Release v2.5.1

New features

• Zero Plugin: Add new configuration option, omit_single_disc, to allow zeroing the disc number on write for single-disc albums. Defaults to False.

Bug fixes

• beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin: load the last plugin class defined in the plugin namespace. 🐛 (#6093)

For packagers

• Fixed issue with legacy metadata plugins not copying properties from the base class.
• Reverted the following: When installing beets via git or locally the version string now reflects the current git branch and commit hash. 🐛 (#6089)

Other changes

• Removed outdated mailing list contact information from the documentation 🐛 (#5462).
• Getting Started: Modernized the Getting Started guide with tabbed sections and dropdown menus. Installation instructions have been streamlined, and a new subpage now provides additional setup details.

Release v2.5.0

New features

• Convert Plugin: Add a config option to disable writing metadata to converted files.
• Discogs Plugin Added support for featured artists. 🐛 (#6038)
• Discogs Plugin New configuration option featured_string to change the default string used to join featured artists. The default string is Feat..
• Discogs Plugin Support for artist_credit in Discogs tags. 🐛 (#3354)
• Discogs Plugin Support for name variations and config options to specify where the variations are written. 🐛 (#3354)
• Discogs Plugin: New config option strip_disambiguation to toggle stripping discogs numeric disambiguation on artist and label fields.
• LastGenre Plugin: Add a --pretend option to preview genre changes without storing or writing them.

Bug fixes

• Metadata source plugins: Fixed data source penalty calculation that was incorrectly applied during import matching. The source_weight configuration option has been renamed to data_source_mismatch_penalty to better reflect its purpose. 🐛 (#6066)
• Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin BPSync Plugin Fix plugin loading issue caused by an import of another beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin class. 🐛 (#6033)
• Discogs Plugin Fixed inconsistency in stripping disambiguation from artists but not labels. 🐛 (#5366)
• FromFilename Plugin: Fix 🐛 (#5218), improve the code (refactor regexps, allow for more cases, add some logging), add tests.
• MusicBrainz Plugin Refresh flexible MusicBrainz metadata on reimport so format changes are applied. 🐛 (#6036)
• Spotify Plugin Ensure spotifysync keeps popularity, ISRC, and related fields current even when audio features requests fail. 🐛 (#6061)
• Spotify Plugin Fixed an issue where candidate lookup would not find matches due to query escaping (single vs double quotes).
• Spotify Plugin Fixed an issue where track matching and lookups could return incorrect or misleading results when using the Spotify plugin. The problem occurred primarily when no album was provided or when the album field was an empty string. 🐛 (#5189)
• Spotify Plugin Removed old and undocumented config options artist_field, album_field and track that were causing issues with track matching. 🐛 (#5189)

Other changes

• Moved art.py utility module from beets into beetsplug namespace as it is not used in the core beets codebase. It can now be found in beetsplug._utils.
• Moved vfs.py utility module from beets into beetsplug namespace as it is not used in the core beets codebase. It can now be found in beetsplug._utils.
• When installing beets via git or locally the version string now reflects the current git branch and commit hash. 🐛 (#4448)
• Autotagger Matching Options: match.distance_weights.source configuration has been renamed to match.distance_weights.data_source for consistency with the name of the field it refers to.
• FAQ: Add check for musicbrainz plugin if auto-tagger can't find a match 🐛 (#6020)
• Plugins: Clarify that musicbrainz must be mentioned if plugin list modified 🐛 (#6020)
• Using the Auto-Tagger: Section on no matching release found, related to possibly disabled musicbrainz plugin 🐛 (#6020)
• beets.metadata_plugin.MetadataSourcePlugin: Remove discogs specific disambiguation stripping.

For developers and plugin authors

• Metadata source plugins are now registered globally when instantiated, which makes their handling slightly more efficient.
• The track_distance() and album_distance() methods have been removed from MetadataSourcePlugin. Distance calculation for data source mismatches is now handled automatically by the core matching logic. This change simplifies the plugin architecture and fixes incorrect penalty calculations. 🐛 (#6066)
• Typing improvements in beets/logging.py: getLogger now returns BeetsLogger when called with a name, or RootLogger when called without a name.

