compatibility with other
  software, especially with iTunes and when using ID3v2.3. Thanks to
  lazka. #899 #2264 #2270

The last release, 1.3.19, also erroneously reported its version as
"1.3.18" when you typed "beet version". This has been corrected.


1.3.19 (June 25, 2016)
======================

This is primarily a bug fix release: it cleans up a couple of
regressions that appeared in the last version. But it also features
the triumphant return of the Beatport Plugin and a modernized BPD
Plugin.

It's also the first version where beets passes all its tests on
Windows! May this herald a new age of cross-platform reliability for
beets.

New features:

* Beatport Plugin: This metadata source plugin has arisen from the
  dead! It now works with Beatport's new OAuth-based API. Thanks to
  jbaiter. #1989 #2067

* BPD Plugin: The plugin now uses the modern GStreamer 1.0 instead of
  the old 0.10. Thanks to philippbeckmann. #2057 #2062

* A new "--force" option for the remove command allows removal of
  items without prompting beforehand. #2042

* A new duplicate_action importer config option controls how duplicate
  albums or tracks treated in import task. #185

Some fixes for Windows:

* Queries are now detected as paths when they contain backslashes (in
  addition to forward slashes). This only applies on Windows.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Image similarity comparison with ImageMagick should
  now work on Windows.

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin should work more reliably with non-ASCII
  paths.

And other fixes:

* ReplayGain Plugin: The "bs1770gain" backend now correctly calculates
  sample peak instead of true peak. This comes with a major speed
  increase. #2031

* Lyrics Plugin: Avoid a crash and a spurious warning introduced in
  the last version about a Google API key, which appeared even when
  you hadn't enabled the Google lyrics source.

* Fix a hard-coded path to "bash-completion" to work better with
  Homebrew installations. Thanks to bismark. #2038

* Fix a crash introduced in the previous version when the standard
  input was connected to a Unix pipe. #2041

* Fix a crash when specifying non-ASCII format strings on the command
  line with the "-f" option for many commands. #2063

* FetchArt Plugin: Determine the file extension for downloaded images
  based on the image's magic bytes. The plugin prints a warning if
  result is not consistent with the server-supplied "Content-Type"
  header. In previous versions, the plugin would use a ".jpg"
  extension for all images. #2053


1.3.18 (May 31, 2016)
=====================

This update adds a new Hook Plugin that lets you integrate beets with
command-line tools and an Export Plugin that can dump data from the
beets database as JSON. You can also automatically translate lyrics
using a machine translation service.

The "echonest" plugin has been removed in this version because the API
it used is shutting down. You might want to try the AcousticBrainz
Plugin instead.

Some of the larger new features:

* The new Hook Plugin lets you execute commands in response to beets
  events.

* The new Export Plugin can export data from beets' database as JSON.
  Thanks to GuilhermeHideki.

* Lyrics Plugin: The plugin can now translate the fetched lyrics to
  your native language using the Bing translation API. Thanks to
  Kraymer.

* FetchArt Plugin: Album art can now be fetched from fanart.tv.

Smaller new things:

* There are two new functions available in templates: "%first" and
  "%ifdef". See Template Functions.

* Convert Plugin: A new *album_art_maxwidth* setting lets you resize
  album art while copying it.

* Convert Plugin: The *extension* setting is now optional for
  conversion formats. By default, the extension is the same as the
  name of the configured format.

* ImportAdded Plugin: A new *preserve_write_mtimes* option lets you
  preserve mtime of files even when beets updates their metadata.

* FetchArt Plugin: The *enforce_ratio* option now lets you tolerate
  images that are *almost* square but differ slightly from an exact
  1:1 aspect ratio.

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin can now optionally save the artwork's
  source in an attribute in the database.

* The terminal_encoding configuration option can now also override the
  *input* encoding. (Previously, it only affected the encoding of the
  standard *output* stream.)

* A new ignore_hidden configuration option lets you ignore files that
  your OS marks as invisible.

* Web Plugin: A new *values* endpoint lets you get the distinct values
  of a field. Thanks to sumpfralle. #2010

Fixes:

* Fix a problem with the stats command in exact mode when filenames on
  Windows use non-ASCII characters. #1891

* Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data.
  #1895

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: The plugin now redacts your
  MusicBrainz password in the "beet config" output. #1907

* Scrub Plugin: Fix an occasional problem where scrubbing on import
  could undo the id3v23 setting. #1903

* Lyrics Plugin: Add compatibility with some changes to the LyricsWiki
  page markup. #1912 #1909

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix retrieval from Musixmatch by improving the way we
  guess the URL for lyrics on that service. #1880

* Edit Plugin: Fail gracefully when the configured text editor command
  can't be invoked. #1927

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix a crash in the Wikipedia backend on non-ASCII
  artist and album names. #1960

* Convert Plugin: Change the default *ogg* encoding quality from 2 to
  3 (to fit the default from the *oggenc(1)* manpage). #1982

* Convert Plugin: The *never_convert_lossy_files* option now considers
  AIFF a lossless format. #2005

* Web Plugin: A proper 404 error, instead of an internal exception, is
  returned when missing album art is requested. Thanks to sumpfralle.
  #2011

* Tolerate more malformed floating-point numbers in metadata tags.
  #2014

* The ignore configuration option now includes the "lost+found"
  directory by default.

* AcousticBrainz Plugin: AcousticBrainz lookups are now done over
  HTTPS. Thanks to Freso. #2007


1.3.17 (February 7, 2016)
=========================

This release introduces one new plugin to fetch audio information from
the AcousticBrainz project and another plugin to make it easier to
submit your handcrafted metadata back to MusicBrainz. The importer
also gained two oft-requested features: a way to skip the initial
search process by specifying an ID ahead of time, and a way to
*manually* provide metadata in the middle of the import process (via
the Edit Plugin).

Also, as of this release, the beets project has some new Internet
homes! Our new domain name is beets.io, and we have a shiny new GitHub
organization: beetbox.

Here are the big new features:

* A new AcousticBrainz Plugin fetches acoustic-analysis information
  from the AcousticBrainz project. Thanks to opatel99, and thanks to
  Google Code-In! #1784

* A new MusicBrainz Submit Plugin lets you print music's current
  metadata in a format that the MusicBrainz data parser can
  understand. You can trigger it during an interactive import session.
  #1779

* A new "--search-id" importer option lets you manually specify IDs
  (i.e., MBIDs or Discogs IDs) for imported music. Doing this skips
  the initial candidate search, which can be important for huge albums
  where this initial lookup is slow. Also, the "enter Id" prompt
  choice now accepts several IDs, separated by spaces. #1808

* Edit Plugin: You can now edit metadata *on the fly* during the
  import process. The plugin provides two new interactive options: one
  to edit *your music's* metadata, and one to edit the *matched
  metadata* retrieved from MusicBrainz (or another data source). This
  feature is still in its early stages, so please send feedback if you
  find anything missing. #1846 #396

There are even more new features:

* FetchArt Plugin: The Google Images backend has been restored. It now
  requires an API key from Google. Thanks to lcharlick. #1778

* Info Plugin: A new option will print only fields' names and not
  their values. Thanks to GuilhermeHideki. #1812

* The fields command now displays flexible attributes. Thanks to
  GuilhermeHideki. #1818

* The modify command lets you interactively select which albums or
  items you want to change. #1843

* The move command gained a new "--timid" flag to print and confirm
  which files you want to move. #1843

* The move command no longer prints filenames for files that don't
  actually need to be moved. #1583

Fixes:

* Play Plugin: Fix a regression in the last version where there was no
  default command. #1793

* LastImport Plugin: The plugin now works again after being broken by
  some unannounced changes to the Last.fm API. #1574

* Play Plugin: Fixed a typo in a configuration option. The option is
  now "warning_threshold" instead of "warning_treshold", but we kept
  the old name around for compatibility. Thanks to JesseWeinstein.
  #1802 #1803

* Edit Plugin: Editing metadata now moves files, when appropriate
  (like the modify command). #1804

* The stats command no longer crashes when files are missing or
  inaccessible. #1806

* FetchArt Plugin: Possibly fix a Unicode-related crash when using
  some versions of pyOpenSSL. #1805

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix an intermittent crash with the GStreamer
  backend. #1855

* LastImport Plugin: The plugin now works with the beets API key by
  default. You can still provide a different key the configuration.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix a crash using the Python Audio Tools backend.
  #1873


1.3.16 (December 28, 2015)
==========================

The big news in this release is a new interactive editor plugin. It's
really nifty: you can now change your music's metadata by making
changes in a visual text editor, which can sometimes be far more
efficient than the built-in modify command. No more carefully retyping
the same artist name with slight capitalization changes.

This version also adds an oft-requested "not" operator to beets'
queries, so you can exclude music from any operation. It also brings
friendlier formatting (and querying!) of song durations.

The big new stuff:

* A new Edit Plugin lets you manually edit your music's metadata using
  your favorite text editor. #164 #1706

* Queries can now use "not" logic. Type a "^" before part of a query
  to *exclude* matching music from the results. For example, "beet
  list -a beatles ^album:1" will find all your albums by the Beatles
  except for their singles compilation, "1." See Query Term Negation.
  #819 #1728

* A new EmbyUpdate Plugin can trigger a library refresh on an Emby
  server when your beets database changes.

* Track length is now displayed as "M:SS" rather than a raw number of
  seconds. Queries on track length also accept this format: for
  example, "beet list length:5:30.." will find all your tracks that
  have a duration over 5 minutes and 30 seconds. You can turn off this
  new behavior using the "format_raw_length" configuration option.
  #1749

Smaller changes:

* Three commands, "modify", "update", and "mbsync", would previously
  move files by default after changing their metadata. Now, these
  commands will only move files if you have the copy or move options
  enabled in your importer configuration. This way, if you configure
  the importer not to touch your filenames, other commands will
  respect that decision by default too. Each command also sprouted a "
  --move" command-line option to override this default (in addition to
  the "--nomove" flag they already had). #1697

* A new configuration option, "va_name", controls the album artist
  name for various-artists albums. The setting defaults to "Various
  Artists," the MusicBrainz standard. In order to match MusicBrainz,
  the Discogs Plugin also adopts the same setting.

* Info Plugin: The "info" command now accepts a "-f/--format" option
  for customizing how items are displayed, just like the built-in
  "list" command. #1737

Some changes for developers:

* Two new plugin hooks, "albuminfo_received" and "trackinfo_received",
  let plugins intercept metadata as soon as it is received, before it
  is applied to music in the database. #872

* Plugins can now add options to the interactive importer prompts. See
  Append Prompt Choices. #1758

Fixes:

* PlexUpdate Plugin: Fix a crash when Plex libraries use non-ASCII
  collection names. #1649

* Discogs Plugin: Maybe fix a crash when using some versions of the
  "requests" library. #1656

* Fix a race in the importer when importing two albums with the same
  artist and name in quick succession. The importer would fail to
  detect them as duplicates, claiming that there were "empty albums"
  in the database even when there were not. #1652

* LastGenre Plugin: Clean up the reggae-related genres somewhat.
  Thanks to Freso. #1661

* The importer now correctly moves album art files when re-importing.
  #314

* FetchArt Plugin: In auto mode, the plugin now skips albums that
  already have art attached to them so as not to interfere with re-
  imports. #314

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin now only resizes album art if necessary,
  rather than always by default. #1264

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix a bug where a database reference to a non-
  existent album art file would prevent the command from fetching new
  art. #1126

* Thumbnails Plugin: Fix a crash with Unicode paths. #1686

* EmbedArt Plugin: The "remove_art_file" option now works on import
  (as well as with the explicit command). #1662 #1675

* MetaSync Plugin: Fix a crash when syncing with recent versions of
  iTunes. #1700

* Duplicates Plugin: Fix a crash when merging items. #1699

* Smart Playlist Plugin: More gracefully handle malformed queries and
  missing configuration.

* Fix a crash with some files with unreadable iTunes SoundCheck
  metadata. #1666

* Thumbnails Plugin: Fix a nasty segmentation fault crash that arose
  with some library versions. #1433

* Convert Plugin: Fix a crash with Unicode paths in "--pretend" mode.
  #1735

* Fix a crash when sorting by nonexistent fields on queries. #1734

* Probably fix some mysterious errors when dealing with images using
  ImageMagick on Windows. #1721

* Fix a crash when writing some Unicode comment strings to MP3s that
  used older encodings. The encoding is now always updated to UTF-8.
  #879

* FetchArt Plugin: The Google Images backend has been removed. It used
  an API that has been shut down. #1760

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix a crash in the Google backend when searching for
  bands with regular-expression characters in their names, like Sunn
  O))). #1673

* Scrub Plugin: In "auto" mode, the plugin now *actually* only scrubs
  files on import, as the documentation always claimed it did---not
  every time files were written, as it previously did. #1657

* Scrub Plugin: Also in "auto" mode, album art is now correctly
  restored. #1657

* Possibly allow flexible attributes to be used with the "%aunique"
  template function. #1775

* Lyrics Plugin: The Genius backend is now more robust to
  communication errors. The backend has also been disabled by default,
  since the API it depends on is currently down. #1770


1.3.15 (October 17, 2015)
=========================

This release adds a new plugin for checking file quality and a new
source for lyrics. The larger features are:

* A new Bad Files Plugin helps you scan for corruption in your music
  collection. Thanks to fxthomas. #1568

* Lyrics Plugin: You can now fetch lyrics from Genius.com. Thanks to
  sadatay. #1626 #1639

* Zero Plugin: The plugin can now use a "whitelist" policy as an
  alternative to the (default) "blacklist" mode. Thanks to adkow.
  #1621 #1641

And there are smaller new features too:

* Add new color aliases for standard terminal color names (e.g., cyan
  and magenta). Thanks to mathstuf. #1548

* Play Plugin: A new "--args" option lets you specify options for the
  player command. #1532

* Play Plugin: A new "raw" configuration option lets the command work
  with players (such as VLC) that expect music filenames as arguments,
  rather than in a playlist. Thanks to nathdwek. #1578

* Play Plugin: You can now configure the number of tracks that trigger
  a "lots of music" warning. #1577

* EmbedArt Plugin: A new "remove_art_file" option lets you clean up if
  you prefer *only* embedded album art. Thanks to jackwilsdon. #1591
  #733

* PlexUpdate Plugin: A new "library_name" option allows you to select
  which Plex library to update. #1572 #1595

* A new "include" option lets you import external configuration files.

This release has plenty of fixes:

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix a bug that prevented tag popularity from being
  considered. Thanks to svoos. #1559

* Fixed a bug where plugins wouldn't be notified of the deletion of an
  item's art, for example with the "clearart" command from the
  EmbedArt Plugin. Thanks to nathdwek. #1565

* FetchArt Plugin: The Google Images source is disabled by default (as
  it was before beets 1.3.9), as is the Wikipedia source (which was
  causing lots of unnecessary delays due to DBpedia downtime). To re-
  enable these sources, add "wikipedia google" to your "sources"
  configuration option.

* The list command's help output now has a small query and format
  string example. Thanks to pkess. #1582

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin now fetches PNGs but not GIFs. (It still
  fetches JPEGs.) This avoids an error when trying to embed images,
  since not all formats support GIFs. #1588

* Date fields are now written in the correct order (year-month-day),
  which eliminates an intermittent bug where the latter two fields
  would not get written to files. Thanks to jdetrey. #1303 #1589

* ReplayGain Plugin: Avoid a crash when the PyAudioTools backend
  encounters an error. #1592

* The case sensitivity of path queries is more useful now: rather than
  just guessing based on the platform, we now check the case
  sensitivity of your filesystem. #1586

* Case-insensitive path queries might have returned nothing because of
  a wrong SQL query.

* Fix a crash when a query contains a "+" or "-" alone in a component.
  #1605

* Fixed unit of file size to powers of two (MiB, GiB, etc.) instead of
  powers of ten (MB, GB, etc.). #1623


1.3.14 (August 2, 2015)
=======================

This is mainly a bugfix release, but we also have a nifty new plugin
for ipfs and a bunch of new configuration options.

The new features:

* A new IPFS Plugin lets you share music via a new, global,
  decentralized filesystem. #1397

* Duplicates Plugin: You can now merge duplicate track metadata (when
  detecting duplicate items), or duplicate album tracks (when
  detecting duplicate albums).

* Duplicates Plugin: Duplicate resolution now uses an ordering to
  prioritize duplicates. By default, it prefers music with more
  complete metadata, but you can configure it to use any list of
  attributes.

* MetaSync Plugin: Added a new backend to fetch metadata from iTunes.
  This plugin is still in an experimental phase. #1450

* The *move* command has a new "--pretend" option, making the command
  show how the items will be moved without actually changing anything.

