Beets Changelog

What's new in Beets 1.3.13

Apr 25, 2015

This is a tiny bug-fix release. It copes with a dependency upgrade that broke beets.
THERE ARE JUST TWO FIXES:
Fix compatibility with Jellyfish version 0.5.0.
embedart: In auto mode (the import hook), the plugin now respects the write config option under import. If this is disabled, album art is no longer embedded on import in order to leave files untouched---in effect, auto is implicitly disabled. #1427

New in Beets 1.3.12 (Apr 20, 2015)

This little update makes queries more powerful, sorts music more intelligently, and removes a performance bottleneck. There’s an experimental new plugin for synchronizing metadata with music players.
Packagers should also note a new dependency in this version: the Jellyfish Python library makes our text comparisons (a big part of the auto-tagging process) go much faster.
New features:
Queries can now use “or” logic: if you use a comma to separate parts of a query, items and albums will match either side of the comma. For example, beet ls foo , bar will get all the items matching foo or matching bar. See Combining Keywords. #1423
The autotagger’s matching algorithm is faster. We now use the Jellyfish library to compute string similarity, which is better optimized than our hand-rolled edit distance implementation. #1389
Sorting is now case insensitive by default. This means that artists will be sorted lexicographically regardless of case. For example, the artist alt-J will now properly sort before YACHT. (Previously, it would have ended up at the end of the list, after all the capital-letter artists.) You can turn this new behavior off using the sort_case_insensitive configuration option. See Sort Order. #1429
An experimental new MetaSync Plugin lets you get metadata from your favorite music players, starting with Amarok. #1386
FetchArt Plugin: There are new settings to control what constitutes “acceptable” images. The minwidth option constrains the minimum image width in pixels and the enforce_ratio option requires that images be square. #1394
Little fixes and improvements:
FetchArt Plugin: Remove a hard size limit when fetching from the Cover Art Archive.
The output of the fields command is now sorted. Thanks to multikatt. #1402
ReplayGain Plugin: Fix a number of issues with the new bs1770gain backend on Windows. Also, fix missing debug output in import mode. #1398
Beets should now be better at guessing the appropriate output encoding on Windows. (Specifically, the console output encoding is guessed separately from the encoding for command-line arguments.) A bug was also fixed where beets would ignore the locale settings and use UTF-8 by default. #1419
Discogs Plugin: Better error handling when we can’t communicate with Discogs on setup. #1417
ImportAdded Plugin: Fix a crash when importing singletons in-place. #1416
Fuzzy Search Plugin: Fix a regression causing a crash in the last release. #1422
Fix a crash when the importer cannot open its log file. Thanks to barsanuphe. #1426
Fix an error when trying to write tags for items with flexible fields called date and original_date (which are not built-in beets fields). #1404

New in Beets 1.3.11 (Apr 6, 2015)