Release v2.4.0

New features

• Discogs Plugin: Add configurable search_limit option to limit the number of results returned by the Discogs metadata search queries.
• Discogs Plugin: Implement track_for_id method to allow retrieving singletons by their Discogs ID. 🐛 (#4661)
• Duplicates Plugin: Add --remove option, allowing to remove from the library without deleting media files. 🐛 (#5832)
• MPDStats Plugin: Add new configuration option, played_ratio_threshold, to allow configuring the percentage the song must be played for it to be counted as played instead of skipped.
• MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: When getting the user collections, only consider collections of releases, and ignore collections of other entity types.
• MusicBrainz Plugin: The MusicBrainz autotagger has been moved to a separate plugin. The default plugins includes MusicBrainz Plugin, but if you've customized your plugins list in your configuration, you'll need to explicitly add MusicBrainz Plugin to continue using this functionality. Configuration option musicbrainz.enabled has thus been deprecated. 🐛 (#2686) 🐛 (#4605)
• Playlist Plugin: Support files with the .m3u8 extension. 🐛 (#5829)
• Replace Plugin: Add new plugin.
• Spotify Plugin Deezer Plugin: Add new configuration option search_limit to limit the number of results returned by search queries.
• Web Plugin: Display artist and album as part of the search results.
• Web Plugin: Show notifications when a track plays. This uses the Media Session API to customize media notifications.

Bug fixes

• Fix HiddenFileTest by using bytestring_path().
• Fix an issue where calling Library.add would cause the database_change event to be sent twice, not once. 🐛 (#5560)
• Fixed regression with ListenBrainz Plugin where the plugin could not be loaded 🐛 (#5975)
• Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: AcoustID lookup HTTP requests will now time out after 10 seconds, rather than hanging the entire import process.
• Deezer Plugin: Fix the issue with that every query to deezer was ascii encoded. This resulted in bad matches for queries that contained special e.g. non latin characters as 盗作. If you want to keep the legacy behavior set the config option deezer.search_query_ascii: yes. 🐛 (#5860)
• Discogs Plugin: Beets will no longer crash if a release has been deleted, and returns a 404.
• LastGenre Plugin: Fix the issue introduced in Beets 2.3.0 where non-whitelisted last.fm genres were not canonicalized to parent genres. 🐛 (#5930)
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Fix the MusicBrainz search not taking into account the album/recording aliases
• MusicBrainz Plugin: fix regression where user configured extra_tags have been read incorrectly. 🐛 (#5788)
• Spotify Plugin: Fix the issue with that every query to spotify was ascii encoded. This resulted in bad matches for queries that contained special e.g. non latin characters as 盗作. If you want to keep the legacy behavior set the config option spotify.search_query_ascii: yes. 🐛 (#5699)
• tests: Fix library tests failing on Windows when run from outside D:/. 🐛 (#5802)
• tests: Fix tests failing without langdetect (by making it required). 🐛 (#5797)

For packagers

• Loosened typing_extensions dependency in pyproject.toml to apply to every python version.
• Optional extra_tags parameter has been removed from BeetsPlugin.candidates method signature since it is never passed in. If you override this method in your plugin, feel free to remove this parameter.

For plugin developers

• The FetchArt Plugin plugins has seen a few changes to function signatures and source registration in the process of introducing typings to the code. Custom art sources might need to be adapted.

• We split the responsibilities of plugins into two base classes

  1. beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin is the base class for all plugins, any plugin needs to inherit from this class.
  2. beets.metadata_plugin.MetadataSourcePlugin allows plugins to act like metadata sources. E.g. used by the MusicBrainz plugin. All plugins in the beets repo are opted into this class where applicable. If you are maintaining a plugin that acts like a metadata source, i.e. you expose any of track_for_id, album_for_id, candidates, item_candidates, album_distance, track_distance methods, please update your plugin to inherit from the new baseclass, as otherwise your plugin will stop working with the next major release.

• Several definitions have been moved:

  • BLOB_TYPE constant, PathQuery and SingletonQuery queries have moved from beets.library to beets.dbcore.query module
  • DateType, DurationType, PathType types and MusicalKey class have moved from beets.library to beets.dbcore.types module.
  • Distance has moved from beets.autotag to beets.autotag.distance module.
  • beets.autotag.current_metadata has been renamed to beets.util.get_most_common_tags.

  Old imports are now deprecated and will be removed in version 3.0.0.

• beets.ui.decargs is deprecated and will be removed in version 3.0.0.

• Beets is now PEP 561 compliant, which means that it provides type hints for all public APIs. This allows IDEs to provide better autocompletion and type checking for downstream users of the beets API.

• plugins.find_plugins function does not anymore load plugins. You need to explicitly call plugins.load_plugins() to load them.

