Discogs Plugin#

The discogs plugin extends the autotagger's search capabilities to include matches from the Discogs database.

Files can be imported as albums or as singletons. Since Discogs matches are always based on Discogs releases, the album tag is written even to singletons. This enhances the importers results when reimporting as (full or partial) albums later on.

Installation#

To use the discogs plugin, first enable it in your configuration (see Using Plugins). Then, install beets with discogs extra

pip install "beets[discogs]"

You will also need to register for a Discogs account, and provide authentication credentials via a personal access token or an OAuth2 authorization.

Matches from Discogs will now show up during import alongside matches from MusicBrainz. The search terms sent to the Discogs API are based on the artist and album tags of your tracks. If those are empty no query will be issued.

If you have a Discogs ID for an album you want to tag, you can also enter it at the "enter Id" prompt in the importer.

OAuth Authorization#

The first time you run the import command after enabling the plugin, it will ask you to authorize with Discogs by visiting the site in a browser. Subsequent runs will not require re-authorization.

Authentication via Personal Access Token#

As an alternative to OAuth, you can get a token from Discogs and add it to your configuration. To get a personal access token (called a "user token" in the python3-discogs-client documentation):

  1. login to Discogs;

  2. visit the Developer settings page;

  3. press the Generate new token button;

  4. copy the generated token;

  5. place it in your configuration in the discogs section as the user_token option:

    discogs:
    user_token: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

Configuration#

This plugin can be configured like other metadata source plugins as described in Using Metadata Source Plugins.

Default#

discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.5
    search_limit: 5
    apikey: REDACTED
    apisecret: REDACTED
    tokenfile: discogs_token.json
    user_token: REDACTED
    index_tracks: no
    append_style_genre: no
    separator: ', '
    strip_disambiguation: yes

  • index_tracks: Index tracks (see the Discogs guidelines) along with headers, mark divisions between distinct works on the same release or within works. When enabled, beets will incorporate the names of the divisions containing each track into the imported track's title. Default: no.

    For example, importing divisions album would result in track names like:

    Messiah, Part I: No.1: Sinfony
Messiah, Part II: No.22: Chorus- Behold The Lamb Of God
Athalia, Act I, Scene I: Sinfonia

    whereas with index_tracks disabled you'd get:

    No.1: Sinfony
No.22: Chorus- Behold The Lamb Of God
Sinfonia

    This option is useful when importing classical music.

  • append_style_genre: Appends the Discogs style (if found) to the genre tag. This can be useful if you want more granular genres to categorize your music. For example, a release in Discogs might have a genre of "Electronic" and a style of "Techno": enabling this setting would set the genre to be "Electronic, Techno" (assuming default separator of ", ") instead of just "Electronic". Default: False

  • separator: How to join multiple genre and style values from Discogs into a string. Default: ", "

  • strip_disambiguation: Discogs uses strings like "(4)" to mark distinct artists and labels with the same name. If you'd like to use the discogs disambiguation in your tags, you can disable it. Default: True

  • featured_string: Configure the string used for noting featured artists. Useful if you prefer Featuring or ft.. Default: Feat.

  • anv: These configuration option are dedicated to handling Artist Name Variations (ANVs). Sometimes a release credits artists differently compared to the majority of their work. For example, "Basement Jaxx" may be credited as "Tha Jaxx" or "The Basement Jaxx".You can select any combination of these config options to control where beets writes and stores the variation credit. The default, shown below, writes variations to the artist_credit field.

discogs:
    anv:
       artist_credit: True
       artist: False
       album_artist: False

Troubleshooting#

Several issues have been encountered with the Discogs API. If you have one, please start by searching for a similar issue on the repo.

Here are two things you can try:

  • Try deleting the token file (~/.config/beets/discogs_token.json by default) to force re-authorization.

  • Make sure that your system clock is accurate. The Discogs servers can reject your request if your clock is too out of sync.

Matching tracks by Discogs ID is not yet supported. The --group-albums option in album import mode provides an alternative to singleton mode for autotagging tracks that are not in album-related folders.