In this release, we refactored the logging system to be more flexible and more useful. There are more granular levels of verbosity, the output from plugins should be more consistent, and several kinds of logging bugs should be impossible in the future.
There are also two new plugins: one for filtering the files you import and an evolved plugin for using album art as directory thumbnails in file managers. There’s a new source for album art, and the importer now records the source of match data. This is a particularly huge release—there’s lots more below.
There’s one big change with this release: Python 2.6 is no longer supported. You’ll need Python 2.7. Please trust us when we say this let us remove a surprising number of ugly hacks throughout the code.
Major new features and bigger changes:
There are now multiple levels of output verbosity. On the command line, you can make beets somewhat verbose with -v or very verbose with -vv. For the importer especially, this makes the first verbose mode much more manageable, while still preserving an option for overwhelmingly verbose debug output. #1244
A new FileFilter Plugin lets you write regular expressions to automatically avoid importing certain files. Thanks to mried. #1186
A new Thumbnails Plugin generates cover-art thumbnails for album folders for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. (This replaces the Freedesktop Plugin, which only worked with the Dolphin file manager.)
ReplayGain Plugin: There is a new backend that uses the bs1770gain analysis tool. Thanks to jmwatte. #1343
A new filesize field on items indicates the number of bytes in the file. #1291
A new searchlimit configuration option allows you to specify how many search results you wish to see when looking up releases at MusicBrainz during import. #1245
The importer now records the data source for a match in a new flexible attribute data_source on items and albums. #1311
The colors used in the terminal interface are now configurable via the new config option colors, nested under the option ui. (Also, the color config option has been moved from top-level to under ui. Beets will respect the old color setting, but will warn the user with a deprecation message.) #1238
FetchArt Plugin: There’s a new Wikipedia image source that uses DBpedia to find albums. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. #1194
In the config command, the output is now redacted by default. Sensitive information like passwords and API keys is not included. The new --clear option disables redaction. #1376
You should probably also know about these core changes to the way beets works:
As mentioned above, Python 2.6 is no longer supported.
The tracktotal attribute is now a track-level field instead of an album-level one. This field stores the total number of tracks on the album, or if the per_disc_numbering config option is set, the total number of tracks on a particular medium (i.e., disc). The field was causing problems with that per_disc_numbering mode: different discs on the same album needed different track totals. The field can now work correctly in either mode.
To replace tracktotal as an album-level field, there is a new albumtotal computed attribute that provides the total number of tracks on the album. (The per_disc_numbering option has no influence on this field.)
The list_format_album and list_format_item configuration keys now affect (almost) every place where objects are printed and logged. (Previously, they only controlled the list command and a few other scattered pieces.) #1269
Relatedly, the beet program now accept top-level options --format-item and --format-album before any subcommand to control how items and albums are displayed. #1271
list_format_album and list_format_album have respectively been renamed format_album and format_item. The old names still work but each triggers a warning message. #1271
Path queries are automatically triggered only if the path targeted by the query exists. Previously, just having a slash somewhere in the query was enough, so beet ls AC/DC wouldn’t work to refer to the artist.
There are also lots of medium-sized features in this update:
Duplicates Plugin: The command has a new --strict option that will only report duplicates if all attributes are explicitly set. #1000
Smart Playlist Plugin: Playlist updating should now be faster: the plugin detects, for each playlist, whether it needs to be regenerated, instead of obliviously regenerating all of them. The splupdate command can now also take additional parameters that indicate the names of the playlists to regenerate.
Play Plugin: The command shows the output of the underlying player command and lets you interact with it. #1321
The summary shown to compare duplicate albums during import now displays the old and new filesizes. #1291
LastGenre Plugin: Add comedy, humor, and stand-up as well as a longer list of classical music genre tags to the built-in whitelist and canonicalization tree. #1206 #1239 #1240
Web Plugin: Add support for cross-origin resource sharing for more flexible in-browser clients. Thanks to Andre Miller. #1236 #1237
MBSync Plugin: A new -f/--format option controls the output format when listing unrecognized items. The output is also now more helpful by default. #1246
FetchArt Plugin: A new option, -n, extracts the cover art of all matched albums into their respective directories. Another new flag, -a, associates the extracted files with the albums in the database. #1261
Info Plugin: A new option, -i, can display only a specified subset of properties. #1287
The number of missing/unmatched tracks is shown during import. #1088
Permissions Plugin: The plugin now also adjusts the permissions of the directories. (Previously, it only affected files.) #1308 #1324
FtInTitle Plugin: You can now configure the format that the plugin uses to add the artist to the title. Thanks to amishb. #1377
And many little fixes and improvements:
ReplayGain Plugin: Stop applying replaygain directly to source files when using the mp3gain backend. #1316
Path queries are case-sensitive on non-Windows OSes. #1165
Lyrics Plugin: Silence a warning about insecure requests in the new MusixMatch backend. #1204
Fix a crash when beet is invoked without arguments. #1205 #1207
FetchArt Plugin: Do not attempt to import directories as album art. #1177 #1211
MPDStats Plugin: Avoid double-counting some play events. #773 #1212
Fix a crash when the importer deals with Unicode metadata in --pretend mode. #1214
Smart Playlist Plugin: Fix album_query so that individual files are added to the playlist instead of directories. #1225
Remove the beatport plugin. Beatport has shut off public access to their API and denied our request for an account. We have not heard from the company since 2013, so we are assuming access will not be restored.
Incremental imports now (once again) show a “skipped N directories” message.
EmbedArt Plugin: Handle errors in ImageMagick’s output. #1241
Key Finder Plugin: Parse the underlying tool’s output more robustly. #1248
EmbedArt Plugin: We now show a comprehensible error message when beet embedart -f FILE is given a non-existent path. #1252
Fix a crash when a file has an unrecognized image type tag. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1260
ImportFeeds Plugin and Smart Playlist Plugin: Automatically create parent directories for playlist files (instead of crashing when the parent directory does not exist). #1266
The write command no longer tries to “write” non-writable fields, such as the bitrate. #1268
The error message when MusicBrainz is not reachable on the network is now much clearer. Thanks to Tom Jaspers. #1190 #1272
Improve error messages when parsing query strings with shlex. #1290
EmbedArt Plugin: Fix a crash that occured when used together with the check plugin. #1241
Scrub Plugin: Log an error instead of stopping when the beet scrub command cannot write a file. Also, avoid problems on Windows with Unicode filenames. #1297
Discogs Plugin: Handle and log more kinds of communication errors. #1299 #1305
LastGenre Plugin: Bugs in the pylast library can no longer crash beets.
Convert Plugin: You can now configure the temporary directory for conversions. Thanks to autochthe. #1382 #1383
Rewrite Plugin: Fix a regression that prevented the plugin’s rewriting from applying to album-level fields like $albumartist. #1393
Play Plugin: The plugin now sorts items according to the configuration in album mode.
FetchArt Plugin: The name for extracted art files is taken from the art_filename configuration option. #1258
When there’s a parse error in a query (for example, when you type a malformed date in a date query), beets now stops with an error instead of silently ignoring the query component.
For developers:
The database_change event now sends the item or album that is subject to a change.
The OptionParser is now a CommonOptionsParser that offers facilities for adding usual options (--album, --path and --format). See Add Commands to the CLI. #1271
The logging system in beets has been overhauled. Plugins now each have their own logger, which helps by automatically adjusting the verbosity level in import mode and by prefixing the plugin’s name. Logging levels are dynamically set when a plugin is called, depending on how it is called (import stage, event or direct command). Finally, logging calls can (and should!) use modern {}-style string formatting lazily. See Logging in the plugin API docs.
A new import_task_created event lets you manipulate import tasks immediately after they are initialized. It’s also possible to replace the originally created tasks by returning new ones using this event.

New in Beets 1.3.10 (Jan 6, 2015)

his version adds a healthy helping of new features and fixes a critical MPEG-4--related bug. There are more lyrics sources, there new plugins for managing permissions and integrating with Plex, and the importer has a new --pretend flag that shows which music would be imported.
One backwards-compatibility note: the lyrics now requires the requests_ library. If you use this plugin, you will need to install the library by typing pip install requests or the equivalent for your OS.
Also, as an advance warning, this will be one of the last releases to support Python 2.6. If you have a system that cannot run Python 2.7, please consider upgrading soon.
The new features are:
A new permissions makes it easy to fix permissions on music files as they are imported. Thanks to xsteadfastx. #1098
A new plexupdate lets you notify a Plex server when the database changes. Thanks again to xsteadfastx. #1120
The import-cmd` command now has a --pretend flag that lists the files that will be imported. Thanks to mried. #1162
lyrics: Add Musixmatch source and introduce a new sources config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for lyrics and in which order.
lyrics: Add Brazilian and Spanish sources to Google custom search engine.
Add a warning when importing a directory that contains no music. #1116 #1127
zero: Can now remove embedded images. #1129 #1100
The config command can now be used to edit the configuration even when it has syntax errors. #1123 #1128
lyrics: Added a new force config option. #1150
As usual, there are loads of little fixes and improvements:
Fix a new crash with the latest version of Mutagen (1.26).
lyrics: Avoid fetching truncated lyrics from the Google backed by merging text blocks separated by empty ` tags before scraping.
We now print a better error message when the database file is corrupted.
discogs: Only prompt for authentication when running the import command. #1123
When deleting fields with the modify command, do not crash when the field cannot be removed (i.e., when it does not exist, when it is a built-in field, or when it is a computed field). #1124
The deprecated echonest_tempo plugin has been removed. Please use the echonest instead.
echonest: Fingerprint-based lookup has been removed in accordance with API changes. #1121
echonest: Avoid a crash when the song has no duration information. #896
lyrics: Avoid a crash when retrieving non-ASCII lyrics from the Google backend. #1135 #1136
smartplaylist: Sort specifiers are now respected in queries. Thanks to djl. #1138 #1137
ftintitle and lyrics: Featuring artists can now be detected when they use the Spanish word con. #1060 #1143
mbcollection: Fix an "HTTP 400" error caused by a change in the MusicBrainz API. #1152
The % and _ characters in path queries do not invoke their special SQL meaning anymore. #1146
convert: Command-line argument construction now works on Windows. Thanks to mluds. #1026 #1157 #1158
embedart: Fix an erroneous missing-art error on Windows. Thanks to mluds. #1163
importadded: Now works with in-place and symlinked imports. #1170
ftintitle: The plugin is now quiet when it runs as part of the import process. Thanks to Freso. #1176 #1172
ftintitle: Fix weird behavior when the same artist appears twice in the artist string. Thanks to Marc Addeo. #1179 #1181
lastgenre: Match songs more robustly when they contain dashes. Thanks to djl. #1156
The config command can now use $EDITOR variables with arguments.