* The importer now supports matching of "pregap" or HTOA (hidden
  track-one audio) tracks when they are listed in MusicBrainz. (This
  feature depends on a new version of the python-musicbrainzngs
  library that is not yet released, but will start working when it is
  available.) Thanks to ruippeixotog. #1104 #1493

* PlexUpdate Plugin: A new "token" configuration option lets you
  specify a key for Plex Home setups. Thanks to edcarroll. #1494

Fixes:

* FetchArt Plugin: Complain when the *enforce_ratio* or *min_width*
  options are enabled but no local imaging backend is available to
  carry them out. #1460

* ImportFeeds Plugin: Avoid generating incorrect m3u filename when
  both of the *m3u* and *m3u_multi* options are enabled. #1490

* Duplicates Plugin: Avoid a crash when misconfigured. #1457

* MPDStats Plugin: Avoid a crash when the music played is not in the
  beets library. Thanks to CodyReichert. #1443

* Fix a crash with ArtResizer on Windows systems (affecting EmbedArt
  Plugin, FetchArt Plugin, and Thumbnails Plugin). #1448

* Permissions Plugin: Fix an error with non-ASCII paths. #1449

* Fix sorting by paths when the sort_case_insensitive option is
  enabled. #1451

* EmbedArt Plugin: Avoid an error when trying to embed invalid images
  into MPEG-4 files.

* FetchArt Plugin: The Wikipedia source can now better deal artists
  that use non-standard capitalization (e.g., alt-J, dEUS).

* Web Plugin: Fix searching for non-ASCII queries. Thanks to
  oldtopman. #1470

* MPDUpdate Plugin: We now recommend the newer "python-mpd2" library
  instead of its unmaintained parent. Thanks to Somasis. #1472

* The importer interface and log file now output a useful list of
  files (instead of the word "None") when in album-grouping mode.
  #1475 #825

* Fix some logging errors when filenames and other user-provided
  strings contain curly braces. #1481

* Regular expression queries over paths now work more reliably with
  non-ASCII characters in filenames. #1482

* Fix a bug where the autotagger's ignored setting was sometimes,
  well, ignored. #1487

* Fix a bug with Unicode strings when generating image thumbnails.
  #1485

* Key Finder Plugin: Fix handling of Unicode paths. #1502

* FetchArt Plugin: When album art is already present, the message is
  now printed in the "text_highlight_minor" color (light gray). Thanks
  to Somasis. #1512

* Some messages in the console UI now use plural nouns correctly.
  Thanks to JesseWeinstein. #1521

* Sorting numerical fields (such as track) now works again. #1511

* ReplayGain Plugin: Missing GStreamer plugins now cause a helpful
  error message instead of a crash. #1518

* Fix an edge case when producing sanitized filenames where the
  maximum path length conflicted with the replace rules. Thanks to Ben
  Ockmore. #496 #1361

* Fix an incompatibility with OS X 10.11 (where "/usr/sbin" seems not
  to be on the user's path by default).

* Fix an incompatibility with certain JPEG files. Here's a relevant
  Python bug. Thanks to nathdwek. #1545

* Fix the group_albums importer mode so that it works correctly when
  files are not already in order by album. #1550

* The "fields" command no longer separates built-in fields from
  plugin-provided ones. This distinction was becoming increasingly
  unreliable.

* Duplicates Plugin: Fix a Unicode warning when paths contained non-
  ASCII characters. #1551

* FetchArt Plugin: Work around a urllib3 bug that could cause a crash.
  #1555 #1556

* When you edit the configuration file with "beet config -e" and the
  file does not exist, beets creates an empty file before editing it.
  This fixes an error on OS X, where the "open" command does not work
  with non-existent files. #1480

* Convert Plugin: Fix a problem with filename encoding on Windows
  under Python 3. #2515 #2516


1.3.13 (April 24, 2015)
=======================

This is a tiny bug-fix release. It copes with a dependency upgrade
that broke beets. There are just two fixes:

* Fix compatibility with Jellyfish version 0.5.0.

* EmbedArt Plugin: In "auto" mode (the import hook), the plugin now
  respects the "write" config option under "import". If this is
  disabled, album art is no longer embedded on import in order to
  leave files untouched---in effect, "auto" is implicitly disabled.
  #1427


1.3.12 (April 18, 2015)
=======================

This little update makes queries more powerful, sorts music more
intelligently, and removes a performance bottleneck. There's an
experimental new plugin for synchronizing metadata with music players.

Packagers should also note a new dependency in this version: the
Jellyfish Python library makes our text comparisons (a big part of the
auto-tagging process) go much faster.

New features:

* Queries can now use **"or" logic**: if you use a comma to separate
  parts of a query, items and albums will match *either* side of the
  comma. For example, "beet ls foo , bar" will get all the items
  matching *foo* or matching *bar*. See Combining Keywords. #1423

* The autotagger's **matching algorithm is faster**. We now use the
  Jellyfish library to compute string similarity, which is better
  optimized than our hand-rolled edit distance implementation. #1389

* Sorting is now **case insensitive** by default. This means that
  artists will be sorted lexicographically regardless of case. For
  example, the artist alt-J will now properly sort before YACHT.
  (Previously, it would have ended up at the end of the list, after
  all the capital-letter artists.) You can turn this new behavior off
  using the sort_case_insensitive configuration option. See Sort
  Order. #1429

* An experimental new MetaSync Plugin lets you get metadata from your
  favorite music players, starting with Amarok. #1386

* FetchArt Plugin: There are new settings to control what constitutes
  "acceptable" images. The *minwidth* option constrains the minimum
  image width in pixels and the *enforce_ratio* option requires that
  images be square. #1394

Little fixes and improvements:

* FetchArt Plugin: Remove a hard size limit when fetching from the
  Cover Art Archive.

* The output of the fields command is now sorted. Thanks to multikatt.
  #1402

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix a number of issues with the new "bs1770gain"
  backend on Windows. Also, fix missing debug output in import mode.
  #1398

* Beets should now be better at guessing the appropriate output
  encoding on Windows. (Specifically, the console output encoding is
  guessed separately from the encoding for command-line arguments.) A
  bug was also fixed where beets would ignore the locale settings and
  use UTF-8 by default. #1419

* Discogs Plugin: Better error handling when we can't communicate with
  Discogs on setup. #1417

* ImportAdded Plugin: Fix a crash when importing singletons in-place.
  #1416

* Fuzzy Search Plugin: Fix a regression causing a crash in the last
  release. #1422

* Fix a crash when the importer cannot open its log file. Thanks to
  barsanuphe. #1426

* Fix an error when trying to write tags for items with flexible
  fields called *date* and *original_date* (which are not built-in
  beets fields). #1404


1.3.11 (April 5, 2015)
======================

In this release, we refactored the logging system to be more flexible
and more useful. There are more granular levels of verbosity, the
output from plugins should be more consistent, and several kinds of
logging bugs should be impossible in the future.

There are also two new plugins: one for filtering the files you import
and an evolved plugin for using album art as directory thumbnails in
file managers. There's a new source for album art, and the importer
now records the source of match data. This is a particularly huge
release---there's lots more below.

There's one big change with this release: **Python 2.6 is no longer
supported**. You'll need Python 2.7. Please trust us when we say this
let us remove a surprising number of ugly hacks throughout the code.

Major new features and bigger changes:

* There are now **multiple levels of output verbosity**. On the
  command line, you can make beets somewhat verbose with "-v" or very
  verbose with "-vv". For the importer especially, this makes the
  first verbose mode much more manageable, while still preserving an
  option for overwhelmingly verbose debug output. #1244

* A new FileFilter Plugin lets you write regular expressions to
  automatically **avoid importing** certain files. Thanks to mried.
  #1186

* A new Thumbnails Plugin generates cover-art **thumbnails for album
  folders** for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. (This
  replaces the Freedesktop Plugin, which only worked with the Dolphin
  file manager.)

* ReplayGain Plugin: There is a new backend that uses the bs1770gain
  analysis tool. Thanks to jmwatte. #1343

* A new "filesize" field on items indicates the number of bytes in the
  file. #1291

* A new searchlimit configuration option allows you to specify how
  many search results you wish to see when looking up releases at
  MusicBrainz during import. #1245

* The importer now records the data source for a match in a new
  flexible attribute "data_source" on items and albums. #1311

* The colors used in the terminal interface are now configurable via
  the new config option "colors", nested under the option "ui". (Also,
  the *color* config option has been moved from top-level to under
  "ui". Beets will respect the old color setting, but will warn the
  user with a deprecation message.) #1238

* FetchArt Plugin: There's a new Wikipedia image source that uses
  DBpedia to find albums. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. #1194

* In the config command, the output is now redacted by default.
  Sensitive information like passwords and API keys is not included.
  The new "--clear" option disables redaction. #1376

You should probably also know about these core changes to the way
beets works:

* As mentioned above, Python 2.6 is no longer supported.

* The "tracktotal" attribute is now a *track-level field* instead of
  an album-level one. This field stores the total number of tracks on
  the album, or if the per_disc_numbering config option is set, the
  total number of tracks on a particular medium (i.e., disc). The
  field was causing problems with that per_disc_numbering mode:
  different discs on the same album needed different track totals. The
  field can now work correctly in either mode.

* To replace "tracktotal" as an album-level field, there is a new
  "albumtotal" computed attribute that provides the total number of
  tracks on the album. (The per_disc_numbering option has no influence
  on this field.)

* The *list_format_album* and *list_format_item* configuration keys
  now affect (almost) every place where objects are printed and
  logged. (Previously, they only controlled the list command and a few
  other scattered pieces.) #1269

* Relatedly, the "beet" program now accept top-level options "--
  format-item" and "--format-album" before any subcommand to control
  how items and albums are displayed. #1271

* *list_format_album* and *list_format_album* have respectively been
  renamed format_album and format_item. The old names still work but
  each triggers a warning message. #1271

* Path queries are automatically triggered only if the path targeted
  by the query exists. Previously, just having a slash somewhere in
  the query was enough, so "beet ls AC/DC" wouldn't work to refer to
  the artist.

There are also lots of medium-sized features in this update:

* Duplicates Plugin: The command has a new "--strict" option that will
  only report duplicates if all attributes are explicitly set. #1000

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Playlist updating should now be faster: the
  plugin detects, for each playlist, whether it needs to be
  regenerated, instead of obliviously regenerating all of them. The
  "splupdate" command can now also take additional parameters that
  indicate the names of the playlists to regenerate.

* Play Plugin: The command shows the output of the underlying player
  command and lets you interact with it. #1321

* The summary shown to compare duplicate albums during import now
  displays the old and new filesizes. #1291

* LastGenre Plugin: Add *comedy*, *humor*, and *stand-up* as well as a
  longer list of classical music genre tags to the built-in whitelist
  and canonicalization tree. #1206 #1239 #1240

* Web Plugin: Add support for *cross-origin resource sharing* for more
  flexible in-browser clients. Thanks to Andre Miller. #1236 #1237

* MBSync Plugin: A new "-f/--format" option controls the output format
  when listing unrecognized items. The output is also now more helpful
  by default. #1246

* FetchArt Plugin: A new option, "-n", extracts the cover art of all
  matched albums into their respective directories. Another new flag,
  "-a", associates the extracted files with the albums in the
  database. #1261

* Info Plugin: A new option, "-i", can display only a specified subset
  of properties. #1287

* The number of missing/unmatched tracks is shown during import. #1088

* Permissions Plugin: The plugin now also adjusts the permissions of
  the directories. (Previously, it only affected files.) #1308 #1324

* FtInTitle Plugin: You can now configure the format that the plugin
  uses to add the artist to the title. Thanks to amishb. #1377

And many little fixes and improvements:

* ReplayGain Plugin: Stop applying replaygain directly to source files
  when using the mp3gain backend. #1316

* Path queries are case-sensitive on non-Windows OSes. #1165

* Lyrics Plugin: Silence a warning about insecure requests in the new
  MusixMatch backend. #1204

* Fix a crash when "beet" is invoked without arguments. #1205 #1207

* FetchArt Plugin: Do not attempt to import directories as album art.
  #1177 #1211

* MPDStats Plugin: Avoid double-counting some play events. #773 #1212

* Fix a crash when the importer deals with Unicode metadata in "--
  pretend" mode. #1214

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Fix "album_query" so that individual files
  are added to the playlist instead of directories. #1225

* Remove the "beatport" plugin. Beatport has shut off public access to
  their API and denied our request for an account. We have not heard
  from the company since 2013, so we are assuming access will not be
  restored.

* Incremental imports now (once again) show a "skipped N directories"
  message.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Handle errors in ImageMagick's output. #1241

* Key Finder Plugin: Parse the underlying tool's output more robustly.
  #1248

* EmbedArt Plugin: We now show a comprehensible error message when
  "beet embedart -f FILE" is given a non-existent path. #1252

* Fix a crash when a file has an unrecognized image type tag. Thanks
  to Matthias Kiefer. #1260

* ImportFeeds Plugin and Smart Playlist Plugin: Automatically create
  parent directories for playlist files (instead of crashing when the
  parent directory does not exist). #1266

* The write command no longer tries to "write" non-writable fields,
  such as the bitrate. #1268

* The error message when MusicBrainz is not reachable on the network
  is now much clearer. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. #1190 #1272

* Improve error messages when parsing query strings with shlex. #1290

* EmbedArt Plugin: Fix a crash that occurred when used together with
  the *check* plugin. #1241

* Scrub Plugin: Log an error instead of stopping when the "beet scrub"
  command cannot write a file. Also, avoid problems on Windows with
  Unicode filenames. #1297

* Discogs Plugin: Handle and log more kinds of communication errors.
  #1299 #1305

* LastGenre Plugin: Bugs in the *pylast* library can no longer crash
  beets.

* Convert Plugin: You can now configure the temporary directory for
  conversions. Thanks to autochthe. #1382 #1383

* Rewrite Plugin: Fix a regression that prevented the plugin's
  rewriting from applying to album-level fields like "$albumartist".
  #1393

* Play Plugin: The plugin now sorts items according to the
  configuration in album mode.

* FetchArt Plugin: The name for extracted art files is taken from the
  "art_filename" configuration option. #1258

* When there's a parse error in a query (for example, when you type a
  malformed date in a date query), beets now stops with an error
  instead of silently ignoring the query component.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Stream-friendly smart playlists. The
  "splupdate" command can now also add a URL-encodable prefix to every
  path in the playlist file.

For developers:

* The "database_change" event now sends the item or album that is
  subject to a change.

* The "OptionParser" is now a "CommonOptionsParser" that offers
  facilities for adding usual options ("--album", "--path" and "--
  format"). See Add Commands to the CLI. #1271

* The logging system in beets has been overhauled. Plugins now each
  have their own logger, which helps by automatically adjusting the
  verbosity level in import mode and by prefixing the plugin's name.
  Logging levels are dynamically set when a plugin is called,
  depending on how it is called (import stage, event or direct
  command).  Finally, logging calls can (and should!) use modern
  "{}"-style string formatting lazily. See Logging in the plugin API
  docs.

* A new "import_task_created" event lets you manipulate import tasks
  immediately after they are initialized. It's also possible to
  replace the originally created tasks by returning new ones using
  this event.


1.3.10 (January 5, 2015)
========================

This version adds a healthy helping of new features and fixes a
critical MPEG-4--related bug. There are more lyrics sources, there new
plugins for managing permissions and integrating with Plex, and the
importer has a new "--pretend" flag that shows which music *would* be
imported.

One backwards-compatibility note: the Lyrics Plugin now requires the
requests library. If you use this plugin, you will need to install the
library by typing "pip install requests" or the equivalent for your
OS.

Also, as an advance warning, this will be one of the last releases to
support Python 2.6. If you have a system that cannot run Python 2.7,
please consider upgrading soon.

The new features are:

* A new Permissions Plugin makes it easy to fix permissions on music
  files as they are imported. Thanks to xsteadfastx. #1098

* A new PlexUpdate Plugin lets you notify a Plex server when the
  database changes. Thanks again to xsteadfastx. #1120

* The import command now has a "--pretend" flag that lists the files
  that will be imported. Thanks to mried. #1162

* Lyrics Plugin: Add Musixmatch source and introduce a new "sources"
  config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for lyrics
  and in which order.

* Lyrics Plugin: Add Brazilian and Spanish sources to Google custom
  search engine.