• plugins.load_plugins function does not anymore accept the list of plugins to load. Instead, it loads all plugins that are configured by plugins configuration.

• Flexible fields, which can be used by plugins to store additional metadata, now also support list values. Previously, beets would throw an error while storing the data in the SQL database due to missing type conversion. 🐛 (#5698)

Other changes

• Added a test to check that all plugins can be imported without errors.
• Documentation structure for auto generated API references changed slightly. Autogenerated API references are now located in the docs/api subdirectory.
• Refactor: Split responsibilities of Plugins into MetaDataPlugins and general Plugins.
• Refactored library.py file by splitting it into multiple modules within the beets/library directory.
• UI: Update default text_diff_added color from bold red to bold green.
• UI: Use text_diff_added and text_diff_removed colors in all diff comparisons, including case differences.
• Getting Started: Add instructions to install beets on Void Linux.
• LastGenre Plugin: Refactor loading whitelist and canonicalization file. 🐛 (#5979)
• LastGenre Plugin: Updated and streamlined the genre whitelist and canonicalization tree 🐛 (#5977)
• Substitute Plugin: Fix rST formatting for example cases so that each case is shown on separate lines.

Release v2.3.1

Bug fixes:

• Path Formats: Fixed a regression where path legalization incorrectly removed parts of user-configured path formats that followed a dot (.). 🐛 (#5771)

For packagers:

• Force poetry version below 2 to avoid it mangling file modification times in sdist package. 🐛 (#5770)

Release v2.3.0

Beets now requires Python 3.9 or later since support for EOL Python 3.8 has been dropped.

New features

• LastGenre Plugin: The new configuration option, keep_existing, provides more fine-grained control over how pre-populated genre tags are handled. The force option now behaves in a more conventional manner. 🐛 (#4982)
• Lyrics Plugin: Add new configuration option dist_thresh to control the maximum allowed distance between the lyrics search result and the tagged item's artist and title. This is useful for preventing false positives when fetching lyrics.
• Lyrics Plugin: Rewrite lyrics translation functionality to use Azure AI Translator API and add relevant instructions to the documentation.
• MBSync Plugin: Add support for all metadata sorces.
• Missing Plugin: Add support for all metadata sources.

Bug fixes

• Fix ambiguous column name sqlite3.OperationalError that occured in album queries that filtered album track titles, for example beet list -a keyword title:foo.
• ImageMagick 7.1.1-44 is now supported.
• Synchronise files included in the source distribution with what we used to have before the introduction of Poetry. 🐛 (#5531) 🐛 (#5526)
• FetchArt Plugin: Fix fetchart bug where a tempfile could not be deleted due to never being properly closed. 🐛 (#5521)
• LastGenre Plugin: Fix track-level genre handling. Now when an album-level genre is set already, single tracks don't fall back to the album's genre and request their own last.fm genre. Also log messages regarding what's been tagged are now more polished. 🐛 (#5582)
• ListenBrainz Plugin: Fix UnboundLocalError in cases where 'mbid' is not defined.
• ListenBrainz Plugin: Fix rST formatting for URLs of Listenbrainz API Key documentation and config.yaml.
• Lyrics Plugin: Do not attempt to search for lyrics if either the artist or title is missing and ignore artist_sort value if it is empty. 🐛 (#2635)
• Lyrics Plugin: Fix fetching lyrics from lrclib source. If we cannot find lyrics for a specific album, artist, title combination, the plugin now tries to search for the artist and title and picks the most relevant result. Update the default sources configuration to prioritize lrclib over other sources since it returns reliable results quicker than others. 🐛 (#5102)
• Lyrics Plugin: Fix plugin crash when genius backend returns empty lyrics. 🐛 (#5583)
• Lyrics Plugin: Fix the issue with genius backend not being able to match lyrics when there is a slight variation in the artist name. 🐛 (#4791)
• Lyrics Plugin: LRCLib will fallback to plain lyrics if synced lyrics are not found and synced flag is set to yes.
• Lyrics Plugin: Rewrite lyrics tests using pytest to provide isolated configuration for each test case. This fixes the issue where some tests failed because they read developers' local lyrics configuration. 🐛 (#5133)
• ParentWork Plugin: Only output parentwork changes when running in verbose mode.
• Sort Order: Fix a bug that would raise an exception when sorting on a non-string field that is not populated in all items. 🐛 (#5512)
• Thumbnails Plugin: Fix API call to GIO on big endian architectures (like s390x) in thumbnails plugin. 🐛 (#5708)
• import: Fix MemoryError and improve performance tagging large albums by replacing munkres library with lap.lapjv. 🐛 (#5207)
• write: Fix the issue where for certain files differences in mb_artistid, mb_albumartistid and albumtype fields are shown on every attempt to write tags. Note: your music needs to be reimported with beet import -LI or synchronised with beet mbsync in order to fix this! 🐛 (#5265) 🐛 (#5371) 🐛 (#4715)

For packagers

• External plugin developers: beetsplug/__init__.py file can be removed from your plugin as beets now uses native/implicit namespace package setup.
• The minimum supported Python version is now 3.9.