New in Beets 1.3.9 (Nov 19, 2014)

This release adds two new standard plugins to beets: one for synchronizing Last.fm listening data and one for integrating with Linux desktops. And at long last, imports can now create symbolic links to music files instead of copying or moving them. We also gained the ability to search for album art on the iTunes Store and a new way to compute ReplayGain levels.
THE MAJOR NEW FEATURES ARE:
A new lastimport lets you download your play count data from Last.fm into a flexible attribute. Thanks to Rafael Bodill.
A new freedesktop creates metadata files for Freedesktop.org-compliant file managers. Thanks to kerobaros. #1056, #707
A new link option in the import section creates symbolic links during import instead of moving or copying. Thanks to Rovanion Luckey. #710, #114
fetchart: You can now search for art on the iTunes Store. There's also a new sources config option that lets you choose exactly where to look for images and in which order.
replaygain: A new Python Audio Tools backend was added. Thanks to Francesco Rubino. #1070
embedart: You can now automatically check that new art looks similar to existing art---ensuring that you only get a better "version" of the art you already have. See image-similarity-check.
ftintitle: The plugin now runs automatically on import. To disable this, unset the auto config flag.
THERE ARE ALSO CORE IMPROVEMENTS AND OTHER SUBSTANTIAL ADDITIONS:
The media attribute is now a track-level field instead of an album-level one. This field stores the delivery mechanism for the music, so in its album-level incarnation, it could not represent heterogeneous releases---for example, an album consisting of a CD and a DVD. Now, tracks accurately indicate the media they appear on. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.
Re-imports of your existing music now preserve its added date and flexible attributes. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
Slow queries, such as those over flexible attributes, should now be much faster when used with certain commands---notably, the play.
bpd: Add a new configuration option for setting the default volume. Thanks to IndiGit.
embedart: A new ifempty config option lets you only embed album art when no album art is present. Thanks to kerobaros.
discogs: Authenticate with the Discogs server. The plugin now requires a Discogs account due to new API restrictions. Thanks to multikatt. #1027, #1040
AND COUNTLESS LITTLE IMPROVEMENTS AND FIXES:
Standard cover art in APEv2 metadata is now supported. Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1042
convert: Avoid a crash when embedding cover art fails.
mpdstats: Fix an error on start (introduced in the previous version). Thanks to Zach Denton.
convert: The --yes command-line flag no longer expects an argument.
play: Remove the temporary .m3u file after sending it to the player.
The importer no longer tries to highlight partial differences in numeric quantities (track numbers and durations), which was often confusing.
Date-based queries that are malformed (not parse-able) no longer crash beets and instead fail silently.
duplicates: Emit an error when the checksum config option is set incorrectly.
The migration from pre-1.1, non-YAML configuration files has been removed. If you need to upgrade an old config file, use an older version of beets temporarily.
discogs: Recover from HTTP errors when communicating with the Discogs servers. Thanks to Dustin Rodriguez.
embedart: Do not log "embedding album art into..." messages during the import process.
Fix a crash in the autotagger when files had only whitespace in their metadata.
play: Fix a potential crash when the command outputs special characters. #1041
web: Queries typed into the search field are now treated as separate query components. #1045
Date tags that use slashes instead of dashes as separators are now interpreted correctly. And WMA (ASF) files now map the comments field to the "Description" tag (in addition to "WM/Comments"). Thanks to Matthias Kiefer. #1043
embedart: Avoid resizing the image multiple times when embedding into an album. Thanks to kerobaros. #1028, #1036
discogs: Avoid a situation where a trailing comma could be appended to some artist names. #1049
The output of the stats command is slightly different: the approximate size is now marked as such, and the total number of seconds only appears in exact mode.
convert: A new copy_album_art option puts images alongside converted files. Thanks to Ángel Alonso. #1050, #1055
There is no longer a "conflict" between two plugins that declare the same field with the same type. Thanks to Peter Schnebel. #1059 #1061
chroma: Limit the number of releases and recordings fetched as the result of an Acoustid match to avoid extremely long processing times for very popular music. #1068
Fix an issue where modifying an album's field without actually changing it would not update the corresponding tracks to bring differing tracks back in line with the album. #856
echonest: When communicating with the Echo Nest servers fails repeatedly, log an error instead of exiting. #1096
lyrics: Avoid an error when the Google source returns a result without a title. Thanks to Alberto Leal. #1097
Importing an archive will no longer leave temporary files behind in /tmp. Thanks to multikatt. #1067, #1091

New in Beets 1.3.8 (Sep 18, 2014)