* Add a warning when importing a directory that contains no music.
  #1116 #1127

* Zero Plugin: Can now remove embedded images. #1129 #1100

* The config command can now be used to edit the configuration even
  when it has syntax errors. #1123 #1128

* Lyrics Plugin: Added a new "force" config option. #1150

As usual, there are loads of little fixes and improvements:

* Fix a new crash with the latest version of Mutagen (1.26).

* Lyrics Plugin: Avoid fetching truncated lyrics from the Google
  backed by merging text blocks separated by empty "<div>" tags before
  scraping.

* We now print a better error message when the database file is
  corrupted.

* Discogs Plugin: Only prompt for authentication when running the
  import command. #1123

* When deleting fields with the modify command, do not crash when the
  field cannot be removed (i.e., when it does not exist, when it is a
  built-in field, or when it is a computed field). #1124

* The deprecated "echonest_tempo" plugin has been removed. Please use
  the "echonest" plugin instead.

* "echonest" plugin: Fingerprint-based lookup has been removed in
  accordance with API changes. #1121

* "echonest" plugin: Avoid a crash when the song has no duration
  information. #896

* Lyrics Plugin: Avoid a crash when retrieving non-ASCII lyrics from
  the Google backend. #1135 #1136

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Sort specifiers are now respected in queries.
  Thanks to djl. #1138 #1137

* FtInTitle Plugin and Lyrics Plugin: Featuring artists can now be
  detected when they use the Spanish word *con*. #1060 #1143

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Fix an "HTTP 400" error caused by a
  change in the MusicBrainz API. #1152

* The "%" and "_" characters in path queries do not invoke their
  special SQL meaning anymore. #1146

* Convert Plugin: Command-line argument construction now works on
  Windows. Thanks to mluds. #1026 #1157 #1158

* EmbedArt Plugin: Fix an erroneous missing-art error on Windows.
  Thanks to mluds. #1163

* ImportAdded Plugin: Now works with in-place and symlinked imports.
  #1170

* FtInTitle Plugin: The plugin is now quiet when it runs as part of
  the import process. Thanks to Freso. #1176 #1172

* FtInTitle Plugin: Fix weird behavior when the same artist appears
  twice in the artist string. Thanks to Marc Addeo. #1179 #1181

* LastGenre Plugin: Match songs more robustly when they contain
  dashes. Thanks to djl. #1156

* The config command can now use "$EDITOR" variables with arguments.


1.3.9 (November 17, 2014)
=========================

This release adds two new standard plugins to beets: one for
synchronizing Last.fm listening data and one for integrating with
Linux desktops. And at long last, imports can now create symbolic
links to music files instead of copying or moving them. We also gained
the ability to search for album art on the iTunes Store and a new way
to compute ReplayGain levels.

The major new features are:

* A new LastImport Plugin lets you download your play count data from
  Last.fm into a flexible attribute. Thanks to Rafael Bodill.

* A new Freedesktop Plugin creates metadata files for Freedesktop.org
  --compliant file managers. Thanks to kerobaros. #1056, #707

* A new link option in the "import" section creates symbolic links
  during import instead of moving or copying. Thanks to Rovanion
  Luckey. #710, #114

* FetchArt Plugin: You can now search for art on the iTunes Store.
  There's also a new "sources" config option that lets you choose
  exactly where to look for images and in which order.

* ReplayGain Plugin: A new Python Audio Tools backend was added.
  Thanks to Francesco Rubino. #1070

* EmbedArt Plugin: You can now automatically check that new art looks
  similar to existing art---ensuring that you only get a better
  "version" of the art you already have. See Image Similarity.

* FtInTitle Plugin: The plugin now runs automatically on import. To
  disable this, unset the "auto" config flag.

There are also core improvements and other substantial additions:

* The "media" attribute is now a *track-level field* instead of an
  album-level one. This field stores the delivery mechanism for the
  music, so in its album-level incarnation, it could not represent
  heterogeneous releases---for example, an album consisting of a CD
  and a DVD. Now, tracks accurately indicate the media they appear on.
  Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.

* Re-imports of your existing music (see Reimporting) now preserve its
  added date and flexible attributes. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea
  Bjørnsen.

* Slow queries, such as those over flexible attributes, should now be
  much faster when used with certain commands---notably, the Play
  Plugin.

* BPD Plugin: Add a new configuration option for setting the default
  volume. Thanks to IndiGit.

* EmbedArt Plugin: A new "ifempty" config option lets you only embed
  album art when no album art is present. Thanks to kerobaros.

* Discogs Plugin: Authenticate with the Discogs server. The plugin now
  requires a Discogs account due to new API restrictions. Thanks to
  multikatt. #1027, #1040

And countless little improvements and fixes:

* Standard cover art in APEv2 metadata is now supported. Thanks to
  Matthias Kiefer. #1042

* Convert Plugin: Avoid a crash when embedding cover art fails.

* MPDStats Plugin: Fix an error on start (introduced in the previous
  version). Thanks to Zach Denton.

* Convert Plugin: The "--yes" command-line flag no longer expects an
  argument.

* Play Plugin: Remove the temporary .m3u file after sending it to the
  player.

* The importer no longer tries to highlight partial differences in
  numeric quantities (track numbers and durations), which was often
  confusing.

* Date-based queries that are malformed (not parse-able) no longer
  crash beets and instead fail silently.

* Duplicates Plugin: Emit an error when the "checksum" config option
  is set incorrectly.

* The migration from pre-1.1, non-YAML configuration files has been
  removed. If you need to upgrade an old config file, use an older
  version of beets temporarily.

* Discogs Plugin: Recover from HTTP errors when communicating with the
  Discogs servers. Thanks to Dustin Rodriguez.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Do not log "embedding album art into..." messages
  during the import process.

* Fix a crash in the autotagger when files had only whitespace in
  their metadata.

* Play Plugin: Fix a potential crash when the command outputs special
  characters. #1041

* Web Plugin: Queries typed into the search field are now treated as
  separate query components. #1045

* Date tags that use slashes instead of dashes as separators are now
  interpreted correctly. And WMA (ASF) files now map the "comments"
  field to the "Description" tag (in addition to "WM/Comments").
  Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1043

* EmbedArt Plugin: Avoid resizing the image multiple times when
  embedding into an album. Thanks to kerobaros. #1028, #1036

* Discogs Plugin: Avoid a situation where a trailing comma could be
  appended to some artist names. #1049

* The output of the stats command is slightly different: the
  approximate size is now marked as such, and the total number of
  seconds only appears in exact mode.

* Convert Plugin: A new "copy_album_art" option puts images alongside
  converted files. Thanks to Ángel Alonso. #1050, #1055

* There is no longer a "conflict" between two plugins that declare the
  same field with the same type. Thanks to Peter Schnebel. #1059 #1061

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Limit the number of releases and
  recordings fetched as the result of an Acoustid match to avoid
  extremely long processing times for very popular music. #1068

* Fix an issue where modifying an album's field without actually
  changing it would not update the corresponding tracks to bring
  differing tracks back in line with the album. #856

* "echonest" plugin: When communicating with the Echo Nest servers
  fails repeatedly, log an error instead of exiting. #1096

* Lyrics Plugin: Avoid an error when the Google source returns a
  result without a title. Thanks to Alberto Leal. #1097

* Importing an archive will no longer leave temporary files behind in
  "/tmp". Thanks to multikatt. #1067, #1091


1.3.8 (September 17, 2014)
==========================

This release has two big new chunks of functionality. Queries now
support **sorting** and user-defined fields can now have **types**.

If you want to see all your songs in reverse chronological order, just
type "beet list year-". It couldn't be easier. For details, see Sort
Order.

Flexible field types mean that some functionality that has previously
only worked for built-in fields, like range queries, can now work with
plugin- and user-defined fields too. For starters, the "echonest"
plugin and MPDStats Plugin now mark the types of the fields they
provide---so you can now say, for example, "beet ls liveness:0.5..1.5"
for the Echo Nest "liveness" attribute. The Types Plugin makes it easy
to specify field types in your config file.

One upgrade note: if you use the Discogs Plugin, you will need to
upgrade the Discogs client library to use this version. Just type "pip
install -U discogs-client".

Other new features:

* Info Plugin: Target files can now be specified through library
  queries (in addition to filenames). The "--library" option prints
  library fields instead of tags. Multiple files can be summarized
  together with the new "--summarize" option.

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: A new option lets you automatically
  update your collection on import. Thanks to Olin Gay.

* Convert Plugin: A new "never_convert_lossy_files" option can prevent
  lossy transcoding. Thanks to Simon Kohlmeyer.

* Convert Plugin: A new "--yes" command-line flag skips the
  confirmation.

Still more fixes and little improvements:

* Invalid state files don't crash the importer.

* Lyrics Plugin: Only strip featured artists and parenthesized title
  suffixes if no lyrics for the original artist and title were found.

* Fix a crash when reading some files with missing tags.

* Discogs Plugin: Compatibility with the new 2.0 version of the
  discogs_client Python library. If you were using the old version,
  you will need to upgrade to the latest version of the library to use
  the correspondingly new version of the plugin (e.g., with "pip
  install -U discogs-client"). Thanks to Andriy Kohut.

* Fix a crash when writing files that can't be read. Thanks to Jocelyn
  De La Rosa.

* The stats command now counts album artists. The album count also
  more accurately reflects the number of albums in the database.

* Convert Plugin: Avoid crashes when tags cannot be written to newly
  converted files.

* Formatting templates with item data no longer confusingly shows
  album-level data when the two are inconsistent.

* Resuming imports and beginning incremental imports should now be
  much faster when there is a lot of previously-imported music to
  skip.

* Lyrics Plugin: Remove "<script>" tags from scraped lyrics. Thanks to
  Bombardment.

* Play Plugin: Add a "relative_to" config option. Thanks to
  BrainDamage.

* Fix a crash when a MusicBrainz release has zero tracks.

* The "--version" flag now works as an alias for the "version"
  command.

* LastGenre Plugin: Remove some unhelpful genres from the default
  whitelist. Thanks to gwern.

* ImportFeeds Plugin: A new "echo" output mode prints files' paths to
  standard error. Thanks to robotanarchy.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Restore some error handling when "mp3gain" output
  cannot be parsed. The verbose log now contains the bad tool output
  in this case.

* Convert Plugin: Fix filename extensions when converting
  automatically.

* The "write" plugin event allows plugins to change the tags that are
  written to a media file.

* Zero Plugin: Do not delete database values; only media file tags are
  affected.


1.3.7 (August 22, 2014)
=======================

This release of beets fixes all the bugs, and you can be confident
that you will never again find any bugs in beets, ever. It also adds
support for plain old AIFF files and adds three more plugins,
including a nifty one that lets you measure a song's tempo by tapping
out the beat on your keyboard. The importer deals more elegantly with
duplicates and you can broaden your cover art search to the entire web
with Google Image Search.

The big new features are:

* Support for AIFF files. Tags are stored as ID3 frames in one of the
  file's IFF chunks. Thanks to Evan Purkhiser for contributing support
  to Mutagen.

* The new ImportAdded Plugin reads files' modification times to set
  their "added" date. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.

* The new BPM Plugin lets you manually measure the tempo of a playing
  song. Thanks to aroquen.

* The new Spotify Plugin generates playlists for your Spotify account.
  Thanks to Olin Gay.

* A new required configuration option for the importer skips matches
  that are missing certain data. Thanks to oprietop.

* When the importer detects duplicates, it now shows you some details
  about the potentially-replaced music so you can make an informed
  decision. Thanks to Howard Jones.

* FetchArt Plugin: You can now optionally search for cover art on
  Google Image Search. Thanks to Lemutar.

* A new asciify_paths configuration option replaces all non-ASCII
  characters in paths.

And the multitude of little improvements and fixes:

* Compatibility with the latest version of Mutagen, 1.23.

* Web Plugin: Lyrics now display readably with correct line breaks.
  Also, the detail view scrolls to reveal all of the lyrics. Thanks to
  Meet Udeshi.

* Play Plugin: The "command" config option can now contain arguments
  (rather than just an executable). Thanks to Alessandro Ghedini.

* Fix an error when using the modify command to remove a flexible
  attribute. Thanks to Pierre Rust.

* Info Plugin: The command now shows audio properties (e.g., bitrate)
  in addition to metadata. Thanks Alessandro Ghedini.

* Avoid a crash on Windows when writing to files with special
  characters in their names.

* Play Plugin: Playing albums now generates filenames by default (as
  opposed to directories) for better compatibility. The "use_folders"
  option restores the old behavior. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* Fix an error when importing an empty directory with the "--flat"
  option.

* MPDStats Plugin: The last song in a playlist is now correctly
  counted as played. Thanks to Johann Klähn.

* Zero Plugin: Prevent accidental nulling of dangerous fields (IDs and
  paths). Thanks to brunal.

* The remove command now shows the paths of files that will be
  deleted. Thanks again to brunal.

* Don't display changes for fields that are not in the restricted
  field set. This fixes write showing changes for fields that are not
  written to the file.

* The write command avoids displaying the item name if there are no
  changes for it.

* When using both the Convert Plugin and the Scrub Plugin, avoid
  scrubbing the source file of conversions. (Fix a regression
  introduced in the previous release.)

* ReplayGain Plugin: Logging is now quieter during import. Thanks to
  Yevgeny Bezman.

* FetchArt Plugin: When loading art from the filesystem, we now
  prioritize covers with more keywords in them. This means that
  "cover-front.jpg" will now be taken before "cover-back.jpg" because
  it contains two keywords rather than one. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* LastGenre Plugin: Remove duplicates from canonicalized genre lists.
  Thanks again to Fabrice Laporte.

* The importer now records its progress when skipping albums. This
  means that incremental imports will no longer try to import albums
  again after you've chosen to skip them, and erroneous invitations to
  resume "interrupted" imports should be reduced. Thanks to jcassette.

* Bucket Plugin: You can now customize the definition of alphanumeric
  "ranges" using regular expressions. And the heuristic for detecting
  years has been improved. Thanks to sotho.

* Already-imported singleton tracks are skipped when resuming an
  import.

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: A new "auto" configuration option
  disables fingerprinting on import. Thanks to ddettrittus.

* Convert Plugin: A new "--format" option to can select the
  transcoding preset from the command-line.

* Convert Plugin: Transcoding presets can now omit their filename
  extensions (extensions default to the name of the preset).

* Convert Plugin: A new "--pretend" option lets you preview the
  commands the plugin will execute without actually taking any action.
  Thanks to Dietrich Daroch.

* Fix a crash when a float-valued tag field only contained a "+" or
  "-" character.

* Fixed a regression in the core that caused the Scrub Plugin not to
  work in "auto" mode. Thanks to Harry Khanna.

* The write command now has a "--force" flag. Thanks again to Harry
  Khanna.

* MBSync Plugin: Track alignment now works with albums that have
  multiple copies of the same recording. Thanks to Rui Gonçalves.


1.3.6 (May 10, 2014)
====================

This is primarily a bugfix release, but it also brings two new
plugins: one for playing music in desktop players and another for
organizing your directories into "buckets." It also brings huge
performance optimizations to queries---your "beet ls" commands will
now go much faster.

New features:

* The new Play Plugin lets you start your desktop music player with
  the songs that match a query. Thanks to David Hamp-Gonsalves.

* The new Bucket Plugin provides a "%bucket{}" function for path
  formatting to generate folder names representing ranges of years or
  initial letter. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* Item and album queries are much faster.

* FtInTitle Plugin: A new option lets you remove featured artists
  entirely instead of moving them to the title. Thanks to SUTJael.

And those all-important bug fixes:

* MBSync Plugin: Fix a regression in 1.3.5 that broke the plugin
  entirely.

* Shell completion now searches more common paths for its
  "bash_completion" dependency.

* Fix encoding-related logging errors in Convert Plugin and ReplayGain
  Plugin.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Suppress a deprecation warning emitted by later
  versions of PyGI.

* Fix a crash when reading files whose iTunes SoundCheck tags contain
  non-ASCII characters.

* The "%if{}" template function now appropriately interprets the
  condition as false when it contains the string "false". Thanks to
  Ayberk Yilmaz.

* Convert Plugin: Fix conversion for files that include a video stream
  by ignoring it. Thanks to brunal.

* FetchArt Plugin: Log an error instead of crashing when tag
  manipulation fails.

* Convert Plugin: Log an error instead of crashing when embedding
  album art fails.

* Convert Plugin: Embed cover art into converted files. Previously
  they were embedded into the source files.

* New plugin event: *before_item_moved*. Thanks to Robert Speicher.


1.3.5 (April 15, 2014)
======================

This is a short-term release that adds some great new stuff to beets.
There's support for tracking and calculating musical keys, the
ReplayGain plugin was expanded to work with more music formats via
GStreamer, we can now import directly from compressed archives, and
the lyrics plugin is more robust.