Other changes

• Database models are now serializable with pickle.
• Release workflow: fix the issue where the new release tag is created for the wrong (outdated) commit. Now the tag is created in the same workflow step right after committing the version update. 🐛 (#5539)
• FtInTitle Plugin: Optimize the plugin by avoiding unnecessary writes to the database.
• Smart Playlist Plugin: URL-encode additional item fields within generated EXTM3U playlists instead of JSON-encoding them.
• typehints: ./beets/importer.py file now has improved typehints.
• typehints: ./beets/plugins.py file now includes typehints.

Release v2.2.0

New features

• /plugins/substitute: Allow the replacement string to use capture groups from the match. It is thus possible to create more general rules, applying to many different artists at once.

Bug fixes

• Bring back test files and the manual to the source distribution tarball. 🐛 (#5513)
• Fix bug where matcher doesn't consider medium number when importing. This makes it difficult to import hybrid SACDs and other releases with duplicate tracks. 🐛 (#5148)
• Check if running python from the Microsoft Store and provide feedback to install from python.org. 🐛 (#5467)

Other changes

• Changed bitesize label to good first issue. Our contribute page is now automatically populated with these issues. 🐛 (#4855)

Release v2.1.0

New features

• Ability to query albums with track db fields and vice-versa, for example beet list -a title:something or beet list artpath:cover. Consequently album queries involving path field have been sped up, like beet list -a path:/path/.
• Beets now uses platformdirs to determine the default music directory. This location varies between systems -- for example, users can configure it on Unix systems via user-dirs.dirs(5).
• New template function added: %capitalize. Converts the first letter of the text to uppercase and the rest to lowercase.
• Plugin autobpm: Add new configuration option beat_track_kwargs which enables adjusting keyword arguments supplied to librosa's beat_track function call.
• Plugin ftintitle: New keep_in_artist option for the plugin, which allows keeping the "feat." part in the artist metadata while still changing the title.

Bug fixes

• Album flexible fields are now correctly saved. For instance MusicBrainz external links such as bandcamp_album_id will be available on albums in addition to tracks. For albums already in your library, a re-import is required for the fields to be added. Such a re-import can be done with, in this case, beet import -L data_source:=MusicBrainz.
• Fix lyrics plugin only getting part of the lyrics from Genius.com 🐛 (#4815)
• Fix the TypeError when set_fields is provided non-string values. 🐛 (#4840)
• Fix the auto value for the reflink config option.
• Improve naming of temporary files by separating the random part with the file extension.
• Plugin autobpm: Fix the TypeError where tempo was being returned as a numpy array. Update librosa dependency constraint to prevent similar issues in the future. 🐛 (#5289)
• Plugin convert: Fixed the convert plugin no_convert option so that it no longer treats "and" and "or" queries the same. To maintain previous behaviour add commas between your query keywords. For help see combiningqueries.
• Plugin discogs: Fix the TypeError when there is no description.
• Plugin ftintitle: The detection of a "feat. X" part in a song title does not produce any false positives caused by words like "and" or "with" anymore. 🐛 (#5441)
• Plugin ftintitle: The detection of a "feat. X" part now also matches such parts if they are in parentheses or brackets. 🐛 (#5436)
• Plugin lyrics: Update tekstowo backend to fetch lyrics directly since recent updates to their website made it unsearchable. 🐛 (#5456)
• Use single quotes in all SQL queries 🐛 (#4709)

For packagers

• The beet script has been removed from the repository.
• The typing_extensions is required for Python 3.10 and below.
• The minimum supported Python version is now 3.8.