New features:
Queries now support sorting and user-defined fields can now have types.
info: Target files can now be specified through library queries (in addition to filenames). The --library option prints library fields instead of tags. Multiple files can be summarized together with the new --summarize option.
mbcollection: A new option lets you automatically update your collection on import. Thanks to Olin Gay.
convert: A new never_convert_lossy_files option can prevent lossy transcoding. Thanks to Simon Kohlmeyer.
convert: A new --yes command-line flag skips the confirmation.
Fixes and little improvements:
Invalid state files don't crash the importer.
lyrics: Only strip featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes if no lyrics for the original artist and title were found.
Fix a crash when reading some files with missing tags.
discogs: Compatibility with the new 2.0 version of the discogs_client Python library. If you were using the old version, you wil need to upgrade to the latest version of the library to use the correspondingly new version of the plugin (e.g., with pip install -U discogs-client). Thanks to Andriy Kohut.
Fix a crash when writing files that can't be read. Thanks to Jocelyn De La Rosa.
The stats command now counts album artists. The album count also more accurately reflects the number of albums in the database.
convert: Avoid crashes when tags cannot be written to newly converted files.
Formatting templates with item data no longer confusingly shows album-level data when the two are inconsistent.
Resuming imports and beginning incremental imports should now be much faster when there is a lot of previously-imported music to skip.
lyrics: Remove tags from scraped lyrics. Thanks to Bombardment.
play: Add a relative_to config option. Thanks to BrainDamage.
Fix a crash when a MusicBrainz release has zero tracks.
The --version flag now works as an alias for the version command.
lastgenre: Remove some unhelpful genres from the default whitelist. Thanks to gwern.
importfeeds: A new echo output mode prints files' paths to standard error. Thanks to robotanarchy.
replaygain: Restore some error handling when mp3gain output cannot be parsed. The verbose log now contains the bad tool output in this case.
convert: Fix filename extensions when converting automatically.
The write plugin event allows plugins to change the tags that are written to a media file.
zero: Do not delete database values; only media file tags are affected.

New in Beets 1.3.7 (Aug 23, 2014)

New features:
Support for AIFF files. Tags are stored as ID3 frames in one of the file’s IFF chunks. Thanks to Evan Purkhiser for contributing support to Mutagen.
The new ImportAdded Plugin reads files’ modification times to set their “added” date. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
The new BPM Plugin lets you manually measure the tempo of a playing song. Thanks to aroquen.
The new Spotify Plugin generates playlists for your Spotify account. Thanks to Olin Gay.
A new required configuration option for the importer skips matches that are missing certain data. Thanks to oprietop.
When the importer detects duplicates, it now shows you some details about the potentially-replaced music so you can make an informed decision. Thanks to Howard Jones.
FetchArt Plugin: You can now optionally search for cover art on Google Image Search. Thanks to Lemutar.
A new asciify_paths configuration option replaces all non-ASCII characters in paths.
Improvements and fixes:
Compatibility with the latest version of Mutagen, 1.23.
Web Plugin: Lyrics now display readably with correct line breaks. Also, the detail view scrolls to reveal all of the lyrics. Thanks to Meet Udeshi.
Play Plugin: The command config option can now contain arguments (rather than just an executable). Thanks to Alessandro Ghedini.
Fix an error when using the modify command to remove a flexible attribute. Thanks to Pierre Rust.
Info Plugin: The command now shows audio properties (e.g., bitrate) in addition to metadata. Thanks Alessandro Ghedini.
Avoid a crash on Windows when writing to files with special characters in their names.
Play Plugin: Playing albums now generates filenames by default (as opposed to directories) for better compatibility. The use_folders option restores the old behavior. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
Fix an error when importing an empty directory with the --flat option.
MPDStats Plugin: The last song in a playlist is now correctly counted as played. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
Zero Plugin: Prevent accidental nulling of dangerous fields (IDs and paths). Thanks to brunal.
The remove command now shows the paths of files that will be deleted. Thanks again to brunal.
Don’t display changes for fields that are not in the restricted field set. This fixes write showing changes for fields that are not written to the file.
The write command avoids displaying the item name if there are no changes for it.
When using both the Convert Plugin and the Scrub Plugin, avoid scrubbing the source file of conversions. (Fix a regression introduced in the previous release.)
ReplayGain Plugin: Logging is now quieter during import. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
FetchArt Plugin: When loading art from the filesystem, we now prioritize covers with more keywords in them. This means that cover-front.jpg will now be taken before cover-back.jpg because it contains two keywords rather than one. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
LastGenre Plugin: Remove duplicates from canonicalized genre lists. Thanks again to Fabrice Laporte.
The importer now records its progress when skipping albums. This means that incremental imports will no longer try to import albums again after you’ve chosen to skip them, and erroneous invitations to resume “interrupted” imports should be reduced. Thanks to jcassette.
Bucket Plugin: You can now customize the definition of alphanumeric “ranges” using regular expressions. And the heuristic for detecting years has been improved. Thanks to sotho.
Already-imported singleton tracks are skipped when resuming an import.
Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: A new auto configuration option disables fingerprinting on import. Thanks to ddettrittus.
Convert Plugin: A new --format option to can select the transcoding preset from the command-line.
Convert Plugin: Transcoding presets can now omit their filename extensions (extensions default to the name of the preset).
Convert Plugin: A new --pretend option lets you preview the commands the plugin will execute without actually taking any action. Thanks to Dietrich Daroch.
Fix a crash when a float-valued tag field only contained a + or - character.
Fixed a regression in the core that caused the Scrub Plugin not to work in auto mode. Thanks to Harry Khanna.
The write command now has a --force flag. Thanks again to Harry Khanna.
MBSync Plugin: Track alignment now works with albums that have multiple copies of the same recording. Thanks to Rui Gonçalves.

New in Beets 1.3.6 (May 13, 2014)

New in Beets 1.3.5 (Apr 17, 2014)

New features are:
Beets can now import zip, tar and rar archives. Just type beet import music.zip to have beets transparently extract the files to import.
ReplayGain Plugin: Added support for calculating ReplayGain values with GStreamer as well the mp3gain program. This enables ReplayGain calculation for any audio format. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
Lyrics Plugin: Lyrics should now be found for more songs. Searching is now sensitive to featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes. When a song has multiple titles, lyrics from all the named songs are now concatenated. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte and Paul Phillips.
In particular, a full complement of features for supporting musical keys are new in this release:
A new initial_key is available in the database and files’ tags. You can set the field manually using a command like beet modify initial_key=Am.
The Echo Nest Plugin sets the initial_key field if the data is available.
A new Key Finder Plugin runs a command-line tool to get the key from audio data and store it in the initial_key field.
Bug fixes and little enhancements:
Echo Nest Plugin: Truncate files larger than 50MB before uploading for analysis.
FetchArt Plugin: Fix a crash when the server does not specify a content type. Thanks to Lee Reinhardt.
Convert Plugin: The --keep-new flag now works correctly and the library includes the converted item.
The importer now logs a message instead of crashing when errors occur while opening the files to be imported.
EmbedArt Plugin: Better error messages in exceptional conditions.
Silenced some confusing error messages when searching for a non-MusicBrainz ID. Using an invalid ID (of any kind—Discogs IDs can be used there too) at the “Enter ID:” importer prompt now just silently returns no results. More info is in the verbose logs.
MBSync Plugin: Fix application of album-level metadata. Due to a regression a few releases ago, only track-level metadata was being updated.
On Windows, paths on network shares (UNC paths) no longer cause “invalid filename” errors.
ReplayGain Plugin: Fix crashes when attempting to log errors.
The modify command can now accept query arguments that contain = signs. An argument is considered a query part when a : appears before any =s. Thanks to mook.