One note for upgraders and packagers: this version of beets has a new
dependency in enum34, which is a backport of the new enum standard
library module.

The major new features are:

* Beets can now import *zip*, *tar*, and *rar* archives. Just type
  "beet import music.zip" to have beets transparently extract the
  files to import.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Added support for calculating ReplayGain values
  with GStreamer as well the mp3gain program. This enables ReplayGain
  calculation for any audio format. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.

* Lyrics Plugin: Lyrics should now be found for more songs. Searching
  is now sensitive to featured artists and parenthesized title
  suffixes. When a song has multiple titles, lyrics from all the named
  songs are now concatenated. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte and Paul
  Phillips.

In particular, a full complement of features for supporting musical
keys are new in this release:

* A new *initial_key* field is available in the database and files'
  tags. You can set the field manually using a command like "beet
  modify initial_key=Am".

* The "echonest" plugin sets the *initial_key* field if the data is
  available.

* A new Key Finder Plugin runs a command-line tool to get the key from
  audio data and store it in the *initial_key* field.

There are also many bug fixes and little enhancements:

* "echonest" plugin: Truncate files larger than 50MB before uploading
  for analysis.

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix a crash when the server does not specify a
  content type. Thanks to Lee Reinhardt.

* Convert Plugin: The "--keep-new" flag now works correctly and the
  library includes the converted item.

* The importer now logs a message instead of crashing when errors
  occur while opening the files to be imported.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Better error messages in exceptional conditions.

* Silenced some confusing error messages when searching for a non-
  MusicBrainz ID. Using an invalid ID (of any kind---Discogs IDs can
  be used there too) at the "Enter ID:" importer prompt now just
  silently returns no results. More info is in the verbose logs.

* MBSync Plugin: Fix application of album-level metadata. Due to a
  regression a few releases ago, only track-level metadata was being
  updated.

* On Windows, paths on network shares (UNC paths) no longer cause
  "invalid filename" errors.

* ReplayGain Plugin: Fix crashes when attempting to log errors.

* The modify command can now accept query arguments that contain =
  signs. An argument is considered a query part when a : appears
  before any =s. Thanks to mook.


1.3.4 (April 5, 2014)
=====================

This release brings a hodgepodge of medium-sized conveniences to
beets. A new config command manages your configuration, we now have
bash completion, and the modify command can delete attributes. There
are also some significant performance optimizations to the
autotagger's matching logic.

One note for upgraders: if you use the FetchArt Plugin, it has a new
dependency, the requests module.

New stuff:

* Added a config command to manage your configuration. It can show you
  what you currently have in your config file, point you at where the
  file should be, or launch your text editor to let you modify the
  file. Thanks to geigerzaehler.

* Beets now ships with a shell command completion script! See Shell
  Completion. Thanks to geigerzaehler.

* The modify command now allows removing flexible attributes. For
  example, "beet modify artist:beatles oldies!" deletes the "oldies"
  attribute from matching items. Thanks to brilnius.

* Internally, beets has laid the groundwork for supporting multi-
  valued fields. Thanks to geigerzaehler.

* The importer interface now shows the URL for MusicBrainz matches.
  Thanks to johtso.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Playlists can now be generated from multiple
  queries (combined with "or" logic). Album-level queries are also now
  possible and automatic playlist regeneration can now be disabled.
  Thanks to brilnius.

* "echonest" plugin: Echo Nest similarity now weights the tempo in
  better proportion to other metrics. Also, options were added to
  specify custom thresholds and output formats. Thanks to Adam M.

* Added the after_write plugin event.

* LastGenre Plugin: Separator in genre lists can now be configured.
  Thanks to brilnius.

* We now only use "primary" aliases for artist names from MusicBrainz.
  This eliminates some strange naming that could occur when the
  *languages* config option was set. Thanks to Filipe Fortes.

* The performance of the autotagger's matching mechanism is vastly
  improved. This should be noticeable when matching against very large
  releases such as box sets.

* The import command can now accept individual files as arguments even
  in non-singleton mode. Files are imported as one-track albums.

Fixes:

* Error messages involving paths no longer escape non-ASCII characters
  (for legibility).

* Fixed a regression that made it impossible to use the modify command
  to add new flexible fields. Thanks to brilnius.

* "echonest" plugin: Avoid crashing when the audio analysis fails.
  Thanks to Pedro Silva.

* Duplicates Plugin: Fix checksumming command execution for files with
  quotation marks in their names. Thanks again to Pedro Silva.

* Fix a crash when importing with both of the group_albums and
  incremental options enabled. Thanks to geigerzaehler.

* Give a sensible error message when "BEETSDIR" points to a file.
  Thanks again to geigerzaehler.

* Fix a crash when reading WMA files whose boolean-valued fields
  contain strings. Thanks to johtso.

* FetchArt Plugin: The plugin now sends "beets" as the User-Agent when
  making scraping requests. This helps resolve some blocked requests.
  The plugin now also depends on the requests Python library.

* The write command now only shows the changes to fields that will
  actually be written to a file.

* Duplicates Plugin: Spurious reports are now avoided for tracks with
  missing values (e.g., no MBIDs). Thanks to Pedro Silva.

* The default replace sanitation options now remove leading whitespace
  by default. Thanks to brilnius.

* ImportFeeds Plugin: Fix crash when importing albums containing "/"
  with the "m3u_multi" format.

* Avoid crashing on Mutagen bugs while writing files' tags.

* Convert Plugin: Display a useful error message when the FFmpeg
  executable can't be found.


1.3.3 (February 26, 2014)
=========================

Version 1.3.3 brings a bunch changes to how item and album fields work
internally. Along with laying the groundwork for some great things in
the future, this brings a number of improvements to how you interact
with beets. Here's what's new with fields in particular:

* Plugin-provided fields can now be used in queries. For example, if
  you use the Inline Plugin to define a field called "era", you can
  now filter your library based on that field by typing something like
  "beet list era:goldenage".

* Album-level flexible attributes and plugin-provided attributes can
  now be used in path formats (and other item-level templates).

* Date-based queries are now possible. Try getting every track you
  added in February 2014 with "beet ls added:2014-02" or in the whole
  decade with "added:2010..". Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.

* The modify command is now better at parsing and formatting fields.
  You can assign to boolean fields like "comp", for example, using
  either the words "true" or "false" or the numerals 1 and 0. Any
  boolean-esque value is normalized to a real boolean. The update and
  write commands also got smarter at formatting and colorizing
  changes.

For developers, the short version of the story is that Item and Album
objects provide *uniform access* across fixed, flexible, and computed
attributes. You can write "item.foo" to access the "foo" field without
worrying about where the data comes from.

Unrelated new stuff:

* The importer has a new interactive option (*G* for "Group albums"),
  command-line flag ("--group-albums"), and config option
  (group_albums) that lets you split apart albums that are mixed
  together in a single directory. Thanks to geigerzaehler.

* A new "--config" command-line option lets you specify an additional
  configuration file. This option *combines* config settings with your
  default config file. (As part of this change, the "BEETSDIR"
  environment variable no longer combines---it *replaces* your default
  config file.) Thanks again to geigerzaehler.

* IHate Plugin: The plugin's configuration interface was overhauled.
  Its configuration is now much simpler---it uses beets queries
  instead of an ad-hoc per-field configuration. This is *backwards-
  incompatible*---if you use this plugin, you will need to update your
  configuration. Thanks to BrainDamage.

Other little fixes:

* "echonest" plugin: Tempo (BPM) is now always stored as an integer.
  Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.

* Fix Python 2.6 compatibility in some logging statements in
  Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin and LastGenre Plugin.

* Prevent some crashes when things go really wrong when writing file
  metadata at the end of the import process.

* New plugin events: "item_removed" (thanks to Romuald Conty) and
  "item_copied" (thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen).

* The "pluginpath" config option can now point to the directory
  containing plugin code. (Previously, it awkwardly needed to point at
  a directory containing a "beetsplug" directory, which would then
  contain your code. This is preserved as an option for backwards
  compatibility.) This change should also work around a long-standing
  issue when using "pluginpath" when beets is installed using pip.
  Many thanks to geigerzaehler.

* Web Plugin: The "/item/" and "/album/" API endpoints now produce
  full details about albums and items, not just lists of IDs. Thanks
  to geigerzaehler.

* Fix a potential crash when using image resizing with the FetchArt
  Plugin or EmbedArt Plugin without ImageMagick installed.

* Also, when invoking "convert" for image resizing fails, we now log
  an error instead of crashing.

* FetchArt Plugin: The "beet fetchart" command can now associate local
  images with albums (unless "--force" is provided). Thanks to
  brilnius.

* FetchArt Plugin: Command output is now colorized. Thanks again to
  brilnius.

* The modify command avoids writing files and committing to the
  database when nothing has changed. Thanks once more to brilnius.

* The importer now uses the album artist field when guessing existing
  metadata for albums (rather than just the track artist field).
  Thanks to geigerzaehler.

* FromFilename Plugin: Fix a crash when a filename contained only a
  track number (e.g., "02.mp3").

* Convert Plugin: Transcoding should now work on Windows.

* Duplicates Plugin: The "move" and "copy" destination arguments are
  now treated as directories. Thanks to Pedro Silva.

* The modify command now skips confirmation and prints a message if no
  changes are necessary. Thanks to brilnius.

* FetchArt Plugin: When using the "remote_priority" config option,
  local image files are no longer completely ignored.

* "echonest" plugin: Fix an issue causing the plugin to appear twice
  in the output of the "beet version" command.

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix an occasional crash when no tag weight was
  returned by Last.fm.

* MPDStats Plugin: Restore the "last_played" field. Thanks to Johann
  Klähn.

* The modify command's output now clearly shows when a file has been
  deleted.

* Album art in files with Vorbis Comments is now marked with the
  "front cover" type. Thanks to Jason Lefley.


1.3.2 (December 22, 2013)
=========================

This update brings new plugins for fetching acoustic metrics and
listening statistics, many more options for the duplicate detection
plugin, and flexible options for fetching multiple genres.

The "core" of beets gained a new built-in command: beet write updates
the metadata tags for files, bringing them back into sync with your
database. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.

We added some plugins and overhauled some existing ones:

* The new "echonest" plugin plugin can fetch a wide range of acoustic
  attributes from The Echo Nest, including the "speechiness" and
  "liveness" of each track. The new plugin supersedes an older version
  ("echonest_tempo") that only fetched the BPM field. Thanks to Pedro
  Silva and Peter Schnebel.

* The Duplicates Plugin got a number of new features, thanks to Pedro
  Silva:

  * The "keys" option lets you specify the fields used detect
    duplicates.

  * You can now use checksumming (via an external command) to find
    duplicates instead of metadata via the "checksum" option.

  * The plugin can perform actions on the duplicates it find. The new
    "copy", "move", "delete", "delete_file", and "tag" options perform
    those actions.

* The new MPDStats Plugin collects statistics about your listening
  habits from MPD. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and Johann Klähn.

* LastGenre Plugin: The new "multiple" option has been replaced with
  the "count" option, which lets you limit the number of genres added
  to your music. (No more thousand-character genre fields!) Also, the
  "min_weight" field filters out nonsense tags to make your genres
  more relevant. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and rashley60.

* Lyrics Plugin: A new "--force" option optionally re-downloads lyrics
  even when files already have them. Thanks to Bitdemon.

As usual, there are also innumerable little fixes and improvements:

* When writing ID3 tags for ReplayGain normalization, tags are written
  with both upper-case and lower-case TXXX frame descriptions.
  Previous versions of beets used only the upper-case style, which
  seems to be more standard, but some players (namely, Quod Libet and
  foobar2000) seem to only use lower-case names.

* Missing Plugin: Avoid a possible error when an album's "tracktotal"
  field is missing.

* FtInTitle Plugin: Fix an error when the sort artist is missing.

* "echonest_tempo": The plugin should now match songs more reliably
  (i.e., fewer "no tempo found" messages). Thanks to Peter Schnebel.

* Convert Plugin: Fix an "Item has no library" error when using the
  "auto" config option.

* Convert Plugin: Fix an issue where files of the wrong format would
  have their transcoding skipped (and files with the right format
  would be needlessly transcoded). Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer.

* Fix an issue that caused the id3v23 option to work only
  occasionally.

* Also fix using id3v23 in conjunction with the "scrub" and "embedart"
  plugins. Thanks to Chris Cogburn.

* IHate Plugin: Fix an error when importing singletons. Thanks to
  Mathijs de Bruin.

* The clutter option can now be a whitespace-separated list in
  addition to a YAML list.

* Values for the replace option can now be empty (i.e., null is
  equivalent to the empty string).

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix a conflict between canonicalization and
  multiple genres.

* When a match has a year but not a month or day, the autotagger now
  "zeros out" the month and day fields after applying the year.

* For plugin developers: added an "optparse" callback utility function
  for performing actions based on arguments. Thanks to Pedro Silva.

* Scrub Plugin: Fix scrubbing of MPEG-4 files. Thanks to Yevgeny
  Bezman.


1.3.1 (October 12, 2013)
========================

This release boasts a host of new little features, many of them
contributed by beets' amazing and prolific community. It adds support
for Opus files, transcoding to any format, and two new plugins: one
that guesses metadata for "blank" files based on their filenames and
one that moves featured artists into the title field.

Here's the new stuff:

* Add Opus audio support. Thanks to Rowan Lewis.

* Convert Plugin: You can now transcode files to any audio format,
  rather than just MP3. Thanks again to Rowan Lewis.

* The new FromFilename Plugin guesses tags from the filenames during
  import when metadata tags themselves are missing. Thanks to Jan-Erik
  Dahlin.

* The FtInTitle Plugin, by @Verrus, is now distributed with beets. It
  helps you rewrite tags to move "featured" artists from the artist
  field to the title field.

* The MusicBrainz data source now uses track artists over recording
  artists. This leads to better metadata when tagging classical music.
  Thanks to Henrique Ferreiro.

* LastGenre Plugin: You can now get multiple genres per album or track
  using the "multiple" config option. Thanks to rashley60 on GitHub.

* A new id3v23 config option makes beets write MP3 files' tags using
  the older ID3v2.3 metadata standard. Use this if you want your tags
  to be visible to Windows and some older players.

And some fixes:

* FetchArt Plugin: Better error message when the image file has an
  unrecognized type.

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Detect, log, and skip invalid
  MusicBrainz IDs (instead of failing with an API error).

* Info Plugin: Fail gracefully when used erroneously with a directory.

* "echonest_tempo": Fix an issue where the plugin could use the tempo
  from the wrong song when the API did not contain the requested song.

* Fix a crash when a file's metadata included a very large number (one
  wider than 64 bits). These huge numbers are now replaced with zeroes
  in the database.

* When a track on a MusicBrainz release has a different length from
  the underlying recording's length, the track length is now used
  instead.

* With per_disc_numbering enabled, the "tracktotal" field is now set
  correctly (i.e., to the number of tracks on the disc).

* Scrub Plugin: The "scrub" command now restores album art in addition
  to other (database-backed) tags.

* MPDUpdate Plugin: Domain sockets can now begin with a tilde (which
  is correctly expanded to "$HOME") as well as a slash. Thanks to
  Johann Klähn.

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix a regression that could cause new genres found
  during import not to be persisted.

* Fixed a crash when imported album art was also marked as "clutter"
  where the art would be deleted before it could be moved into place.
  This led to a "image.jpg not found during copy" error. Now clutter
  is removed (and directories pruned) much later in the process, after
  the "import_task_files" hook.

* Missing Plugin: Fix an error when printing missing track names.
  Thanks to Pedro Silva.

* Fix an occasional KeyError in the update command introduced in
  1.3.0.

* Scrub Plugin: Avoid preserving certain non-standard ID3 tags such as
  NCON.


1.3.0 (September 11, 2013)
==========================

Albums and items now have **flexible attributes**. This means that,
when you want to store information about your music in the beets
database, you're no longer constrained to the set of fields it
supports out of the box (title, artist, track, etc.). Instead, you can
use any field name you can think of and treat it just like the built-
in fields.

For example, you can use the modify command to set a new field on a
track:

   $ beet modify mood=sexy artist:miguel

and then query your music based on that field:

   $ beet ls mood:sunny

or use templates to see the value of the field:

   $ beet ls -f '$title: $mood'

While this feature is nifty when used directly with the usual command-
line suspects, it's especially useful for plugin authors and for
future beets features. Stay tuned for great things built on this
flexible attribute infrastructure.