Other changes

• Added caching for dependency installation in all CI jobs which speeds them up a bit, especially the tests.
• GitHub workflows have been reorganised for clarity: style, linting, type and docs checks now live in separate jobs and are named accordingly.
• Installation instructions have been made consistent across plugins documentation. Users should simply install beets with an extra of the corresponding plugin name in order to install extra dependencies for that plugin.
• Plugin autobpm: Add plugin dependencies to pyproject.toml under the autobpm extra and update the plugin installation instructions in the docs. Since importing the bpm calculation functionality from librosa takes around 4 seconds, update the plugin to only do so when it actually needs to calculate the bpm. Previously this import was being done immediately, so every beet invocation was being delayed by a couple of seconds. 🐛 (#5185)
• The linting workflow has been made to run only when Python files or documentation is changed, and they only check the changed files. When dependencies are updated (poetry.lock), then the entire code base is checked.
• The long-deprecated beets.util.confit module has been removed. This may cause extremely outdated external plugins to fail to load.
• contributing: Since poetry now manages local virtual environments, tox has been replaced by a task runner poethepoet. This change affects beets developers and contributors. Please see updates in the development-tools section for more details. Type poe while in the project directory to see the available commands.
• contributing: The project now uses poetry for packaging and dependency management. This change affects project management and mostly affects beets developers. Please see updates in getting-the-source and testing for more information.

Release v2.0.0

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: Prefer editor from VISUAL environment variable over EDITOR.
• config: Prefer editor from VISUAL environment variable over EDITOR.
• listenbrainz: Add initial support for importing history and playlists from ListenBrainz 🐛 (#1719)
• mbsubmit: add new prompt choices helping further to submit unmatched tracks to MusicBrainz faster.
• spotify: We now fetch track's ISRC, EAN, and UPC identifiers from Spotify when using the spotifysync command. 🐛 (#4992)
• discogs: 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: 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: 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)
• bareasc 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)
• mbsubmit: 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: The plugin now provides an additional command spotifysync that allows getting track popularity and audio features information from Spotify. 🐛 (#4094)
• spotify: 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-config: a new musicbrainz.enabled option allows disabling the MusicBrainz metadata source during the autotagging process
• kodiupdate: 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 <exact-match> queries, using the prefixes = and =~. 🐛 (#4251)
• discogs: Permit appending style to genre.
• discogs: Implement item_candidates for matching singletons.
• discogs: Check for compliant discogs_client module.
• convert: 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.
• import-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{} <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.
• smartplaylist: A new --pretend option lets the user see what a new or changed smart playlist saved in the config is actually returning. 🐛 (#4573)
• fromfilename: Add debug log messages that inform when the plugin replaced bad (missing) artist, title or tracknumber metadata. 🐛 (#4561) 🐛 (#4600)
• musicbrainz-config: MusicBrainz release pages often link to related metadata sources like Discogs, Bandcamp, Spotify, Deezer and Beatport. When enabled via the musicbrainz.external_ids options, release ID's will be extracted from those URL's and imported to the library. 🐛 (#4220)
• convert: Add support for generating m3u8 playlists together with converted media files. 🐛 (#4373)
• Fetch the release_group_title field from MusicBrainz. 🐛 4809
• discogs: Add support for applying album information on singleton imports. 🐛 4716
• smartplaylist: 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: Updates are now triggered whenever either the beets database is changed or a smart playlist is created/updated. 🐛 4862
• importfeeds: Add a new output format allowing to save a playlist once per import session. 🐛 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. 🐛 4866
• embyupdate: Add handling for private users by adding userid config option. 🐛 (#4402)
• substitute: 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: Add the autobpm plugin which uses Librosa to calculate the BPM of the audio. 🐛 (#3856)
• fetchart: 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: 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.
• advancedrewrite: Add an advanced version of the rewrite plugin which allows to replace fields based on a given library query.
• lyrics: 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.
• smartplaylist: Expose config options as CLI options.
• smartplaylist: Add new option smartplaylist.output.
• smartplaylist: Add new option smartplaylist.uri_format.
• Sorted the default configuration file into categories. 🐛 (#4987)
• convert: 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)
• smartplaylist: Add new config option smartplaylist.fields.

Bug fixes

• lastimport: Improve error handling in the process_tracks function and enable it to be used with other plugins.
• spotify: Improve handling of ConnectionError.
• deezer: Improve Deezer plugin error handling and set requests timeout to 10 seconds. 🐛 (#4983)
• spotify: Add bad gateway (502) error handling.
• spotify: 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: 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: Fixed the error where Deezer plugin would crash if non-Deezer id is passed during import.
• fetchart: Fix fetching from Cover Art Archive when the maxwidth option is set to one of the supported Cover Art Archive widths.
• discogs: 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: Set default max_bitrate value to None to avoid transcoding when this parameter is not set. 🐛 (#4472)
• replaygain: 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 ...

beets 1.6.0

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{.interpreted-text role="user"}. #2200
• An accompanying new albumtypes includes some options for formatting this new albumtypes field. Thanks to edgars-supe{.interpreted-text role="user"}.