New in Beets 1.3.4 (Apr 8, 2014)

New:
Added a config command to manage your configuration. It can show you what you currently have in your config file, point you at where the file should be, or launch your text editor to let you modify the file. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
Beets now ships with a shell command completion script! See completion. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
The modify command now allows removing flexible attributes. For example, beet modify artist:beatles oldies! deletes the oldies attribute from matching items. Thanks to brilnius.
Internally, beets has laid the groundwork for supporting multi-valued fields. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
The importer interface now shows the URL for MusicBrainz matches. Thanks to johtso.
smartplaylist: Playlists can now be generated from multiple queries (combined with "or" logic). Album-level queries are also now possible and automatic playlist regeneration can now be disabled. Thanks to brilnius.
echonest: Echo Nest similarity now weights the tempo in better proportion to other metrics. Also, options were added to specify custom thresholds and output formats. Thanks to Adam M.
Added the after_write plugin event.
lastgenre: Separator in genre lists can now be configured. Thanks to brilnius.
We now only use "primary" aliases for artist names from MusicBrainz. This eliminates some strange naming that could occur when the languages config option was set. Thanks to Filipe Fortes.
The performance of the autotagger's matching mechanism is vastly improved. This should be noticeable when matching against very large releases such as box sets.
The import command can now accept individual files as arguments even in non-singleton mode. Files are imported as one-track albums.
Fixes:
Error messages involving paths no longer escape non-ASCII characters (for legibility).
Fixed a regression that made it impossible to use the modify command to add new flexible fields. Thanks to brilnius.
echonest: Avoid crashing when the audio analysis fails. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
duplicates: Fix checksumming command execution for files with quotation marks in their names. Thanks again to Pedro Silva.
Fix a crash when importing with both of the group_albums and incremental options enabled. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
Give a sensible error message when BEETSDIR points to a file. Thanks again to geigerzaehler.
Fix a crash when reading WMA files whose boolean-valued fields contain strings. Thanks to johtso.
fetchart: The plugin now sends "beets" as the User-Agent when making scraping requests. This helps resolve some blocked requests. The plugin now also depends on the requests Python library.
The write command now only shows the changes to fields that will actually be written to a file.
duplicates: Spurious reports are now avoided for tracks with missing values (e.g., no MBIDs). Thanks to Pedro Silva.
The default replace sanitation options now remove leading whitespace by default. Thanks to brilnius.
importfeeds: Fix crash when importing albums containing / with the m3u_multi format.
Avoid crashing on Mutagen bugs while writing files' tags.
convert: Display a useful error message when the FFmpeg executable can't be found.

New in Beets 1.3.3 (Feb 27, 2014)

Plugin-provided fields can now be used in queries. For example, if you use the inline plugin to define a field called era, you can now filter your library based on that field by typing something like beet list era:goldenage.
Album-level flexible attributes and plugin-provided attributes can now be used in path formats (and other item-level templates).
Date-based queries are now possible. Try getting every track you added in February 2014 with beet ls added:2014-02 or in the whole decade with added:2010... Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
The modify-cmd command is now better at parsing and formatting fields. You can assign to boolean fields like comp, for example, using either the words "true" or "false" or the numerals 1 and 0. Any boolean-esque value is normalized to a real boolean. The update-cmd and write-cmd commands also got smarter at formatting and colorizing changes.
echonest: Tempo (BPM) is now always stored as an integer. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.
Fix Python 2.6 compatibility in some logging statements in chroma and lastgenre.
Prevent some crashes when things go really wrong when writing file metadata at the end of the import process.
New plugin events: item_removed (thanks to Romuald Conty) and item_copied (thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen).
The pluginpath config option can now point to the directory containing plugin code. (Previously, it awkwardly needed to point at a directory containing a beetsplug directory, which would then contain your code. This is preserved as an option for backwards compatibility.) This change should also work around a long-standing issue when using pluginpath when beets is installed using pip. Many thanks to geigerzaehler.
web: The /item/ and /album/ API endpoints now produce full details about albums and items, not just lists of IDs. Thanks to geigerzaehler.
Fix a potential crash when using image resizing with the fetchart or embedart without ImageMagick installed.
Also, when invoking convert for image resizing fails, we now log an error instead of crashing.
fetchart: The beet fetchart command can now associate local images with albums (unless --force is provided). Thanks to brilnius.
fetchart: Command output is now colorized. Thanks again to brilnius.
The modify-cmd command avoids writing files and committing to the database when nothing has changed. Thanks once more to brilnius.
The importer now uses the album artist field when guessing existing metadata for albums (rather than just the track artist field). Thanks to geigerzaehler.
fromfilename: Fix a crash when a filename contained only a track number (e.g., 02.mp3).
convert: Transcoding should now work on Windows.
duplicates: The move and copy destination arguments are now treated as directories. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
The modify-cmd command now skips confirmation and prints a message if no changes are necessary. Thanks to brilnius.
fetchart: When using the remote_priority config option, local image files are no longer completely ignored.
echonest: Fix an issue causing the plugin to appear twice in the output of the beet version command.
lastgenre: Fix an occasional crash when no tag weight was returned by Last.fm.
mpdstats: Restore the last_played field. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
The modify-cmd command's output now clearly shows when a file has been deleted.
Album art in files with Vorbis Comments is now marked with the "front cover" type. Thanks to Jason Lefley.