One side effect of this change: queries that include unknown fields
will now match *nothing* instead of *everything*. So if you type "beet
ls fieldThatDoesNotExist:foo", beets will now return no results,
whereas previous versions would spit out a warning and then list your
entire library.

There's more detail than you could ever need on the beets blog.


1.2.2 (August 27, 2013)
=======================

This is a bugfix release. We're in the midst of preparing for a large
change in beets 1.3, so 1.2.2 resolves some issues that came up over
the last few weeks. Stay tuned!

The improvements in this release are:

* A new plugin event, "item_moved", is sent when files are moved on
  disk. Thanks to dsedivec.

* Lyrics Plugin: More improvements to the Google backend by Fabrice
  Laporte.

* BPD Plugin: Fix for a crash when searching, thanks to Simon Chopin.

* Regular expression queries (and other query types) over paths now
  work. (Previously, special query types were ignored for the "path"
  field.)

* FetchArt Plugin: Look for images in the Cover Art Archive for the
  release group in addition to the specific release. Thanks to Filipe
  Fortes.

* Fix a race in the importer that could cause files to be deleted
  before they were imported. This happened when importing one album,
  importing a duplicate album, and then asking for the first album to
  be replaced with the second. The situation could only arise when
  importing music from the library directory and when the two albums
  are imported close in time.


1.2.1 (June 22, 2013)
=====================

This release introduces a major internal change in the way that
similarity scores are handled. It means that the importer interface
can now show you exactly why a match is assigned its score and that
the autotagger gained a few new options that let you customize how
matches are prioritized and recommended.

The refactoring work is due to the continued efforts of Tai Lee. The
changes you'll notice while using the autotagger are:

* The top 3 distance penalties are now displayed on the release
  listing, and all album and track penalties are now displayed on the
  track changes list. This should make it clear exactly which metadata
  is contributing to a low similarity score.

* When displaying differences, the colorization has been made more
  consistent and helpful: red for an actual difference, yellow to
  indicate that a distance penalty is being applied, and light gray
  for no penalty (e.g., case changes) or disambiguation data.

There are also three new (or overhauled) configuration options that
let you customize the way that matches are selected:

* The ignored setting lets you instruct the importer not to show you
  matches that have a certain penalty applied.

* The preferred collection of settings specifies a sorted list of
  preferred countries and media types, or prioritizes releases closest
  to the original year for an album.

* The max_rec settings can now be used for any distance penalty
  component. The recommendation will be downgraded if a non-zero
  penalty is being applied to the specified field.

And some little enhancements and bug fixes:

* Multi-disc directory names can now contain "disk" (in addition to
  "disc"). Thanks to John Hawthorn.

* Web Plugin: Item and album counts are now exposed through the API
  for use with the Tomahawk resolver. Thanks to Uwe L. Korn.

* Python 2.6 compatibility for "beatport", Missing Plugin, and
  Duplicates Plugin. Thanks to Wesley Bitter and Pedro Silva.

* Don't move the config file during a null migration. Thanks to
  Theofilos Intzoglou.

* Fix an occasional crash in the "beatport" when a length field was
  missing from the API response. Thanks to Timothy Appnel.

* Scrub Plugin: Handle and log I/O errors.

* Lyrics Plugin: The Google backend should now turn up more results.
  Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* Random Plugin: Fix compatibility with Python 2.6. Thanks to Matthias
  Drochner.


1.2.0 (June 5, 2013)
====================

There's a *lot* of new stuff in this release: new data sources for the
autotagger, new plugins to look for problems in your library, tracking
the date that you acquired new music, an awesome new syntax for doing
queries over numeric fields, support for ALAC files, and major
enhancements to the importer's UI and distance calculations. A special
thanks goes out to all the contributors who helped make this release
awesome.

For the first time, beets can now tag your music using additional
**data sources** to augment the matches from MusicBrainz. When you
enable either of these plugins, the importer will start showing you
new kinds of matches:

* New Discogs Plugin: Get matches from the Discogs database. Thanks to
  Artem Ponomarenko and Tai Lee.

* New "beatport" plugin: Get matches from the Beatport database.
  Thanks to Johannes Baiter.

We also have two other new plugins that can scan your library to check
for common problems, both by Pedro Silva:

* New Duplicates Plugin: Find tracks or albums in your library that
  are **duplicated**.

* New Missing Plugin: Find albums in your library that are **missing
  tracks**.

There are also three more big features added to beets core:

* Your library now keeps track of **when music was added** to it. The
  new "added" field is a timestamp reflecting when each item and album
  was imported and the new "%time{}" template function lets you format
  this timestamp for humans. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* When using queries to match on quantitative fields, you can now use
  **numeric ranges**. For example, you can get a list of albums from
  the '90s by typing "beet ls year:1990..1999" or find high-bitrate
  music with "bitrate:128000..". See Numeric Range Queries. Thanks to
  Michael Schuerig.

* **ALAC files** are now marked as ALAC instead of being conflated
  with AAC audio. Thanks to Simon Luijk.

In addition, the importer saw various UI enhancements, thanks to Tai
Lee:

* More consistent format and colorization of album and track metadata.

* Display data source URL for matches from the new data source
  plugins. This should make it easier to migrate data from Discogs or
  Beatport into MusicBrainz.

* Display album disambiguation and disc titles in the track listing,
  when available.

* Track changes are highlighted in yellow when they indicate a change
  in format to or from the style of per_disc_numbering. (As before, no
  penalty is applied because the track number is still "correct", just
  in a different format.)

* Sort missing and unmatched tracks by index and title and group them
  together for better readability.

* Indicate MusicBrainz ID mismatches.

The calculation of the similarity score for autotagger matches was
also improved, again thanks to Tai Lee. These changes, in general,
help deal with the new metadata sources and help disambiguate between
similar releases in the same MusicBrainz release group:

* Strongly prefer releases with a matching MusicBrainz album ID. This
  helps beets re-identify the same release when re-importing existing
  files.

* Prefer releases that are closest to the tagged "year". Tolerate
  files tagged with release or original year.

* The new "preferred_media" config option lets you prefer a certain
  media type when the "media" field is unset on an album.

* Apply minor penalties across a range of fields to differentiate
  between nearly identical releases: "disctotal", "label",
  "catalognum", "country" and "albumdisambig".

As usual, there were also lots of other great littler enhancements:

* Random Plugin: A new "-e" option gives an equal chance to each
  artist in your collection to avoid biasing random samples to
  prolific artists. Thanks to Georges Dubus.

* The modify now correctly converts types when modifying non-string
  fields. You can now safely modify the "comp" flag and the "year"
  field, for example. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* Convert Plugin: You can now configure the path formats for converted
  files separately from your main library. Thanks again to Lucas
  Duailibe.

* The importer output now shows the number of audio files in each
  album. Thanks to jayme on GitHub.

* Plugins can now provide fields for both Album and Item templates,
  thanks to Pedro Silva. Accordingly, the Inline Plugin can also now
  define album fields. For consistency, the "pathfields" configuration
  section has been renamed "item_fields" (although the old name will
  still work for compatibility).

* Plugins can also provide metadata matches for ID searches. For
  example, the new Discogs plugin lets you search for an album by its
  Discogs ID from the same prompt that previously just accepted
  MusicBrainz IDs. Thanks to Johannes Baiter.

* The fields command shows template fields provided by plugins. Thanks
  again to Pedro Silva.

* MPDUpdate Plugin: You can now communicate with MPD over a Unix
  domain socket. Thanks to John Hawthorn.

And a batch of fixes:

* Album art filenames now respect the replace configuration.

* Friendly error messages are now printed when trying to read or write
  files that go missing.

* The modify command can now change albums' album art paths (i.e.,
  "beet modify artpath=..." works). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* Zero Plugin: Fix a crash when nulling out a field that contains
  None.

* Templates can now refer to non-tag item fields (e.g., "$id" and
  "$album_id").

* Lyrics Plugin: Lyrics searches should now turn up more results due
  to some fixes in dealing with special characters.


1.1.0 (April 29, 2013)
======================

This final release of 1.1 brings a little polish to the betas that
introduced the new configuration system. The album art and lyrics
plugins also got a little love.

If you're upgrading from 1.0.0 or earlier, this release (like the 1.1
betas) will automatically migrate your configuration to the new
system.

* EmbedArt Plugin: The "embedart" command now embeds each album's
  associated art by default. The "--file" option invokes the old
  behavior, in which a specific image file is used.

* Lyrics Plugin: A new (optional) Google Custom Search backend was
  added for finding lyrics on a wide array of sites. Thanks to Fabrice
  Laporte.

* When automatically detecting the filesystem's maximum filename
  length, never guess more than 200 characters. This prevents errors
  on systems where the maximum length was misreported. You can, of
  course, override this default with the max_filename_length option.

* FetchArt Plugin: Two new configuration options were added:
  "cover_names", the list of keywords used to identify preferred
  images, and "cautious", which lets you avoid falling back to images
  that don't contain those keywords. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* Avoid some error cases in the "update" command and the "embedart"
  and "mbsync" plugins. Invalid or missing files now cause error logs
  instead of crashing beets. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* Lyrics Plugin: Searches now strip "featuring" artists when searching
  for lyrics, which should increase the hit rate for these tracks.
  Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* When listing the items in an album, the items are now always in
  track-number order. This should lead to more predictable listings
  from the ImportFeeds Plugin.

* Smart Playlist Plugin: Queries are now split using shell-like syntax
  instead of just whitespace, so you can now construct terms that
  contain spaces.

* LastGenre Plugin: The "force" config option now defaults to true and
  controls the behavior of the import hook. (Previously, new genres
  were always forced during import.)

* Web Plugin: Fix an error when specifying the hostname on the command
  line.

* Web Plugin: The underlying API was expanded slightly to support
  Tomahawk collections. And file transfers now have a "Content-Length"
  header. Thanks to Uwe L. Korn.

* LastGenre Plugin: Fix an error when using genre canonicalization.


1.1b3 (March 16, 2013)
======================

This third beta of beets 1.1 brings a hodgepodge of little new
features (and internal overhauls that will make improvements easier in
the future). There are new options for getting metadata in a
particular language and seeing more detail during the import process.
There's also a new plugin for synchronizing your metadata with
MusicBrainz. Under the hood, plugins can now extend the query syntax.

New configuration options:

* languages controls the preferred languages when selecting an alias
  from MusicBrainz. This feature requires python-musicbrainzngs 0.3 or
  later. Thanks to Sam Doshi.

* detail enables a mode where all tracks are listed in the importer
  UI, as opposed to only changed tracks.

* The "--flat" option to the "beet import" command treats an entire
  directory tree of music files as a single album. This can help in
  situations where a multi-disc album is split across multiple
  directories.

* ImportFeeds Plugin: An option was added to use absolute, rather than
  relative, paths. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

Other stuff:

* A new MBSync Plugin provides a command that looks up each item and
  track in MusicBrainz and updates your library to reflect it. This
  can help you easily correct errors that have been fixed in the MB
  database. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer.

* Fuzzy Search Plugin: The "fuzzy" command was removed and replaced
  with a new query type. To perform fuzzy searches, use the "~" prefix
  with list or other commands. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.

* As part of the above, plugins can now extend the query syntax and
  new kinds of matching capabilities to beets. See Extend the Query
  Syntax. Thanks again to Philippe Mongeau.

* Convert Plugin: A new "--keep-new" option lets you store transcoded
  files in your library while backing up the originals (instead of
  vice-versa). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* Convert Plugin: Also, a new "auto" config option will transcode
  audio files automatically during import. Thanks again to Lucas
  Duailibe.

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: A new "fingerprint" command lets you
  generate and store fingerprints for items that don't yet have them.
  One more round of applause for Lucas Duailibe.

* "echonest_tempo": API errors now issue a warning instead of exiting
  with an exception. We also avoid an error when track metadata
  contains newlines.

* When the importer encounters an error (insufficient permissions, for
  example) when walking a directory tree, it now logs an error instead
  of crashing.

* In path formats, null database values now expand to the empty string
  instead of the string "None".

* Add "System Volume Information" (an internal directory found on some
  Windows filesystems) to the default ignore list.

* Fix a crash when ReplayGain values were set to null.

* Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data.

* Fix an error when the configuration file ("config.yaml") is
  completely empty.

* Fix an error introduced in 1.1b1 when importing using timid mode.
  Thanks to Sam Doshi.

* Convert Plugin: Fix a bug when creating files with Unicode
  pathnames.

* Fix a spurious warning from the Unidecode module when matching
  albums that are missing all metadata.

* Fix Unicode errors when a directory or file doesn't exist when
  invoking the import command. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Show friendly, human-readable errors
  when MusicBrainz exceptions occur.

* "echonest_tempo": Catch socket errors that are not handled by the
  Echo Nest library.

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Catch Acoustid Web service errors when
  submitting fingerprints.


1.1b2 (February 16, 2013)
=========================

The second beta of beets 1.1 uses the fancy new configuration
infrastructure to add many, many new config options. The import
process is more flexible; filenames can be customized in more detail;
and more. This release also supports Windows Media (ASF) files and
iTunes Sound Check volume normalization.

This version introduces one **change to the default behavior** that
you should be aware of. Previously, when importing new albums matched
in MusicBrainz, the date fields ("year", "month", and "day") would be
set to the release date of the *original* version of the album, as
opposed to the specific date of the release selected. Now, these
fields reflect the specific release and "original_year", etc., reflect
the earlier release date. If you want the old behavior, just set
original_date to true in your config file.

New configuration options:

* default_action lets you determine the default (just-hit-return)
  option is when considering a candidate.

* none_rec_action lets you skip the prompt, and automatically choose
  an action, when there is no good candidate. Thanks to Tai Lee.

* max_rec lets you define a maximum recommendation for albums with
  missing/extra tracks or differing track lengths/numbers. Thanks
  again to Tai Lee.

* original_date determines whether, when importing new albums, the
  "year", "month", and "day" fields should reflect the specific (e.g.,
  reissue) release date or the original release date. Note that the
  original release date is always available as "original_year", etc.

* clutter controls which files should be ignored when cleaning up
  empty directories. Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson.

* LastGenre Plugin: A new configuration option lets you choose to
  retrieve artist-level tags as genres instead of album- or track-
  level tags. Thanks to Peter Fern and Peter Schnebel.

* max_filename_length controls truncation of long filenames. Also,
  beets now tries to determine the filesystem's maximum length
  automatically if you leave this option unset.

* FetchArt Plugin: The "remote_priority" option searches remote (Web)
  art sources even when local art is present.

* You can now customize the character substituted for path separators
  (e.g., /) in filenames via "path_sep_replace". The default is an
  underscore. Use this setting with caution.

Other new stuff:

* Support for Windows Media/ASF audio files. Thanks to Dave Hayes.

* New Smart Playlist Plugin: generate and maintain m3u playlist files
  based on beets queries. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.

* ReplayGain tags on MPEG-4/AAC files are now supported. And, even
  more astonishingly, ReplayGain values in MP3 and AAC files are now
  compatible with iTunes Sound Check. Thanks to Dave Hayes.

* Track titles in the importer UI's difference display are now either
  aligned vertically or broken across two lines for readability.
  Thanks to Tai Lee.

* Albums and items have new fields reflecting the *original* release
  date ("original_year", "original_month", and "original_day").
  Previously, when tagging from MusicBrainz, *only* the original date
  was stored; now, the old fields refer to the *specific* release date
  (e.g., when the album was reissued).

* Some changes to the way candidates are recommended for selection,
  thanks to Tai Lee:

  * According to the new max_rec configuration option, partial album
    matches are downgraded to a "low" recommendation by default.

  * When a match isn't great but is either better than all the others
    or the only match, it is given a "low" (rather than "medium")
    recommendation.

  * There is no prompt default (i.e., input is required) when matches
    are bad: "low" or "none" recommendations or when choosing a
    candidate other than the first.

* The importer's heuristic for coalescing the directories in a multi-
  disc album has been improved. It can now detect when two directories
  alongside each other share a similar prefix but a different number
  (e.g., "Album Disc 1" and "Album Disc 2") even when they are not
  alone in a common parent directory. Thanks once again to Tai Lee.

* Album listings in the importer UI now show the release medium (CD,
  Vinyl, 3xCD, etc.) as well as the disambiguation string. Thanks to
  Peter Schnebel.

* LastGenre Plugin: The plugin can now get different genres for
  individual tracks on an album. Thanks to Peter Schnebel.

* When getting data from MusicBrainz, the album disambiguation string
  ("albumdisambig") now reflects both the release and the release
  group.

* MPDUpdate Plugin: Sends an update message whenever *anything* in the
  database changes---not just when importing. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.

