Advanced Awesomeness
********************

So you have beets up and running and you've started importing your
music. There's a lot more that beets can do now that it has cataloged
your collection. Here's a few features to get you started.

Most of these tips involve plugins and fiddling with beets'
configuration. So use your favorite text editor create a config file
before you continue.


Fetch album art, genres, and lyrics
===================================

Beets can help you fill in more than just the basic taxonomy metadata
that comes from MusicBrainz. Plugins can provide album art, lyrics,
and genres from databases around the Web.

If you want beets to get any of this data automatically during the
import process, just enable any of the three relevant plugins (see
Plugins). For example, put this line in your config file to enable all
three:

   plugins: fetchart lyrics lastgenre

Each plugin also has a command you can run to fetch data manually. For
example, if you want to get lyrics for all the Beatles tracks in your
collection, just type "beet lyrics beatles" after enabling the plugin.

Read more about using each of these plugins:

* FetchArt Plugin (and its accompanying EmbedArt Plugin)

* Lyrics Plugin

* LastGenre Plugin


Customize your file and folder names
====================================

Beets uses an extremely flexible template system to name the folders
and files that organize your music in your filesystem. Take a look at
Path Format Configuration for the basics: use fields like "$year" and
"$title" to build up a naming scheme. But if you need more
flexibility, there are two features you need to know about:

* Template functions are simple expressions you can use in your path
  formats to add logic to your names. For example, you can get an
  artist's first initial using "%upper{%left{$albumartist,1}}".

* If you need more flexibility, the Inline Plugin lets you write
  snippets of Python code that generate parts of your filenames. The
  equivalent code for getting an artist initial with the *inline*
  plugin looks like "initial: albumartist[0].upper()".

If you already have music in your library and want to update their
names according to a new scheme, just run the move command to rename
everything.


Stream your music to another computer
=====================================

Sometimes it can be really convenient to store your music on one
machine and play it on another. For example, I like to keep my music
on a server at home but play it at work (without copying my whole
library locally). The Web Plugin makes streaming your music easy---
it's sort of like having your own personal Spotify.

First, enable the "web" plugin (see Plugins). Run the server by typing
"beet web" and head to http://localhost:8337 in a browser. You can
browse your collection with queries and, if your browser supports it,
play music using HTML5 audio.


Transcode music files for media players
=======================================

Do you ever find yourself transcoding high-quality rips to a lower-
bitrate, lossy format for your phone or music player? Beets can help
with that.

You'll first need to install ffmpeg. Then, enable beets' Convert
Plugin. Set a destination directory in your config file like so:

   convert:
       dest: ~/converted_music

Then, use the command "beet convert QUERY" to transcode everything
matching the query and drop the resulting files in that directory,
named according to your path formats. For example, "beet convert long
winters" will move over everything by the Long Winters for listening
on the go.

The plugin has many more dials you can fiddle with to get your
conversions how you like them. Check out its documentation.


Store any data you like
=======================

The beets database keeps track of a long list of built-in fields, but
you're not limited to just that list. Say, for example, that you like
to categorize your music by the setting where it should be played. You
can invent a new "context" attribute to store this. Set the field
using the modify command:

   beet modify context=party artist:'beastie boys'

By default beets will show you the changes that are about to be
applied and ask if you really want to apply them to all, some or none
of the items or albums. You can type y for "yes", n for "no", or s for
"select". If you choose the latter, the command will prompt you for
each individual matching item or album.

Then query your music just as you would with any other field:

   beet ls context:mope

You can even use these fields in your filenames (see Path Format
Configuration).

And, unlike built-in fields, such fields can be removed:

   beet modify context! artist:'beastie boys'

Read more than you ever wanted to know about the *flexible attributes*
feature on the beets blog.


Choose a path style manually for some music
===========================================

Sometimes, you need to categorize some songs differently in your file
system. For example, you might want to group together all the music
you don't really like but keep around to play for friends and family.
This is, of course, impossible to determine automatically using
metadata from MusicBrainz.

Instead, use a flexible attribute (see above) to store a flag on the
music you want to categorize, like so:

   beet modify bad=1 christmas

Then, you can query on this field in your path formats to sort this
music differently. Put something like this in your configuration file:

   paths:
       bad:1: Bad/$artist/$title

Used together, flexible attributes and path format conditions let you
sort your music by any criteria you can imagine.


Automatically add new music to your library
===========================================

As a command-line tool, beets is perfect for automated operation via a
cron job or the like. To use it this way, you might want to use these
options in your config file:

   import:
       incremental: yes
       quiet: yes
       log: /path/to/log.txt

The incremental option will skip importing any directories that have
been imported in the past. quiet avoids asking you any questions
(since this will be run automatically, no input is possible). You
might also want to use the quiet_fallback options to configure what
should happen when no near-perfect match is found -- this option
depends on your level of paranoia. Finally, log will make beets record
its decisions so you can come back later and see what you need to
handle manually.

The last step is to set up cron or some other automation system to run
"beet import /path/to/incoming/music".


Useful reports
==============

Since beets has a quite powerful query tool, this list contains some
useful and powerful queries to run on your library.

* See a list of all albums which have files which are 128 bit rate:

     beet list bitrate:128000

* See a list of all albums with the tracks listed in order of bit
  rate:

     beet ls -f '$bitrate $artist - $title' bitrate+

* See a list of albums and their formats:

     beet ls -f '$albumartist $album $format' | sort | uniq

  Note that "beet ls --album -f '... $format'" doesn't do what you
  want, because "format" is an item-level field, not an album-level
  one. If an album's tracks exist in multiple formats, the album will
  appear in the list once for each format.