New in Beets 1.3.2 (Dec 27, 2013)

This update brings new plugins for fetching acoustic metrics and listening statistics, many more options for the duplicate detection plugin, and flexible options for fetching multiple genres.
The "core" of beets gained a new built-in command: beet write updates the metadata tags for files, bringing them back into sync with your database. Thanks to Heinz Wiesinger.
Added some plugins and overhauled some existing ones:
The new echonest plugin can fetch a wide range of acoustic attributes from The Echo Nest, including the "speechiness" and "liveness" of each track. The new plugin supersedes an older version (echonest_tempo) that only fetched the BPM field. Thanks to Pedro Silva and Peter Schnebel.
The duplicates plugin got a number of new features, thanks to Pedro Silva:
The keys option lets you specify the fields used detect duplicates.
You can now use checksumming (via an external command) to find duplicates instead of metadata via the checksum option.
The plugin can perform actions on the duplicates it find. The new copy, move, delete, delete_file, and tag options perform those actions.
The new mpdstats plugin collects statistics about your listening habits from MPD. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and Johann Klähn.
lastgenre: The new multiple option has been replaced with the count option, which lets you limit the number of genres added to your music. (No more thousand-character genre fields!) Also, the min_weight field filters out nonsense tags to make your genres more relevant. Thanks to Peter Schnebel and rashley60.
lyrics: A new --force option optionally re-downloads lyrics even when files already have them. Thanks to Bitdemon.
Fixes and improvements:
When writing ID3 tags for ReplayGain normalization, tags are written with both upper-case and lower-case TXXX frame descriptions. Previous versions of beets used only the upper-case style, which seems to be more standard, but some players (namely, Quod Libet and foobar2000) seem to only use lower-case names.
missing: Avoid a possible error when an album's tracktotal field is missing.
ftintitle: Fix an error when the sort artist is missing.
echonest_tempo: The plugin should now match songs more reliably (i.e., fewer "no tempo found" messages). Thanks to Peter Schnebel.
convert: Fix an "Item has no library" error when using the auto config option.
convert: Fix an issue where files of the wrong format would have their transcoding skipped (and files with the right format would be needlessly transcoded). Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer.
Fix an issue that caused the id3v23 option to work only occasionally.
Also fix using id3v23 in conjunction with the scrub and embedart plugins. Thanks to Chris Cogburn.
ihate: Fix an error when importing singletons. Thanks to Mathijs de Bruin.
The clutter option can now be a whitespace-separated list in addition to a YAML list.
Values for the replace option can now be empty (i.e., null is equivalent to the empty string).
lastgenre: Fix a conflict between canonicalization and multiple genres.
When a match has a year but not a month or day, the autotagger now "zeros out" the month and day fields after applying the year.
For plugin developers: added an optparse callback utility function for performing actions based on arguments. Thanks to Pedro Silva.

New in Beets 1.3.1 (Oct 14, 2013)

New:
Add Opus audio support. Thanks to Rowan Lewis.
convert: You can now transcode files to any audio format, rather than just MP3. Thanks again to Rowan Lewis.
The new fromfilename plugin guesses tags from the filenames during import when metadata tags themselves are missing. Thanks to Jan-Erik Dahlin.
The ftintitle, by @Verrus, is now distributed with beets. It helps you rewrite tags to move "featured" artists from the artist field to the title field.
The MusicBrainz data source now uses track artists over recording artists. This leads to better metadata when tagging classical music. Thanks to Henrique Ferreiro.
lastgenre: You can now get multiple genres per album or track using the multiple config option. Thanks to rashley60 on GitHub.
A new id3v23 config option makes beets write MP3 files' tags using the older ID3v2.3 metadata standard. Use this if you want your tags to be visible to Windows and some older players.
Fixes:
fetchart: Better error message when the image file has an unrecognized type.
mbcollection: Detect, log, and skip invalid MusicBrainz IDs (instead of failing with an API error).
info: Fail gracefully when used erroneously with a directory.
echonest_tempo: Fix an issue where the plugin could use the tempo from the wrong song when the API did not contain the requested song.
Fix a crash when a file's metadata included a very large number (one wider than 64 bits). These huge numbers are now replaced with zeroes in the database.
When a track on a MusicBrainz release has a different length from the underlying recording's length, the track length is now used instead.
With per_disc_numbering enabled, the tracktotal field is now set correctly (i.e., to the number of tracks on the disc).
scrub: The scrub command now restores album art in addition to other (database-backed) tags.
mpdupdate: Domain sockets can now begin with a tilde (which is correctly expanded to $HOME) as well as a slash. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
lastgenre: Fix a regression that could cause new genres found during import not to be persisted.
Fixed a crash when imported album art was also marked as "clutter" where the art would be deleted before it could be moved into place. This led to a "image.jpg not found during copy" error. Now clutter is removed (and directories pruned) much later in the process, after the import_task_files hook.
missing: Fix an error when printing missing track names. Thanks to Pedro Silva.
Fix an occasional KeyError in the update-cmd command introduced in 1.3.0.
scrub: Avoid preserving certain non-standard ID3 tags such as NCON.

New in Beets 1.3.0 (Sep 12, 2013)

New in Beets 1.2.2 (Aug 29, 2013)

New in Beets 1.2.1 (Jun 24, 2013)

New in Beets 1.2.0 (Jun 7, 2013)