* When the importer UI shows a difference in track numbers or
  durations, they are now colorized based on the *suffixes* that
  differ. For example, when showing the difference between 2:01 and
  2:09, only the last digit will be highlighted.

* The importer UI no longer shows a change when the track length
  difference is less than 10 seconds. (This threshold was previously 2
  seconds.)

* Two new plugin events were added: *database_change* and *cli_exit*.
  Thanks again to Dang Mai Hai.

* Plugins are now loaded in the order they appear in the config file.
  Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.

* BPD Plugin: Browse by album artist and album artist sort name.
  Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson.

* "echonest_tempo": Don't attempt a lookup when the artist or track
  title is missing.

* Fix an error when migrating the ".beetsstate" file on Windows.

* A nicer error message is now given when the configuration file
  contains tabs. (YAML doesn't like tabs.)

* Fix the "-l" (log path) command-line option for the "import"
  command.


1.1b1 (January 29, 2013)
========================

This release entirely revamps beets' configuration system. The
configuration file is now a YAML document and is located, along with
other support files, in a common directory (e.g., "~/.config/beets" on
Unix-like systems).

* Renamed plugins: The "rdm" plugin has been renamed to "random" and
  "fuzzy_search" has been renamed to "fuzzy".

* Renamed config options: Many plugins have a flag dictating whether
  their action runs at import time. This option had many names
  ("autofetch", "autoembed", etc.) but is now consistently called
  "auto".

* Reorganized import config options: The various "import_*" options
  are now organized under an "import:" heading and their prefixes have
  been removed.

* New default file locations: The default filename of the library
  database is now "library.db" in the same directory as the config
  file, as opposed to "~/.beetsmusic.blb" previously. Similarly, the
  runtime state file is now called "state.pickle" in the same
  directory instead of "~/.beetsstate".

It also adds some new features:

* Inline Plugin: Inline definitions can now contain statements or
  blocks in addition to just expressions. Thanks to Florent Thoumie.

* Add a configuration option, terminal_encoding, controlling the text
  encoding used to print messages to standard output.

* The MusicBrainz hostname (and rate limiting) are now configurable.
  See MusicBrainz Options.

* You can now configure the similarity thresholds used to determine
  when the autotagger automatically accepts a metadata match. See
  Autotagger Matching Options.

* ImportFeeds Plugin: Added a new configuration option that controls
  the base for relative paths used in m3u files. Thanks to Philippe
  Mongeau.


1.0.0 (January 29, 2013)
========================

After fifteen betas and two release candidates, beets has finally hit
one-point-oh. Congratulations to everybody involved. This version of
beets will remain stable and receive only bug fixes from here on out.
New development is ongoing in the betas of version 1.1.

* Scrub Plugin: Fix an incompatibility with Python 2.6.

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix an issue that failed to find lyrics when metadata
  contained "real" apostrophes.

* ReplayGain Plugin: On Windows, emit a warning instead of crashing
  when analyzing non-ASCII filenames.

* Silence a spurious warning from version 0.04.12 of the Unidecode
  module.


1.0rc2 (December 31, 2012)
==========================

This second release candidate follows quickly after rc1 and fixes a
few small bugs found since that release. There were a couple of
regressions and some bugs in a newly added plugin.

* "echonest_tempo": If the Echo Nest API limit is exceeded or a
  communication error occurs, the plugin now waits and tries again
  instead of crashing. Thanks to Zach Denton.

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix a regression that caused crashes when art was
  not available from some sources.

* Fix a regression on Windows that caused all relative paths to be
  "not found".


1.0rc1 (December 17, 2012)
==========================

The first release candidate for beets 1.0 includes a deluge of new
features contributed by beets users. The vast majority of the credit
for this release goes to the growing and vibrant beets community. A
million thanks to everybody who contributed to this release.

There are new plugins for transcoding music, fuzzy searches, tempo
collection, and fiddling with metadata. The ReplayGain plugin has been
rebuilt from scratch. Album art images can now be resized
automatically. Many other smaller refinements make things "just work"
as smoothly as possible.

With this release candidate, beets 1.0 is feature-complete. We'll be
fixing bugs on the road to 1.0 but no new features will be added.
Concurrently, work begins today on features for version 1.1.

* New plugin: Convert Plugin **transcodes** music and embeds album art
  while copying to a separate directory. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer and
  Andrew G. Dunn.

* New plugin: Fuzzy Search Plugin lets you find albums and tracks
  using **fuzzy string matching** so you don't have to type (or even
  remember) their exact names. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.

* New plugin: "echonest_tempo" fetches **tempo** (BPM) information
  from The Echo Nest. Thanks to David Brenner.

* New plugin: The Plugin adds a template function that helps format
  text for nicely-sorted directory listings. Thanks to Blemjhoo
  Tezoulbr.

* New plugin: Zero Plugin **filters out undesirable fields** before
  they are written to your tags. Thanks again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.

* New plugin: IHate Plugin automatically skips (or warns you about)
  importing albums that match certain criteria. Thanks once again to
  Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.

* ReplayGain Plugin: This plugin has been completely overhauled to use
  the mp3gain or aacgain command-line tools instead of the failure-
  prone Gstreamer ReplayGain implementation. Thanks to Fabrice
  Laporte.

* FetchArt Plugin and EmbedArt Plugin: Both plugins can now **resize
  album art** to avoid excessively large images. Use the "maxwidth"
  config option with either plugin. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* Scrub Plugin: Scrubbing now removes *all* types of tags from a file
  rather than just one. For example, if your FLAC file has both
  ordinary FLAC tags and ID3 tags, the ID3 tags are now also removed.

* stats command: New "--exact" switch to make the file size
  calculation more accurate (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).

* list command: Templates given with "-f" can now show items' and
  albums' paths (using "$path").

* The output of the update, remove, and modify commands now respects
  the format_album and format_item config options. Thanks to Mike
  Kazantsev.

* The art_filename option can now be a template rather than a simple
  string. Thanks to Jarrod Beardwood.

* Fix album queries for "artpath" and other non-item fields.

* Null values in the database can now be matched with the empty-string
  regular expression, "^$".

* Queries now correctly match non-string values in path format
  predicates.

* When autotagging a various-artists album, the album artist field is
  now used instead of the majority track artist.

* LastGenre Plugin: Use the albums' existing genre tags if they pass
  the whitelist (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).

* LastGenre Plugin: Add a "lastgenre" command for fetching genres post
  facto (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).

* FetchArt Plugin: Local image filenames are now used in alphabetical
  order.

* FetchArt Plugin: Fix a bug where cover art filenames could lack a
  ".jpg" extension.

* Lyrics Plugin: Fix an exception with non-ASCII lyrics.

* Web Plugin: The API now reports file sizes (for use with the
  Tomahawk resolver).

* Web Plugin: Files now download with a reasonable filename rather
  than just being called "file" (thanks to Zach Denton).

* ImportFeeds Plugin: Fix error in symlink mode with non-ASCII
  filenames.

* MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Fix an error when submitting a large
  number of releases (we now submit only 200 releases at a time
  instead of 350). Thanks to Jonathan Towne.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Made the method for embedding art into FLAC files
  standard-compliant. Thanks to Daniele Sluijters.

* Add the track mapping dictionary to the "album_distance" plugin
  function.

* When an exception is raised while reading a file, the path of the
  file in question is now logged (thanks to Mike Kazantsev).

* Truncate long filenames based on their *bytes* rather than their
  Unicode *characters*, fixing situations where encoded names could be
  too long.

* Filename truncation now incorporates the length of the extension.

* Fix an assertion failure when the MusicBrainz main database and
  search server disagree.

* Fix a bug that caused the LastGenre Plugin and other plugins not to
  modify files' tags even when they successfully change the database.

* Fix a VFS bug leading to a crash in the BPD Plugin when files had
  non-ASCII extensions.

* Fix for changing date fields (like "year") with the modify command.

* Fix a crash when input is read from a pipe without a specified
  encoding.

* Fix some problem with identifying files on Windows with Unicode
  directory names in their path.

* Fix a crash when Unicode queries were used with "import -L" re-
  imports.

* Fix an error when fingerprinting files with Unicode filenames on
  Windows.

* Warn instead of crashing when importing a specific file in singleton
  mode.

* Add human-readable error messages when writing files' tags fails or
  when a directory can't be created.

* Changed plugin loading so that modules can be imported without
  unintentionally loading the plugins they contain.


1.0b15 (July 26, 2012)
======================

The fifteenth (!) beta of beets is compendium of small fixes and
features, most of which represent long-standing requests. The
improvements include matching albums with extra tracks, per-disc track
numbering in multi-disc albums, an overhaul of the album art
downloader, and robustness enhancements that should keep beets running
even when things go wrong. All these smaller changes should help us
focus on some larger changes coming before 1.0.

Please note that this release contains one backwards-incompatible
change: album art fetching, which was previously baked into the import
workflow, is now encapsulated in a plugin (the FetchArt Plugin). If
you want to continue fetching cover art for your music, enable this
plugin after upgrading to beets 1.0b15.

* The autotagger can now find matches for albums when you have **extra
  tracks** on your filesystem that aren't present in the MusicBrainz
  catalog. Previously, if you tried to match album with 15 audio files
  but the MusicBrainz entry had only 14 tracks, beets would ignore
  this match. Now, beets will show you matches even when they are "too
  short" and indicate which tracks from your disk are unmatched.

* Tracks on multi-disc albums can now be **numbered per-disc** instead
  of per-album via the per_disc_numbering config option.

* The default output format for the "beet list" command is now
  configurable via the format_item and format_album config options.
  Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.

* Album **cover art fetching** is now encapsulated in the FetchArt
  Plugin. Be sure to enable this plugin if you're using this
  functionality. As a result of this new organization, the new plugin
  has gained a few new features:

  * "As-is" and non-autotagged imports can now have album art imported
    from the local filesystem (although Web repositories are still not
    searched in these cases).

  * A new command, "beet fetchart", allows you to download album art
    post-import. If you only want to fetch art manually, not
    automatically during import, set the new plugin's "autofetch"
    option to "no".

  * New album art sources have been added.

* Errors when communicating with MusicBrainz now log an error message
  instead of halting the importer.

* Similarly, filesystem manipulation errors now print helpful error
  messages instead of a messy traceback. They still interrupt beets,
  but they should now be easier for users to understand. Tracebacks
  are still available in verbose mode.

* New metadata fields for artist credits: "artist_credit" and
  "albumartist_credit" can now contain release- and recording-specific
  variations of the artist's name. See Available Values.

* Revamped the way beets handles concurrent database access to avoid
  nondeterministic SQLite-related crashes when using the multithreaded
  importer. On systems where SQLite was compiled without "usleep(3)"
  support, multithreaded database access could cause an internal error
  (with the message "database is locked"). This release synchronizes
  access to the database to avoid internal SQLite contention, which
  should avoid this error.

* Plugins can now add parallel stages to the import pipeline. See
  Writing Plugins.

* Beets now prints out an error when you use an unrecognized field
  name in a query: for example, when running "beet ls -a artist:foo"
  (because "artist" is an item-level field).

* New plugin events:

  * "import_task_choice" is called after an import task has an action
    assigned.

  * "import_task_files" is called after a task's file manipulation has
    finished (copying or moving files, writing metadata tags).

  * "library_opened" is called when beets starts up and opens the
    library database.

* LastGenre Plugin: Fixed a problem where path formats containing
  "$genre" would use the old genre instead of the newly discovered
  one.

* Fix a crash when moving files to a Samba share.

* MPDUpdate Plugin: Fix TypeError crash (thanks to Philippe Mongeau).

* When re-importing files with "import_copy" enabled, only files
  inside the library directory are moved. Files outside the library
  directory are still copied. This solves a problem (introduced in
  1.0b14) where beets could crash after adding files to the library
  but before finishing copying them; during the next import, the
  (external) files would be moved instead of copied.

* Artist sort names are now populated correctly for multi-artist
  tracks and releases. (Previously, they only reflected the first
  artist.)

* When previewing changes during import, differences in track duration
  are now shown as "2:50 vs. 3:10" rather than separated with "->"
  like track numbers. This should clarify that beets isn't doing
  anything to modify lengths.

* Fix a problem with query-based path format matching where a field-
  qualified pattern, like "albumtype_soundtrack", would match
  everything.

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix matching with ambiguous Acoustids.
  Some Acoustids are identified with multiple recordings; beets now
  considers any associated recording a valid match. This should reduce
  some cases of errant track reordering when using chroma.

* Fix the ID3 tag name for the catalog number field.

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix occasional crash at end of
  fingerprint submission and give more context to "failed fingerprint
  generation" errors.

* Interactive prompts are sent to stdout instead of stderr.

* EmbedArt Plugin: Fix crash when audio files are unreadable.

* BPD Plugin: Fix crash when sockets disconnect (thanks to Matteo
  Mecucci).

* Fix an assertion failure while importing with moving enabled when
  the file was already at its destination.

* Fix Unicode values in the "replace" config option (thanks to Jakob
  Borg).

* Use a nicer error message when input is requested but stdin is
  closed.

* Fix errors on Windows for certain Unicode characters that can't be
  represented in the MBCS encoding. This required a change to the way
  that paths are represented in the database on Windows; if you find
  that beets' paths are out of sync with your filesystem with this
  release, delete and recreate your database with "beet import -AWC
  /path/to/music".

* Fix "import" with relative path arguments on Windows.


1.0b14 (May 12, 2012)
=====================

The centerpiece of this beets release is the graceful handling of
similarly-named albums. It's now possible to import two albums with
the same artist and title and to keep them from conflicting in the
filesystem. Many other awesome new features were contributed by the
beets community, including regular expression queries, artist sort
names, moving files on import. There are three new plugins: random
song/album selection; MusicBrainz "collection" integration; and a
plugin for interoperability with other music library systems.

A million thanks to the (growing) beets community for making this a
huge release.

* The importer now gives you **choices when duplicates are detected**.
  Previously, when beets found an existing album or item in your
  library matching the metadata on a newly-imported one, it would just
  skip the new music to avoid introducing duplicates into your
  library. Now, you have three choices: skip the new music (the
  previous behavior), keep both, or remove the old music. See the
  Duplicates section in the autotagging guide for details.

* Beets can now avoid storing identically-named albums in the same
  directory. The new "%aunique{}" template function, which is included
  in the default path formats, ensures that Crystal Castles' albums
  will be placed into different directories. See Album Disambiguation
  for details.

* Beets queries can now use **regular expressions**. Use an additional
  ":" in your query to enable regex matching. See Regular Expressions
  for the full details. Thanks to Matteo Mecucci.

* Artist **sort names** are now fetched from MusicBrainz. There are
  two new data fields, "artist_sort" and "albumartist_sort", that
  contain sortable artist names like "Beatles, The". These fields are
  also used to sort albums and items when using the "list" command.
  Thanks to Paul Provost.

* Many other **new metadata fields** were added, including ASIN, label
  catalog number, disc title, encoder, and MusicBrainz release group
  ID. For a full list of fields, see Available Values.

* Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: A new command, "beet submit", will
  **submit fingerprints** to the Acoustid database. Submitting your
  library helps increase the coverage and accuracy of Acoustid
  fingerprinting. The Chromaprint fingerprint and Acoustid ID are also
  now stored for all fingerprinted tracks. This version of beets
  *requires* at least version 0.6 of pyacoustid for fingerprinting to
  work.

* The importer can now **move files**. Previously, beets could only
  copy files and delete the originals, which is inefficient if the
  source and destination are on the same filesystem. Use the
  "import_move" configuration option and see Configuration for more
  details. Thanks to Domen Kožar.

* New Random Plugin: Randomly select albums and tracks from your
  library. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.

* The MusicBrainz Collection Plugin by Jeffrey Aylesworth was added to
  the core beets distribution.

* New ImportFeeds Plugin: Catalog imported files in "m3u" playlist
  files or as symlinks for easy importing to other systems. Thanks to
  Fabrice Laporte.

* The "-f" (output format) option to the "beet list" command can now
  contain template functions as well as field references. Thanks to
  Steve Dougherty.

* A new command "beet fields" displays the available metadata fields
  (thanks to Matteo Mecucci).

* The "import" command now has a "--noincremental" or "-I" flag to
  disable incremental imports (thanks to Matteo Mecucci).

* When the autotagger fails to find a match, it now displays the
  number of tracks on the album (to help you guess what might be going
  wrong) and a link to the FAQ.

* The default filename character substitutions were changed to be more
  conservative. The Windows "reserved characters" are substituted by
  default even on Unix platforms (this causes less surprise when using
  Samba shares to store music). To customize your character
  substitutions, see the replace config option.

