beets-oldestdate

Beets plugin that fetches oldest recording or release date for each track. This is especially useful when tracks are from best-of compilations, remasters, or re-releases. Originally based on beets-recordingdate by tweitzel, but almost entirely rewritten to actually work with MusicBrainz's incomplete information. The only thing left intact is the recording_ MP3 tags, for compatibility with beets-recordingdate.

Installation

Simply run pip install beets-oldestdate then add oldestdate to the list of active plugins in beets and configure as necessary. The plugin is intended to be used in singleton mode. Undefined behaviour may occur otherwise.

Configuration

Key	Default Value	Description
auto	True	Run oldestdate during the import phase
ignore_track_id	False	During import, ignore existing track_id. Needed if using plugin on a library already tagged by MusicBrainz
filter_on_import	True	During import, weight down candidates with no work_id so you are more likely to choose a recording with a work_id
prompt_missing_work_id	True	During import, prompt to fix work_id if missing from chosen recording
force	False	Run even if recording_ tags have already been applied to the track
overwrite_date	False	Overwrite the date MP3 tag field, inluding year, month, and day
overwrite_month	True	If overwriting date, also overwrite month field, otherwise leave blank
overwrite_day	True	If overwriting date, also overwrite day field, otherwise leave blank
filter_recordings	True	Skip recordings that have attributes before fetching them. This is usually live recordings
approach	releases	What approach to use to find oldest date. Possible values: recordings, releases, hybrid, both. recordings works like beets-recordingdate did, releases is a far more accurate method. Hybrid only fetches releases if no date was found in recordings.
release_types	None	Filter releases by type, e.g. ['Official']. Usually not needed
use_file_date	False	Use the file's embedded date too when looking for the oldest date
max_network_retries	3	Maximum amount of times a given network call will be retried, using exponential backoff, before giving up.

Optimal Configuration

musicbrainz:
  searchlimit: 20
plugins: oldestdate

oldestdate:
  auto: yes
  ignore_track_id: yes
  filter_on_import: yes
  prompt_missing_work_id: yes
  force: yes
  overwrite_date: yes
  overwrite_month: yes
  overwrite_day: yes
  filter_recordings: yes
  approach: 'releases'

How it works

The plugin will take the recording that was chosen and get its work_id. From this, it gets all recordings associated with said work. If using the recordings approach, it will look through these recordings' dates and find the oldest. If using the releases approach, it will instead go through the dates for all releases for all recordings and find the oldest (much more accurate). The difference between these two approaches is that with recordings it only takes one API call to get the necessary data, while with releases it takes n calls, where n is the number of recordings. This takes significantly longer due to MusicBrainz's default ratelimit of 1 API call per second. Due to this, the option filter_recordings exists to cut down on the amount of calls needed.

Missing work_id

If the chosen recording has no Work associated with it, the plugin cannot do its job. This is where filter_on_import comes in: it applies a negative score to tracks that don't have an associated work so they are much less likely to be chosen. However, this means some of the displayed tracks will be irrelevant. Thus, setting the searchlimit to 20 or so tracks is needed to hit the one recording that does have a work. This happens to work quite well with famous songs because there is usually a single recording with an associated work that is the original recording, and thus the oldest. If we match with this one, the other recordings that we can't get to because they are not associated with the same work are irrelevant, because we already have the oldest date.

However, it sometimes happens that there is no available recording that matches our track with an associated work. This is what prompt_missing_work_id is for: it will prompt us to either just use the single matched recording, in which case only the matched recording's data is used, and checked against the embedded date, or we can try again, or skip the track. Trying again is so that we may go to the website and amend the data, so that the recordings will have an associated work. To help with this process, the plugin prints out a URL to a search for that specific track. Your task is to create a work and associate it with all the relevant recordings, then press try again. This can be quite a laborious task, so if we see that the date printed by the plugin as being the oldest date found with just the selected recording seems accurate, choosing Use this recording would be the best choice.

Covers

The plugin is also programmed to deal with covers effectively. Because a work actually contains both the recordings of a song by the original author and any cover artists, when the song we are processing is not a cover, any recordings tagged as covers are discarded, to save API calls. Conversely, if the processed song is a cover, then we only keep cover recordings, and filter them by author, so only the relevant recordings are kept. This is so the oldest date for a cover will be the oldest date in which that cover was made, and not the original song. This only works when in releases mode, as we need to fetch the recordings to get the author data. In recordings mode, all covers are treated as the same, even if they may be from different authors.