New Discogs Plugin: Get matches from the Discogs database. Thanks to Artem Ponomarenko and Tai Lee.
New Beatport Plugin: Get matches from the Beatport database. Thanks to Johannes Baiter.
New Duplicates Plugin: Find tracks or albums in your library that are duplicated.
New Missing Plugin: Find albums in your library that are missing tracks.
There are also three more big features added to beets core:
Your library now keeps track of when music was added to it. The new added field is a timestamp reflecting when each item and album was imported and the new %time{} template function lets you format this timestamp for humans. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
When using queries to match on quantitative fields, you can now use numeric ranges. For example, you can get a list of albums from the ‘90s by typing beet ls year:1990..1999 or find high-bitrate music with bitrate:128000... See Numeric Range Queries. Thanks to Michael Schuerig.
ALAC files are now marked as ALAC instead of being conflated with AAC audio. Thanks to Simon Luijk.
In addition, the importer saw various UI enhancements, thanks to Tai Lee:
More consistent format and colorization of album and track metadata.
Display data source URL for matches from the new data source plugins. This should make it easier to migrate data from Discogs or Beatport into MusicBrainz.
Display album disambiguation and disc titles in the track listing, when available.
Track changes are highlighted in yellow when they indicate a change in format to or from the style of per_disc_numbering. (As before, no penalty is applied because the track number is still “correct”, just in a different format.)
Sort missing and unmatched tracks by index and title and group them together for better readability.
Indicate MusicBrainz ID mismatches.
Strongly prefer releases with a matching MusicBrainz album ID. This helps beets re-identify the same release when re-importing existing files.
Prefer releases that are closest to the tagged year. Tolerate files tagged with release or original year.
The new preferred_media config option lets you prefer a certain media type when the media field is unset on an album.
Apply minor penalties across a range of fields to differentiate between nearly identical releases: disctotal, label, catalognum, country and albumdisambig.
As usual, there were also lots of other great littler enhancements:
Random Plugin: A new -e option gives an equal chance to each artist in your collection to avoid biasing random samples to prolific artists. Thanks to Georges Dubus.
The modify now correctly converts types when modifying non-string fields. You can now safely modify the “comp” flag and the “year” field, for example. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
Convert Plugin: You can now configure the path formats for converted files separately from your main library. Thanks again to Lucas Duailibe.
The importer output now shows the number of audio files in each album. Thanks to jayme on GitHub.
Plugins can now provide fields for both Album and Item templates, thanks to Pedro Silva. Accordingly, the Inline Plugin can also now define album fields. For consistency, the pathfields configuration section has been renamed item_fields (although the old name will still work for compatibility).
Plugins can also provide metadata matches for ID searches. For example, the new Discogs plugin lets you search for an album by its Discogs ID from the same prompt that previously just accepted MusicBrainz IDs. Thanks to Johannes Baiter.
The fields command shows template fields provided by plugins. Thanks again to Pedro Silva.
MPDUpdate Plugin: You can now communicate with MPD over a Unix domain socket. Thanks to John Hawthorn.
And a batch of fixes:
Album art filenames now respect the replace configuration.
Friendly error messages are now printed when trying to read or write files that go missing.
The modify command can now change albums’ album art paths (i.e., beet modify artpath=... works). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
Zero Plugin: Fix a crash when nulling out a field that contains None.
Templates can now refer to non-tag item fields (e.g., $id and $album_id).
Lyrics Plugin: Lyrics searches should now turn up more results due to some fixes in dealing with special characters.

New in Beets 1.1.0 (Apr 30, 2013)

New in Beets 1.1.0 Beta 3 (Mar 18, 2013)

New configuration options:
languages controls the preferred languages when selecting an alias from MusicBrainz. This feature requires python-musicbrainz-ngs 0.3 or later. Thanks to Sam Doshi.
detail enables a mode where all tracks are listed in the importer UI, as opposed to only changed tracks.
The --flat option to the beet import command treats an entire directory tree of music files as a single album. This can help in situations where a multi-disc album is split across multiple directories.
ImportFeeds Plugin: An option was added to use absolute, rather than relative, paths. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
Other stuff:
A new MBSync Plugin provides a command that looks up each item and track in MusicBrainz and updates your library to reflect it. This can help you easily correct errors that have been fixed in the MB database. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer.
Fuzzy Search Plugin: The fuzzy command was removed and replaced with a new query type. To perform fuzzy searches, use the ~ prefix with list or other commands. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
As part of the above, plugins can now extend the query syntax and new kinds of matching capabilities to beets. See Extend the Query Syntax. Thanks again to Philippe Mongeau.
Convert Plugin: A new --keep-new option lets you store transcoded files in your library while backing up the originals (instead of vice-versa). Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
Convert Plugin: Also, a new auto config option will transcode audio files automatically during import. Thanks again to Lucas Duailibe.
Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: A new fingerprint command lets you generate and store fingerprints for items that don’t yet have them. One more round of applause for Lucas Duailibe.
EchoNest Tempo Plugin: API errors now issue a warning instead of exiting with an exception. We also avoid an error when track metadata contains newlines.
When the importer encounters an error (insufficient permissions, for example) when walking a directory tree, it now logs an error instead of crashing.
In path formats, null database values now expand to the empty string instead of the string “None”.
Add “System Volume Information” (an internal directory found on some Windows filesystems) to the default ignore list.
Fix a crash when ReplayGain values were set to null.
Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data.
Fix an error when the configuration file (config.yaml) is completely empty.
Fix an error introduced in 1.1b1 when importing using timid mode. Thanks to Sam Doshi.
Convert Plugin: Fix a bug when creating files with Unicode pathnames.
Fix a spurious warning from the Unidecode module when matching albums that are missing all metadata.
Fix Unicode errors when a directory or file doesn’t exist when invoking the import command. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Show friendly, human-readable errors when MusicBrainz exceptions occur.
EchoNest Tempo Plugin: Catch socket errors that are not handled by the Echo Nest library.
Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Catch Acoustid Web service errors when submitting fingerprints.

New in Beets 1.1.0 Beta 2 (Feb 18, 2013)