* LastGenre Plugin: Added a "fallback" option when no suitable genre
  can be found (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).

* Rewrite Plugin: Unicode rewriting rules are now allowed (thanks to
  Nicolas Dietrich).

* Filename collisions are now avoided when moving album art.

* BPD Plugin: Print messages to show when directory tree is being
  constructed.

* BPD Plugin: Use Gstreamer's "playbin2" element instead of the
  deprecated "playbin".

* BPD Plugin: Random and repeat modes are now supported (thanks to
  Matteo Mecucci).

* BPD Plugin: Listings are now sorted (thanks once again to Matteo
  Mecucci).

* Filenames are normalized with Unicode Normal Form D (NFD) on Mac OS
  X and NFC on all other platforms.

* Significant internal restructuring to avoid SQLite locking errors.
  As part of these changes, the not-very-useful "save" plugin event
  has been removed.


1.0b13 (March 16, 2012)
=======================

Beets 1.0b13 consists of a plethora of small but important fixes and
refinements. A lyrics plugin is now included with beets; new audio
properties are catalogged; the "list" command has been made more
powerful; the autotagger is more tolerant of different tagging styles;
and importing with original file deletion now cleans up after itself
more thoroughly. Many, many bugs—including several crashers—were
fixed. This release lays the foundation for more features to come in
the next couple of releases.

* The Lyrics Plugin, originally by Peter Brunner, is revamped and
  included with beets, making it easy to fetch **song lyrics**.

* Items now expose their audio **sample rate**, number of
  **channels**, and **bits per sample** (bitdepth). See Path Formats
  for a list of all available audio properties. Thanks to Andrew Dunn.

* The "beet list" command now accepts a "format" argument that lets
  you **show specific information about each album or track**. For
  example, run "beet ls -af '$album: $tracktotal' beatles" to see how
  long each Beatles album is. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.

* The autotagger now tolerates tracks on multi-disc albums that are
  numbered per-disc. For example, if track 24 on a release is the
  first track on the second disc, then it is not penalized for having
  its track number set to 1 instead of 24.

* The autotagger sets the disc number and disc total fields on
  autotagged albums.

* The autotagger now also tolerates tracks whose track artists tags
  are set to "Various Artists".

* Terminal colors are now supported on Windows via Colorama (thanks to
  Karl).

* When previewing metadata differences, the importer now shows
  discrepancies in track length.

* Importing with "import_delete" enabled now cleans up empty
  directories that contained deleting imported music files.

* Similarly, "import_delete" now causes original album art imported
  from the disk to be deleted.

* Plugin-supplied template values, such as those created by "rewrite",
  are now properly sanitized (for example, "AC/DC" properly becomes
  "AC_DC").

* Filename extensions are now always lower-cased when copying and
  moving files.

* The "inline" plugin now prints a more comprehensible error when
  exceptions occur in Python snippets.

* The "replace" configuration option can now remove characters
  entirely (in addition to replacing them) if the special string
  "<strip>" is specified as the replacement.

* New plugin API: plugins can now add fields to the MediaFile tag
  abstraction layer. See Writing Plugins.

* A reasonable error message is now shown when the import log file
  cannot be opened.

* The import log file is now flushed and closed properly so that it
  can be used to monitor import progress, even when the import
  crashes.

* Duplicate track matches are no longer shown when autotagging
  singletons.

* The "chroma" plugin now logs errors when fingerprinting fails.

* The "lastgenre" plugin suppresses more errors when dealing with the
  Last.fm API.

* Fix a bug in the "rewrite" plugin that broke the use of multiple
  rules for a single field.

* Fix a crash with non-ASCII characters in bytestring metadata fields
  (e.g., MusicBrainz IDs).

* Fix another crash with non-ASCII characters in the configuration
  paths.

* Fix a divide-by-zero crash on zero-length audio files.

* Fix a crash in the "chroma" plugin when the Acoustid database had no
  recording associated with a fingerprint.

* Fix a crash when an autotagging with an artist or album containing
  "AND" or "OR" (upper case).

* Fix an error in the "rewrite" and "inline" plugins when the
  corresponding config sections did not exist.

* Fix bitrate estimation for AAC files whose headers are missing the
  relevant data.

* Fix the "list" command in BPD (thanks to Simon Chopin).


1.0b12 (January 16, 2012)
=========================

This release focuses on making beets' path formatting vastly more
powerful. It adds a function syntax for transforming text. Via a new
plugin, arbitrary Python code can also be used to define new path
format fields. Each path format template can now be activated
conditionally based on a query. Character set substitutions are also
now configurable.

In addition, beets avoids problematic filename conflicts by appending
numbers to filenames that would otherwise conflict. Three new plugins
("inline", "scrub", and "rewrite") are included in this release.

* **Functions in path formats** provide a simple way to write complex
  file naming rules: for example, "%upper{%left{$artist,1}}" will
  insert the capitalized first letter of the track's artist. For more
  details, see Path Formats. If you're interested in adding your own
  template functions via a plugin, see Writing Plugins.

* Plugins can also now define new path *fields* in addition to
  functions.

* The new Inline Plugin lets you **use Python expressions to customize
  path formats** by defining new fields in the config file.

* The configuration can **condition path formats based on queries**.
  That is, you can write a path format that is only used if an item
  matches a given query. (This supersedes the earlier functionality
  that only allowed conditioning on album type; if you used this
  feature in a previous version, you will need to replace, for
  example, "soundtrack:" with "albumtype_soundtrack:".) See Path
  Format Configuration.

* **Filename substitutions are now configurable** via the "replace"
  config value. You can choose which characters you think should be
  allowed in your directory and music file names.  See Configuration.

* Beets now ensures that files have **unique filenames** by appending
  a number to any filename that would otherwise conflict with an
  existing file.

* The new Scrub Plugin can remove extraneous metadata either manually
  or automatically.

* The new Rewrite Plugin can canonicalize names for path formats.

* The autotagging heuristics have been tweaked in situations where the
  MusicBrainz database did not contain track lengths. Previously,
  beets penalized matches where this was the case, leading to
  situations where seemingly good matches would have poor similarity.
  This penalty has been removed.

* Fix an incompatibility in BPD with libmpc (the library that powers
  mpc and ncmpc).

* Fix a crash when importing a partial match whose first track was
  missing.

* The "lastgenre" plugin now correctly writes discovered genres to
  imported files (when tag-writing is enabled).

* Add a message when skipping directories during an incremental
  import.

* The default ignore settings now ignore all files beginning with a
  dot.

* Date values in path formats ("$year", "$month", and "$day") are now
  appropriately zero-padded.

* Removed the "--path-format" global flag for "beet".

* Removed the "lastid" plugin, which was deprecated in the previous
  version.


1.0b11 (December 12, 2011)
==========================

This version of beets focuses on transitioning the autotagger to the
new version of the MusicBrainz database (called NGS). This transition
brings with it a number of long-overdue improvements: most notably,
predictable behavior when tagging multi-disc albums and integration
with the new Acoustid acoustic fingerprinting technology.

The importer can also now tag *incomplete* albums when you're missing
a few tracks from a given release. Two other new plugins are also
included with this release: one for assigning genres and another for
ReplayGain analysis.

* Beets now communicates with MusicBrainz via the new Next Generation
  Schema (NGS) service via python-musicbrainzngs. The bindings are
  included with this version of beets, but a future version will make
  them an external dependency.

* The importer now detects **multi-disc albums** and tags them
  together. Using a heuristic based on the names of directories,
  certain structures are classified as multi-disc albums: for example,
  if a directory contains subdirectories labeled "disc 1" and "disc
  2", these subdirectories will be coalesced into a single album for
  tagging.

* The new Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin uses the Acoustid **open-source
  acoustic fingerprinting** service. This replaces the old "lastid"
  plugin, which used Last.fm fingerprinting and is now deprecated.
  Fingerprinting with this library should be faster and more reliable.

* The importer can now perform **partial matches**. This means that,
  if you're missing a few tracks from an album, beets can still tag
  the remaining tracks as a single album. (Thanks to Simon Chopin.)

* The new LastGenre Plugin automatically **assigns genres to imported
  albums** and items based on Last.fm tags and an internal whitelist.
  (Thanks to KraYmer.)

* The ReplayGain Plugin, written by Peter Brunner, has been merged
  into the core beets distribution. Use it to analyze audio and
  **adjust playback levels** in ReplayGain-aware music players.

* Albums are now tagged with their *original* release date rather than
  the date of any reissue, remaster, "special edition", or the like.

* The config file and library databases are now given better names and
  locations on Windows. Namely, both files now reside in "%APPDATA%";
  the config file is named "beetsconfig.ini" and the database is
  called "beetslibrary.blb" (neither has a leading dot as on Unix).
  For backwards compatibility, beets will check the old locations
  first.

* When entering an ID manually during tagging, beets now searches for
  anything that looks like an MBID in the entered string. This means
  that full MusicBrainz URLs now work as IDs at the prompt. (Thanks to
  derwin.)

* The importer now ignores certain "clutter" files like ".AppleDouble"
  directories and "._*" files. The list of ignored patterns is
  configurable via the "ignore" setting; see Configuration.

* The database now keeps track of files' modification times so that,
  during an "update", unmodified files can be skipped. (Thanks to Jos
  van der Til.)

* The album art fetcher now uses albumart.org as a fallback when the
  Amazon art downloader fails.

* A new "timeout" config value avoids database locking errors on slow
  systems.

* Fix a crash after using the "as Tracks" option during import.

* Fix a Unicode error when tagging items with missing titles.

* Fix a crash when the state file ("~/.beetsstate") became emptied or
  corrupted.


1.0b10 (September 22, 2011)
===========================

This version of beets focuses on making it easier to manage your
metadata *after* you've imported it. A bumper crop of new commands has
been added: a manual tag editor ("modify"), a tool to pick up out-of-
band deletions and modifications ("update"), and functionality for
moving and copying files around ("move"). Furthermore, the concept of
"re-importing" is new: you can choose to re-run beets' advanced
autotagger on any files you already have in your library if you change
your mind after you finish the initial import.

As a couple of added bonuses, imports can now automatically skip
previously-imported directories (with the "-i" flag) and there's an
experimental Web interface to beets in a new standard plugin.

* A new "beet modify" command enables **manual, command-line-based
  modification** of music metadata. Pass it a query along with
  "field=value" pairs that specify the changes you want to make.

* A new "beet update" command updates the database to reflect
  **changes in the on-disk metadata**. You can now use an external
  program to edit tags on files, remove files and directories, etc.,
  and then run "beet update" to make sure your beets library is in
  sync. This will also rename files to reflect their new metadata.

* A new "beet move" command can **copy or move files** into your
  library directory or to another specified directory.

* When importing files that are already in the library database, the
  items are no longer duplicated---instead, the library is updated to
  reflect the new metadata. This way, the import command can be
  transparently used as a **re-import**.

* Relatedly, the "-L" flag to the "import" command makes it take a
  query as its argument instead of a list of directories. The matched
  albums (or items, depending on the "-s" flag) are then re-imported.

* A new flag "-i" to the import command runs **incremental imports**,
  keeping track of and skipping previously-imported directories. This
  has the effect of making repeated import commands pick up only
  newly-added directories. The "import_incremental" config option
  makes this the default.

* When pruning directories, "clutter" files such as ".DS_Store" and
  "Thumbs.db" are ignored (and removed with otherwise-empty
  directories).

* The Web Plugin encapsulates a simple **Web-based GUI for beets**.
  The current iteration can browse the library and play music in
  browsers that support HTML5 Audio.

* When moving items that are part of an album, the album art
  implicitly moves too.

* Files are no longer silently overwritten when moving and copying
  files.

* Handle exceptions thrown when running Mutagen.

* Fix a missing "__future__" import in "embed art" on Python 2.5.

* Fix ID3 and MPEG-4 tag names for the album-artist field.

* Fix Unicode encoding of album artist, album type, and label.

* Fix crash when "copying" an art file that's already in place.


1.0b9 (July 9, 2011)
====================

This release focuses on a large number of small fixes and improvements
that turn beets into a well-oiled, music-devouring machine. See the
full release notes, below, for a plethora of new features.

* **Queries can now contain whitespace.** Spaces passed as shell
  arguments are now preserved, so you can use your shell's escaping
  syntax (quotes or backslashes, for instance) to include spaces in
  queries. For example, typing``beet ls "the knife"`` or "beet ls the\
  knife". Read more in Queries.

* Queries can **match items from the library by directory**. A "path:"
  prefix is optional; any query containing a path separator (/ on
  POSIX systems) is assumed to be a path query. Running "beet ls
  path/to/music" will show all the music in your library under the
  specified directory. The Queries reference again has more details.

* **Local album art** is now automatically discovered and copied from
  the imported directories when available.

* When choosing the "as-is" import album (or doing a non-autotagged
  import), **every album either has an "album artist" set or is marked
  as a compilation (Various Artists)**. The choice is made based on
  the homogeneity of the tracks' artists. This prevents compilations
  that are imported as-is from being scattered across many directories
  after they are imported.

* The release **label** for albums and tracks is now fetched from
  !MusicBrainz, written to files, and stored in the database.

* The "list" command now accepts a "-p" switch that causes it to
  **show paths** instead of titles. This makes the output of "beet ls
  -p" suitable for piping into another command such as xargs.

* Release year and label are now shown in the candidate selection list
  to help disambiguate different releases of the same album.

* Prompts in the importer interface are now colorized for easy
  reading. The default option is always highlighted.

* The importer now provides the option to specify a MusicBrainz ID
  manually if the built-in searching isn't working for a particular
  album or track.

* "$bitrate" in path formats is now formatted as a human-readable kbps
  value instead of as a raw integer.

* The import logger has been improved for "always-on" use. First, it
  is now possible to specify a log file in .beetsconfig. Also, logs
  are now appended rather than overwritten and contain timestamps.

* Album art fetching and plugin events are each now run in separate
  pipeline stages during imports. This should bring additional
  performance when using album art plugins like embedart or beets-
  lyrics.

* Accents and other Unicode decorators on characters are now treated
  more fairly by the autotagger. For example, if you're missing the
  acute accent on the "e" in "café", that change won't be penalized.
  This introduces a new dependency on the unidecode Python module.

* When tagging a track with no title set, the track's filename is now
  shown (instead of nothing at all).

* The bitrate of lossless files is now calculated from their file size
  (rather than being fixed at 0 or reflecting the uncompressed audio
  bitrate).

* Fixed a problem where duplicate albums or items imported at the same
  time would fail to be detected.

* BPD now uses a persistent "virtual filesystem" in order to fake a
  directory structure. This means that your path format settings are
  respected in BPD's browsing hierarchy. This may come at a
  performance cost, however. The virtual filesystem used by BPD is
  available for reuse by plugins (e.g., the FUSE plugin).

* Singleton imports ("beet import -s") can now take individual files
  as arguments as well as directories.

* Fix Unicode queries given on the command line.

* Fix crasher in quiet singleton imports ("import -qs").

* Fix crash when autotagging files with no metadata.

* Fix a rare deadlock when finishing the import pipeline.

* Fix an issue that was causing mpdupdate to run twice for every
  album.

* Fix a bug that caused release dates/years not to be fetched.

* Fix a crasher when setting MBIDs on MP3s file metadata.

* Fix a "broken pipe" error when piping beets' standard output.

* A better error message is given when the database file is
  unopenable.

* Suppress errors due to timeouts and bad responses from MusicBrainz.

* Fix a crash on album queries with item-only field names.


1.0b8 (April 28, 2011)
======================

This release of beets brings two significant new features. First,
beets now has first-class support for "singleton" tracks. Previously,
it was only really meant to manage whole albums, but many of us have
lots of non-album tracks to keep track of alongside our collections of
albums. So now beets makes it easy to tag, catalog, and manipulate
your individual tracks. Second, beets can now (optionally) embed album
art directly into file metadata rather than only storing it in a "file
on the side." Check out the EmbedArt Plugin for that functionality.

* Better support for **singleton (non-album) tracks**. Whereas beets
  previously only really supported full albums, now it can also keep
  track of individual, off-album songs. The "singleton" path format
  can be used to customize where these tracks are stored. To import
  singleton tracks, provide the -s switch to the import command or,
  while doing a normal full-album import, choose the "as Tracks" (T)
  option to add singletons to your library.  To list only singleton or
  only album tracks, use the new "singleton:" query term: the query
  "singleton:true" matches only singleton tracks; "singleton:false"
  matches only album tracks. The "lastid" plugin has been extended to
  support matching individual items as well.

* The importer/autotagger system has been heavily refactored in this
  release. If anything breaks as a result, please get in touch or just
  file a bug.

