Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope and Audience

  • Beets is praised as extremely flexible and powerful but clearly pitched at “music geek” power users comfortable with the terminal, not average streamers.
  • Typical use: people with large local collections (Bandcamp, CDs, indie labels, bootlegs) who want precise control over tags, filenames, directory layout, and workflows.

Workflows and Integrations

  • Common pipeline: buy on Bandcamp → download ZIP → beet import → auto-extract, match via MusicBrainz, retag, and organize into a preferred folder scheme.
  • Picard is often used alongside beets for tricky releases, then imported “as is” into beets.
  • Plugins/tools mentioned:
    • lastgenre (with canonicalization and whitelist) for controlling genre sprawl.
    • beets-alternatives for maintaining alternative directory layouts for servers like Navidrome.
    • beets-flask and similar tools to provide web UIs and background import pipelines.
  • Some use beets only as a metadata DB (no file copying/writing) or in combination with other taggers (MusicBee, Foobar, OneTagger, MP3Tag).

Tagging, Genres, and Non-standard Material

  • Genre handling is a major theme:
    • Some want a small curated genre whitelist; others see genre as useless or reductive and strip it entirely.
    • Others embrace detailed genre taxonomies (including using RateYourMusic data) and multiple genres per track.
  • Classical music and multi-pressing popular releases are reported as hard to model; Apple’s classical approach and Roon are cited as better references.
  • Beets’ model fits canonical commercial releases best. Users report serious friction with: indie/Bandcamp items not yet in databases, bootlegs, fan recordings, DJ sets, personal “Frankenstein” edits, and festivals.
  • Two strategies emerge: contribute missing releases to MusicBrainz (often encouraged and enjoyed) vs. importing such material “as-is” with local-only metadata.

UX, Reliability, and Limitations

  • Autotagger is intentionally “fussy” and interactive; some like this as “quality time” with their library, others find it tedious babysitting.
  • Pain points: crashes (often when MusicBrainz is unstable), weak non-interactive/one-shot mode, no progress bar, fragile config leading to confusing errors, troublesome transcoding workflows, and inability to preserve arbitrary directory structures.
  • Despite frustrations, many still view beets as the best available CLI toolkit for deep, scriptable management of a large music library.

Formats and Archival Debates

  • Long subthread on 320 kbps MP3 vs FLAC:
    • Several keep FLAC purely for archival and future transcoding; audible differences are debated and seen as system- and listener-dependent.
    • Some redo old low-bitrate rips; others deem 256/320 kbps “good enough” and avoid migration hassle.