Other new things:

• permissions: The plugin now sets cover art permissions to match the audio file permissions.
• unimported: A new configuration option supports excluding specific subdirectories in library.
• info: Add support for an --album flag.
• export: 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: 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: 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: Fix a crash when Beautiful Soup is not installed. #4027
• discogs: Support a new Discogs URL format for IDs. #4080
• discogs: Remove built-in rate-limiting because the Discogs Python library we use now has its own rate-limiting. 🐛 4108
• export: Fix some duplicated output.
• aura: Fix a potential security hole when serving image files. #4160

For plugin developers:

• :pybeets.library.Item.destination{.interpreted-text role="meth"} 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

beets 1.5.0

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-config`, 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 lets you find untracked files in your library directory.
• The aura 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 gets information about the original work, which is useful for classical music. Thanks to @dosoe. #2580 #3279
• bpd: 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 can autotag tracks and albums using the Deezer database. Thanks to @rhlahuja. #3355
• A new bareasc 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: The plugin can now get album art from last.fm. #3530
• web: 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-config for more details.
• mpdstats: Add a new strip_path option to help build the right local path from MPD information.
• convert: Conversion can now parallelize conversion jobs on Python 3.
• lastgenre: 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
• chroma: The plugin now updates file metadata after generating fingerprints through the submit command.
• lastgenre: Added more heavy metal genres to the built-in genre filter lists.
• A new subsonicplaylist can import playlists from a Subsonic server.
• subsonicupdate: 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 adds Fish shell tab autocompletion to beets.
• plugins/fetchart and plugins/embedart: Added a new quality option that controls the quality of the image output when the image is resized.
• plugins/keyfinder: Added support for keyfinder-cli. Thanks to @BrainDamage.
• plugins/fetchart: Added a new high_resolution config option to allow downloading of higher resolution iTunes artwork (at the expense of file size). #3391
• plugins/discogs: The plugin applies two new fields: discogs_labelid and discogs_artistid. #3413
• export: Added a new -f (--format) flag, which can export your data as JSON, JSON lines, CSV, or XML. Thanks to @austinmm. #3402
• convert: 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: 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: The new ffmpeg ReplayGain backend supports R128_ tags. #3056
• plugins/replaygain: 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: The plugin now collects the "style" field. Thanks to @thedevilisinthedetails. #2579 #3251
• absubmit: 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: The plugin now also gets genre information and a new discogs_albumid field from the Discogs API. Thanks to @thedevilisinthedetails. #465 #3322
• acousticbrainz: The plugin now fetches two more additional fields: moods_mirex and timbre. Thanks to @malcops. #2860
• playlist and smartplaylist: 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: The plugin now gets the musical key, BPM, and genre for each track. #2080
• A new bpsync can synchronize metadata changes from the Beatport database (like the existing mbsync for MusicBrainz).
• hook: The plugin now treats non-zero exit codes as errors. #3409
• subsonicupdate: 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: The new index_tracks option enables incorporation of work names and intra-work divisions into imported track titles. Thanks to cole-miller. #3459
• web: 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: Added an option to use a secure connection to Plex server, and to ignore certificate validation errors if necessary. #2871
• convert: 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 :user:aereaux`.
• replaygain: Analysis now happens in parallel using the command and ffmpeg backends. #3478
• plugins/replaygain: The bs1770gain backend is removed. Thanks to @SamuelCook.
• Added trackdisambig which stores the recording disambiguation from MusicBrainz for each track. #1904
• plugins/fetchart: The new max_filesize configuration sets a maximum target image file size.
• badfiles: Checkers can now run during import with the check_on_import config option.
• export: 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: The plugin now also fetches the "Date Added" field from iTunes databases and stores it in the itunes_dateadded field. Thanks to @sandersantema.
• lyrics: 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: Fix the assignment of the genre field, and rename musical_key to initial_key. #3387
• lyrics: Fixed the Musixmatch backend for lyrics pages when lyrics are divided into multiple elements on the webpage, and when the lyrics are missing.
• web: Allow use of the backslash character in regex queries. #3867
• web: Fixed a small bug that caused the album art path to be redacted e...