* Support for **album art embedded in files**. A new EmbedArt Plugin
  implements this functionality. Enable the plugin to automatically
  embed downloaded album art into your music files' metadata. The
  plugin also provides the "embedart" and "extractart" commands for
  moving image files in and out of metadata. See the wiki for more
  details. (Thanks, daenney!)

* The "distance" number, which quantifies how different an album's
  current and proposed metadata are, is now displayed as "similarity"
  instead. This should be less noisy and confusing; you'll now see
  99.5% instead of 0.00489323.

* A new "timid mode" in the importer asks the user every time, even
  when it makes a match with very high confidence. The "-t" flag on
  the command line and the "import_timid" config option control this
  mode. (Thanks to mdecker on GitHub!)

* The multithreaded importer should now abort (either by selecting
  aBort or by typing ^C) much more quickly. Previously, it would try
  to get a lot of work done before quitting; now it gives up as soon
  as it can.

* Added a new plugin event, "album_imported", which is called every
  time an album is added to the library. (Thanks, Lugoues!)

* A new plugin method, "register_listener", is an imperative
  alternative to the "@listen" decorator (Thanks again, Lugoues!)

* In path formats, "$albumartist" now falls back to "$artist" (as well
  as the other way around).

* The importer now prints "(unknown album)" when no tags are present.

* When autotagging, "and" is considered equal to "&".

* Fix some crashes when deleting files that don't exist.

* Fix adding individual tracks in BPD.

* Fix crash when "~/.beetsconfig" does not exist.


1.0b7 (April 5, 2011)
=====================

Beta 7's focus is on better support for "various artists" releases.
These albums can be treated differently via the new "[paths]" config
section and the autotagger is better at handling them. It also
includes a number of oft-requested improvements to the "beet" command-
line tool, including several new configuration options and the ability
to clean up empty directory subtrees.

* **"Various artists" releases** are handled much more gracefully. The
  autotagger now sets the "comp" flag on albums whenever the album is
  identified as a "various artists" release by !MusicBrainz. Also,
  there is now a distinction between the "album artist" and the "track
  artist", the latter of which is never "Various Artists" or other
  such bogus stand-in. *(Thanks to Jonathan for the bulk of the
  implementation work on this feature!)*

* The directory hierarchy can now be **customized based on release
  type**. In particular, the "path_format" setting in .beetsconfig has
  been replaced with a new "[paths]" section, which allows you to
  specify different path formats for normal and "compilation" (various
  artists) releases as well as for each album type (see below). The
  default path formats have been changed to use "$albumartist" instead
  of "$artist".

* A **new ``albumtype`` field** reflects the release type as specified
  by MusicBrainz.

* When deleting files, beets now appropriately "prunes" the directory
  tree---empty directories are automatically cleaned up. *(Thanks to
  wlof on GitHub for this!)*

* The tagger's output now always shows the album directory that is
  currently being tagged. This should help in situations where files'
  current tags are missing or useless.

* The logging option ("-l") to the "import" command now logs duplicate
  albums.

* A new "import_resume" configuration option can be used to disable
  the importer's resuming feature or force it to resume without
  asking. This option may be either "yes", "no", or "ask", with the
  obvious meanings. The "-p" and "-P" command-line flags override this
  setting and correspond to the "yes" and "no" settings.

* Resuming is automatically disabled when the importer is in quiet
  ("-q") mode. Progress is still saved, however, and the "-p" flag
  (above) can be used to force resuming.

* The "BEETSCONFIG" environment variable can now be used to specify
  the location of the config file that is at ~/.beetsconfig by
  default.

* A new "import_quiet_fallback" config option specifies what should
  happen in quiet mode when there is no strong recommendation. The
  options are "skip" (the default) and "asis".

* When importing with the "delete" option and importing files that are
  already at their destination, files could be deleted (leaving zero
  copies afterward). This is fixed.

* The "version" command now lists all the loaded plugins.

* A new plugin, called "info", just prints out audio file metadata.

* Fix a bug where some files would be erroneously interpreted as
  MPEG-4 audio.

* Fix permission bits applied to album art files.

* Fix malformed !MusicBrainz queries caused by null characters.

* Fix a bug with old versions of the Monkey's Audio format.

* Fix a crash on broken symbolic links.

* Retry in more cases when !MusicBrainz servers are slow/overloaded.

* The old "albumify" plugin for upgrading databases was removed.


1.0b6 (January 20, 2011)
========================

This version consists primarily of bug fixes and other small
improvements. It's in preparation for a more feature-ful release in
beta 7. The most important issue involves correct ordering of
autotagged albums.

* **Quiet import:** a new "-q" command line switch for the import
  command suppresses all prompts for input; it pessimistically skips
  all albums that the importer is not completely confident about.

* Added support for the **WavPack** and **Musepack** formats.
  Unfortunately, due to a limitation in the Mutagen library (used by
  beets for metadata manipulation), Musepack SV8 is not yet supported.
  Here's the upstream bug in question.

* BPD now uses a pure-Python socket library and no longer requires
  eventlet/greenlet (the latter of which is a C extension). For the
  curious, the socket library in question is called Bluelet.

* Non-autotagged imports are now resumable (just like autotagged
  imports).

* Fix a terrible and long-standing bug where track orderings were
  never applied. This manifested when the tagger appeared to be
  applying a reasonable ordering to the tracks but, later, the
  database reflects a completely wrong association of track names to
  files. The order applied was always just alphabetical by filename,
  which is frequently but not always what you want.

* We now use Windows' "long filename" support. This API is fairly
  tricky, though, so some instability may still be present---please
  file a bug if you run into pathname weirdness on Windows. Also,
  filenames on Windows now never end in spaces.

* Fix crash in lastid when the artist name is not available.

* Fixed a spurious crash when "LANG" or a related environment variable
  is set to an invalid value (such as "'UTF-8'" on some installations
  of Mac OS X).

* Fixed an error when trying to copy a file that is already at its
  destination.

* When copying read-only files, the importer now tries to make the
  copy writable. (Previously, this would just crash the import.)

* Fixed an "UnboundLocalError" when no matches are found during
  autotag.

* Fixed a Unicode encoding error when entering special characters into
  the "manual search" prompt.

* Added `` beet version`` command that just shows the current release
  version.


1.0b5 (September 28, 2010)
==========================

This version of beets focuses on increasing the accuracy of the
autotagger. The main addition is an included plugin that uses acoustic
fingerprinting to match based on the audio content (rather than
existing metadata). Additional heuristics were also added to the
metadata-based tagger as well that should make it more reliable. This
release also greatly expands the capabilities of beets' plugin API. A
host of other little features and fixes are also rolled into this
release.

* The "lastid" plugin adds Last.fm **acoustic fingerprinting support**
  to the autotagger. Similar to the PUIDs used by !MusicBrainz Picard,
  this system allows beets to recognize files that don't have any
  metadata at all. You'll need to install some dependencies for this
  plugin to work.

* To support the above, there's also a new system for **extending the
  autotagger via plugins**. Plugins can currently add components to
  the track and album distance functions as well as augment the
  MusicBrainz search. The new API is documented at Plugins.

* **String comparisons** in the autotagger have been augmented to act
  more intuitively. Previously, if your album had the title "Something
  (EP)" and it was officially called "Something", then beets would
  think this was a fairly significant change. It now checks for and
  appropriately reweights certain parts of each string. As another
  example, the title "The Great Album" is considered equal to "Great
  Album, The".

* New **event system for plugins** (thanks, Jeff!). Plugins can now
  get callbacks from beets when certain events occur in the core.
  Again, the API is documented in Plugins.

* The BPD plugin is now disabled by default. This greatly simplifies
  installation of the beets core, which is now 100% pure Python. To
  use BPD, though, you'll need to set "plugins: bpd" in your
  .beetsconfig.

* The "import" command can now remove original files when it copies
  items into your library. (This might be useful if you're low on disk
  space.) Set the "import_delete" option in your .beetsconfig to
  "yes".

* Importing without autotagging ("beet import -A") now prints out
  album names as it imports them to indicate progress.

* The new MPDUpdate Plugin will automatically update your MPD server's
  index whenever your beets library changes.

* Efficiency tweak should reduce the number of !MusicBrainz queries
  per autotagged album.

* A new "-v" command line switch enables debugging output.

* Fixed bug that completely broke non-autotagged imports ("import
  -A").

* Fixed bug that logged the wrong paths when using "import -l".

* Fixed autotagging for the creatively-named band !!!.

* Fixed normalization of relative paths.

* Fixed escaping of "/" characters in paths on Windows.


1.0b4 (August 9, 2010)
======================

This thrilling new release of beets focuses on making the tagger more
usable in a variety of ways. First and foremost, it should now be much
faster: the tagger now uses a multithreaded algorithm by default
(although, because the new tagger is experimental, a single-threaded
version is still available via a config option). Second, the tagger
output now uses a little bit of ANSI terminal coloring to make changes
stand out. This way, it should be faster to decide what to do with a
proposed match: the more red you see, the worse the match is. Finally,
the tagger can be safely interrupted (paused) and restarted later at
the same point. Just enter "b" for aBort at any prompt to stop the
tagging process and save its progress. (The progress-saving also works
in the unthinkable event that beets crashes while tagging.)

Among the under-the-hood changes in 1.0b4 is a major change to the way
beets handles paths (filenames). This should make the whole system
more tolerant to special characters in filenames, but it may break
things (especially databases created with older versions of beets). As
always, let me know if you run into weird problems with this release.

Finally, this release's "setup.py" should install a "beet.exe" startup
stub for Windows users. This should make running beets much easier:
just type "beet" if you have your "PATH" environment variable set up
correctly. The Getting Started guide has some tips on installing beets
on Windows.

Here's the detailed list of changes:

* **Parallel tagger.** The autotagger has been reimplemented to use
  multiple threads. This means that it can concurrently read files
  from disk, talk to the user, communicate with MusicBrainz, and write
  data back to disk. Not only does this make the tagger much faster
  because independent work may be performed in parallel, but it makes
  the tagging process much more pleasant for large imports. The user
  can let albums queue up in the background while making a decision
  rather than waiting for beets between each question it asks.  The
  parallel tagger is on by default but a sequential (single- threaded)
  version is still available by setting the "threaded" config value to
  "no" (because the parallel version is still quite experimental).

* **Colorized tagger output.** The autotagger interface now makes it a
  little easier to see what's going on at a glance by highlighting
  changes with terminal colors. This feature is on by default, but you
  can turn it off by setting "color" to "no" in your ".beetsconfig"
  (if, for example, your terminal doesn't understand colors and
  garbles the output).

* **Pause and resume imports.** The "import" command now keeps track
  of its progress, so if you're interrupted (beets crashes, you abort
  the process, an alien devours your motherboard, etc.), beets will
  try to resume from the point where you left off. The next time you
  run "import" on the same directory, it will ask if you want to
  resume. It accomplishes this by "fast-forwarding" through the albums
  in the directory until it encounters the last one it saw. (This
  means it might fail if that album can't be found.) Also, you can now
  abort the tagging process by entering "b" (for aBort) at any of the
  prompts.

* Overhauled methods for handling filesystem paths to allow filenames
  that have badly encoded special characters. These changes are pretty
  fragile, so please report any bugs involving "UnicodeError" or
  SQLite "ProgrammingError" messages in this version.

* The destination paths (the library directory structure) now respect
  album-level metadata. This means that if you have an album in which
  two tracks have different album-level attributes (like year, for
  instance), they will still wind up in the same directory together.
  (There's currently not a very smart method for picking the "correct"
  album-level metadata, but we'll fix that later.)

* Fixed a bug where the CLI would fail completely if the "LANG"
  environment variable was not set.

* Fixed removal of albums ("beet remove -a"): previously, the album
  record would stay around although the items were deleted.

* The setup script now makes a "beet.exe" startup stub on Windows;
  Windows users can now just type "beet" at the prompt to run beets.

* Fixed an occasional bug where Mutagen would complain that a tag was
  already present.

* Fixed a bug with reading invalid integers from ID3 tags.

* The tagger should now be a little more reluctant to reorder tracks
  that already have indices.


1.0b3 (July 22, 2010)
=====================

This release features two major additions to the autotagger's
functionality: album art fetching and MusicBrainz ID tags. It also
contains some important under-the-hood improvements: a new plugin
architecture is introduced and the database schema is extended with
explicit support for albums.

This release has one major backwards-incompatibility. Because of the
new way beets handles albums in the library, databases created with an
old version of beets might have trouble with operations that deal with
albums (like the "-a" switch to "beet list" and "beet remove", as well
as the file browser for BPD). To "upgrade" an old database, you can
use the included "albumify" plugin (see the fourth bullet point
below).

* **Album art.** The tagger now, by default, downloads album art from
  Amazon that is referenced in the MusicBrainz database. It places the
  album art alongside the audio files in a file called (for example)
  "cover.jpg". The "import_art" config option controls this behavior,
  as do the "-r" and "-R" options to the import command. You can set
  the name (minus extension) of the album art file with the
  "art_filename" config option. (See Configuration for more
  information about how to configure the album art downloader.)

* **Support for MusicBrainz ID tags.** The autotagger now keeps track
  of the MusicBrainz track, album, and artist IDs it matched for each
  file. It also looks for album IDs in new files it's importing and
  uses those to look up data in MusicBrainz. Furthermore, track IDs
  are used as a component of the tagger's distance metric now. (This
  obviously lays the groundwork for a utility that can update tags if
  the MB database changes, but that's for the future.) Tangentially,
  this change required the database code to support a lightweight form
  of migrations so that new columns could be added to old databases--
  this is a delicate feature, so it would be very wise to make a
  backup of your database before upgrading to this version.

* **Plugin architecture.** Add-on modules can now add new commands to
  the beets command-line interface. The "bpd" and "dadd" commands were
  removed from the beets core and turned into plugins; BPD is loaded
  by default. To load the non-default plugins, use the config options
  "plugins" (a space-separated list of plugin names) and "pluginpath"
  (a colon-separated list of directories to search beyond "sys.path").
  Plugins are just Python modules under the "beetsplug" namespace
  package containing subclasses of "beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin". See
  the beetsplug directory for examples or Plugins for instructions.

* As a consequence of adding album art, the database was significantly
  refactored to keep track of some information at an album (rather
  than item) granularity. Databases created with earlier versions of
  beets should work fine, but they won't have any "albums" in them--
  they'll just be a bag of items. This means that commands like "beet
  ls -a" and "beet rm -a" won't match anything. To "upgrade" your
  database, you can use the included "albumify" plugin. Running "beets
  albumify" with the plugin activated (set "plugins=albumify" in your
  config file) will group all your items into albums, making beets
  behave more or less as it did before.

* Fixed some bugs with encoding paths on Windows. Also, ":" is now
  replaced with "-" in path names (instead of "_") for readability.

* "MediaFile``s now have a ``format" attribute, so you can use
  "$format" in your library path format strings like "$artist - $album
  ($format)" to get directories with names like "Paul Simon -
  Graceland (FLAC)".

Beets also now has its first third-party plugin: beetfs, by Martin
Eve! It exposes your music in a FUSE filesystem using a custom
directory structure. Even cooler: it lets you keep your files intact
on-disk while correcting their tags when accessed through FUSE. Check
it out!


1.0b2 (July 7, 2010)
====================

This release focuses on high-priority fixes and conspicuously missing
features. Highlights include support for two new audio formats
(Monkey's Audio and Ogg Vorbis) and an option to log untaggable albums
during import.

* **Support for Ogg Vorbis and Monkey's Audio** files and their tags.
  (This support should be considered preliminary: I haven't tested it
  heavily because I don't use either of these formats regularly.)

* An option to the "beet import" command for **logging albums that are
  untaggable** (i.e., are skipped or taken "as-is"). Use "beet import
  -l LOGFILE PATHS". The log format is very simple: it's just a status
  (either "skip" or "asis") followed by the path to the album in
  question. The idea is that you can tag a large collection and
  automatically keep track of the albums that weren't found in
  MusicBrainz so you can come back and look at them later.

* Fixed a "UnicodeEncodeError" on terminals that don't (or don't claim
  to) support UTF-8.

* Importing without autotagging ("beet import -A") is now faster and
  doesn't print out a bunch of whitespace. It also lets you specify
  single files on the command line (rather than just directories).

* Fixed importer crash when attempting to read a corrupt file.

* Reorganized code for CLI in preparation for adding pluggable
  subcommands. Also removed dependency on the aging "cmdln" module in
  favor of a hand-rolled solution.


1.0b1 (June 17, 2010)
=====================

Initial release.
