Wanted Albums Plugin for Beets

Plugin for the music library manager, Beets. Discover new or old albums missing from your music collection, and take action!

Installation

Instructions

git clone https://github.com/gryphonmyers/beets-wanted-albums-plugin.git
cd beets-wanted-albums-plugin
python setup.py install

Add wantedalbums to the plugins option in your Beets config.yaml.

plugins: wantedalbums

Commands

This plugin adds several new commands to Beets, allowing you to curate and act upon your wanted albums list.

monitor

beet monitor [query]

The album artist(s) of the items matching the provided query will be added to your monitored artist list. Subsequent calls to updatewanted will include these artists.

If no query is included, all album artists in your library will be monitored.

unmonitor

beet unmonitor [query]

The album artist(s) of the items matching the provided query will be removed from your monitored artist list. Subsequent called to updatewanted will no longer include these artists (any currently wanted albums will remain - if you want those removed, use the unwant command).

If no query is included, all album artists in your library will be unmonitored.

listmonitored

beet listmonitored [query]

Lists out any monitored album artist(s) of the items matching the provided query.

If no query is included, all monitored artists will be listed.

updatewanted

beet updatewanted [query]

Searches Musicbrainz for release groups (albums) that have an album artist that matches any of your monitored artists, are not already on your wanted list, and are not already in your library. All matching albums will be added to your list of wanted albums.

If no query is included, albums will be searched for all monitored artists.

listwanted

beet listwanted

Lists all wanted albums.

execwanted

beet execwanted

Executes a command for each wanted album. If that command does not error, the album will be marked as pending. Pending albums will not be included in subsequent calls of execwanted until the configured exec_timeout has passed, and only if the album has not been imported into your library by then.

The intended purpose of this command is for you to run a script that will eventually lead to the album being imported into your library. If something goes wrong and the album never makes it into your library, exec_timeout allows you to have the plugin try again.

Configuration

exec_command

An executable command (e.g. a path to a bash script) that will be run for each wanted album when execwanted is run.

wantedalbums:
    exec_command: '/home/mr-guy/my-scripts/wanted-album-exec.sh'

The command will be run with the following arguments:

1. The musicbrainz release group id of the wanted album
2. The title of the album
3. The musicbrainz artist id of the album's artist
4. The name of the album's artist
5. The number of times a command has been previously executed for this album.

[exec_timeout=5000]

The exec_timeout option indicates how long (in seconds) the execwanted command will wait before re-executing your configured command for a given album.

[statefile=wantedalbums.pickle]

The statefile option determines where this plugin will store persistent data.

Additional Thoughts

The idea here is to manually curate your monitored artists, then run updatewanted and execwanted regularly (e.g. via cron) in order to automatically get albums you care about into your library.

Please don't let this plugin run multiple commands (or instances of the same command) at the same time. Concurrency handling is not great at the moment.