Using Beets to manage playlists

[Jonathan Thomas]

Hi all,

I know we've got the smart playlist plugin (which is a little different to what I need), and some of you may point me toward better software that could suit this need, but I'm wondering if there's a way to get Beets to manage playlists?

I spent a lot of time setting up many playlists for my collection (I started ripping to FLAC) in 2011, I'm still going. Along the way, I've set up "best of" playlists for all my compilation CDs that I didn't want to rip, but rather, use the back catalog of an artist. I also have best of 2011, 2012 etc.. As well as many others.

Problem I have now is that I've started importing my existing collection in to a new and improved library using Beets. And all the CUE sheets I've agonised over for two years are now all broken. 

So my questions are:

1. How can I bulk edit these CUE sheets to match the paths and new file changes set out by Beets?

2. Is there a way to use beets to set up playlists and manage them. Ie. when beets makes changes to paths, it changes cue sheets and points them to the correct places.

I'm not sure how much of a call for this exists in the community, but I for one place a lot of weight on CUE sheets and they're a fundamental part of my library that I've missed since making the jump from Windows (& Media Monkey) to Ubuntu, Beets and MPD.

Many thanks,

Jonathan

[Adrian Sampson]

Hi, Jonathan,

You’ve described two important avenues for future work in beets. (That’s open-source-speak for “beets doesn’t do either of those things yet.” :)

On playlists: https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/issues/123

It wold be great for the beets library to manage playlists, and this has been in the plans about as long as any other feature. There has, however, been surprisingly little demand for the feature. If you’re interested in helping this get built, we could really use some help with designing the feature. How should playlists “work” conceptually? What commands are necessary to manage them? Any changes to existing commands? Do queries need to be extended?

On cue sheets: https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/issues/136

This depends on the proposed “attachments” feature, which allows beets to associate non-music files with items and albums. After that, we should build a plugin for cue sheet-specific functionality. Again, design input would be helpful.

Adrian

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[Jonathan Thomas]

Great stuff, I'm always happy to help, in my own limited little way! I'm very enthusiastic about Beets and hope I can help in any way I can, even if it's not coding...

1) If I wanted to learn how to code this stuff, what language do I learn and where's the best place to start?

2) Sorry, playlists and CUE sheets are (sort of) one and the same, issue.

CUE Sheets included in albums when a CD is ripped with EAC or XLD tell the player how to queue the music, and allow for large flac files to be split in to smaller ones.

CUE sheets are also used for playlists. When I set up a playlist in Media Monkey it created a CUE sheet with the playlist info in it. 

I'll definitely help with the feature design and will endeavor to do the same as what we did for the attachments stuff.

3) Not sure why the attachments feature affects the CUE sheet functionality we build for beets, do you see a connection that I'm missing?

Again, I'll jot up some notes on how I believe we should manipulate CUE sheets upon album import and a potential "playlist-import" etc.

Should I set up another wiki page on github or...?

P.S. This is a cool discussion! They all are! Exciting stuff! :-)

Cheers,

Jonathan 

[Adrian Sampson]

> 1) If I wanted to learn how to code this stuff, what language do I learn and where's the best place to start?

Great! Beets is entirely written in Python, so start there. My standard recommendations for learning are:
Dive Into Python, best for reasonably experienced programmers:
http://www.diveintopython.net
LPTHW and Codecademy, best for beginners:
http://learnpythonthehardway.org
http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python

> 2) Sorry, playlists and CUE sheets are (sort of) one and the same, issue.

Playlists are a separate issue because they don’t *necessarily* need to use cuesheets. One can imagine manipulating playlists in the abstract within beets’ database or using M3U or XSPF playlist files. Cuesheets are a secondary issue in that respect.

(They also need special handling for CD rips, but that’s a separate feature.)

> 3) Not sure why the attachments feature affects the CUE sheet functionality we build for beets, do you see a connection that I'm missing?

Attachments provide a way to link non-music files with your albums and tracks. Cuesheets are one such file. This is only really relevant for the CD rip case, not for the playlist case (where I presume you’ll be importing and exporting playlists, not keeping them associated with the library).

> Should I set up another wiki page on github or…?

Yes, a wiki page would be great! Thanks for your interest in tackling this stuff.

Adrian

[Kartch]

Hi all, has there been progress in this area?

I'd also like to see playlist management features in Beets. Ideal functionality for me would be to add songs/albums to a playlist file using a query, then have the Smart Playlist plugin maintain the links. 

If there's a github somewhere I'd be glad to contribute. 

Thanks!

Kartch

[Adrian Sampson]

I would love to see playlist-like functionality in the beets core! Here's the relevant (old!) ticket:

https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/123

I'm happy to talk more there about the potential design if you like.

Adrian

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