MusicBrainz Plugin

The musicbrainz plugin extends the autotagger's search capabilities to include matches from the MusicBrainz database.

Installation

To use the musicbrainz plugin, enable it in your configuration (see Using Plugins)

Configuration

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

Default

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.5
    search_limit: 5
    host: musicbrainz.org
    https: no
    ratelimit: 1
    ratelimit_interval: 1.0
    extra_tags: []
    genres: no
    external_ids:
        discogs: no
        bandcamp: no
        spotify: no
        deezer: no
        beatport: no
        tidal: no

You can instruct beets to use your own MusicBrainz database instead of the

main server. Use the host, https and ratelimit options under a musicbrainz: header, like so

musicbrainz:
    host: localhost:5000
    https: no
    ratelimit: 100

The host key, of course, controls the Web server hostname (and port, optionally) that will be contacted by beets (default: musicbrainz.org). The https key makes the client use HTTPS instead of HTTP. This setting applies only to custom servers. The official MusicBrainz server always uses HTTPS. (Default: no.) The server must have search indices enabled (see Building search indexes).

The ratelimit option, an integer, controls the number of Web service requests per second (default: 1). Do not change the rate limit setting if you're using the main MusicBrainz server---on this public server, you're limited to one request per second.

enabled

Deprecated since version 2.4: Add musicbrainz to the plugins list instead.

This option allows you to disable using MusicBrainz as a metadata source. This applies if you use plugins that fetch data from alternative sources and should make the import process quicker.

Default: yes.

search_limit

The number of matches returned when sending search queries to the MusicBrainz server.

Default: 5.

searchlimit

Deprecated since version 2.4: Use search_limit.

extra_tags

By default, beets will use only the artist, album, and track count to query MusicBrainz. Additional tags to be queried can be supplied with the extra_tags setting. For example

musicbrainz:
    extra_tags: [barcode, catalognum, country, label, media, year]

This setting should improve the autotagger results if the metadata with the given tags match the metadata returned by MusicBrainz.

Note that the only tags supported by this setting are the ones listed in the above example.

Default: []

genres

Use MusicBrainz genre tags to populate (and replace if it's already set) the genre tag. This will make it a list of all the genres tagged for the release and the release-group on MusicBrainz, separated by "; " and sorted by the total number of votes. Default: no

external_ids

Set any of the external_ids options to yes to enable the MusicBrainz importer to look for links to related metadata sources. If such a link is available the release ID will be extracted from the URL provided and imported to the beets library

musicbrainz:
    external_ids:
        discogs: yes
        spotify: yes
        bandcamp: yes
        beatport: yes
        deezer: yes
        tidal: yes

The library fields of the corresponding Autotagger Extensions are used to save the data (discogs_albumid, bandcamp_album_id, spotify_album_id, beatport_album_id, deezer_album_id, tidal_album_id). On re-imports existing data will be overwritten.

The default of all options is no.