New configuration options:
default_action lets you determine the default (just-hit-return) option is when considering a candidate.
none_rec_action lets you skip the prompt, and automatically choose an action, when there is no good candidate. Thanks to Tai Lee.
max_rec lets you define a maximum recommendation for albums with missing/extra tracks or differing track lengths/numbers. Thanks again to Tai Lee.
original_date determines whether, when importing new albums, the year, month, and day fields should reflect the specific (e.g., reissue) release date or the original release date. Note that the original release date is always available as original_year, etc.
clutter controls which files should be ignored when cleaning up empty directories. Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson.
LastGenre Plugin: A new configuration option lets you choose to retrieve artist-level tags as genres instead of album- or track-level tags. Thanks to Peter Fern and Peter Schnebel.
max_filename_length controls truncation of long filenames. Also, beets now tries to determine the filesystem’s maximum length automatically if you leave this option unset.
FetchArt Plugin: The remote_priority option searches remote (Web) art sources even when local art is present.
You can now customize the character substituted for path separators (e.g., /) in filenames via path_sep_replace. The default is an underscore. Use this setting with caution.
Other new stuff:
Support for Windows Media/ASF audio files. Thanks to Dave Hayes.
New Smart Playlist Plugin: generate and maintain m3u playlist files based on beets queries. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.
ReplayGain tags on MPEG-4/AAC files are now supported. And, even more astonishingly, ReplayGain values in MP3 and AAC files are now compatible with iTunes Sound Check. Thanks to Dave Hayes.
Track titles in the importer UI’s difference display are now either aligned vertically or broken across two lines for readability. Thanks to Tai Lee.
Albums and items have new fields reflecting the original release date (original_year, original_month, and original_day). Previously, when tagging from MusicBrainz, only the original date was stored; now, the old fields refer to the specific release date (e.g., when the album was reissued).
Some changes to the way candidates are recommended for selection, thanks to Tai Lee:
According to the new max_rec configuration option, partial album matches are downgraded to a “low” recommendation by default.
When a match isn’t great but is either better than all the others or the only match, it is given a “low” (rather than “medium”) recommendation.
There is no prompt default (i.e., input is required) when matches are bad: “low” or “none” recommendations or when choosing a candidate other than the first.
The importer’s heuristic for coalescing the directories in a multi-disc album has been improved. It can now detect when two directories alongside each other share a similar prefix but a different number (e.g., “Album Disc 1” and “Album Disc 2”) even when they are not alone in a common parent directory. Thanks once again to Tai Lee.
Album listings in the importer UI now show the release medium (CD, Vinyl, 3xCD, etc.) as well as the disambiguation string. Thanks to Peter Schnebel.
LastGenre Plugin: The plugin can now get different genres for individual tracks on an album. Thanks to Peter Schnebel.
When getting data from MusicBrainz, the album disambiguation string (albumdisambig) now reflects both the release and the release group.
MPDUpdate Plugin: Sends an update message whenever anything in the database changes—not just when importing. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.
When the importer UI shows a difference in track numbers or durations, they are now colorized based on the suffixes that differ. For example, when showing the difference between 2:01 and 2:09, only the last digit will be highlighted.
The importer UI no longer shows a change when the track length difference is less than 10 seconds. (This threshold was previously 2 seconds.)
Two new plugin events were added: database_change and cli_exit. Thanks again to Dang Mai Hai.
Plugins are now loaded in the order they appear in the config file. Thanks to Dang Mai Hai.
BPD Plugin: Browse by album artist and album artist sort name. Thanks to Steinþór Pálsson.
EchoNest Tempo Plugin: Don’t attempt a lookup when the artist or track title is missing.
Fix an error when migrating the .beetsstate file on Windows.
A nicer error message is now given when the configuration file contains tabs. (YAML doesn’t like tabs.)
Fix the -l (log path) command-line option for the import command.

New in Beets 1.1.0 Beta 1 (Jan 30, 2013)

New in Beets 1.0 RC 2 (Jan 4, 2013)

New in Beets 1.0 RC 1 (Dec 18, 2012)

New plugin: Convert Plugin transcodes music and embeds album art while copying to a separate directory. Thanks to Jakob Schnitzer and Andrew G. Dunn.
New plugin: Fuzzy Search Plugin lets you find albums and tracks using fuzzy string matching so you don’t have to type (or even remember) their exact names. Thanks to Philippe Mongeau.
New plugin: EchoNest Tempo Plugin fetches tempo (BPM) information from The Echo Nest. Thanks to David Brenner.
New plugin: The Plugin adds a template function that helps format text for nicely-sorted directory listings. Thanks to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
New plugin: Zero Plugin filters out undesirable fields before they are written to your tags. Thanks again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
New plugin: IHate Plugin automatically skips (or warns you about) importing albums that match certain criteria. Thanks once again to Blemjhoo Tezoulbr.
ReplayGain Plugin: This plugin has been completely overhauled to use the mp3gain or aacgain command-line tools instead of the failure-prone Gstreamer ReplayGain implementation. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
FetchArt Plugin and EmbedArt Plugin: Both plugins can now resize album art to avoid excessively large images. Use the maxwidth config option with either plugin. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
Scrub Plugin: Scrubbing now removes all types of tags from a file rather than just one. For example, if your FLAC file has both ordinary FLAC tags and ID3 tags, the ID3 tags are now also removed.
stats command: New --exact switch to make the file size calculation more accurate (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).
list command: Templates given with -f can now show items’ and albums’ paths (using $path).
The output of the update, remove, and modify commands now respects the list_format_album and list_format_item config options. Thanks to Mike Kazantsev.
The art_filename option can now be a template rather than a simple string. Thanks to Jarrod Beardwood.
Fix album queries for artpath and other non-item fields.
Null values in the database can now be matched with the empty-string regular expression, ^$.
Queries now correctly match non-string values in path format predicates.
When autotagging a various-artists album, the album artist field is now used instead of the majority track artist.
LastGenre Plugin: Use the albums’ existing genre tags if they pass the whitelist (thanks to Fabrice Laporte).
LastGenre Plugin: Add a lastgenre command for fetching genres post facto (thanks to Jakob Schnitzer).
FetchArt Plugin: Local image filenames are now used in alphabetical order.
FetchArt Plugin: Fix a bug where cover art filenames could lack a .jpg extension.
Lyrics Plugin: Fix an exception with non-ASCII lyrics.
Web Plugin: The API now reports file sizes (for use with the Tomahawk resolver).
Web Plugin: Files now download with a reasonable filename rather than just being called “file” (thanks to Zach Denton).
ImportFeeds Plugin: Fix error in symlink mode with non-ASCII filenames.
MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: Fix an error when submitting a large number of releases (we now submit only 200 releases at a time instead of 350). Thanks to Jonathan Towne.
EmbedArt Plugin: Made the method for embedding art into FLAC files standard-compliant. Thanks to Daniele Sluijters.
Add the track mapping dictionary to the album_distance plugin function.
When an exception is raised while reading a file, the path of the file in question is now logged (thanks to Mike Kazantsev).
Truncate long filenames based on their bytes rather than their Unicode characters, fixing situations where encoded names could be too long.
Filename truncation now incorporates the length of the extension.
Fix an assertion failure when the MusicBrainz main database and search server disagree.
Fix a bug that caused the LastGenre Plugin and other plugins not to modify files’ tags even when they successfully change the database.
Fix a VFS bug leading to a crash in the BPD Plugin when files had non-ASCII extensions.
Fix for changing date fields (like “year”) with the modify command.
Fix a crash when input is read from a pipe without a specified encoding.
Fix some problem with identifying files on Windows with Unicode directory names in their path.
Fix a crash when Unicode queries were used with import -L re-imports.
Fix an error when fingerprinting files with Unicode filenames on Windows.
Warn instead of crashing when importing a specific file in singleton mode.
Add human-readable error messages when writing files’ tags fails or when a directory can’t be created.
Changed plugin loading so that modules can be imported without unintentionally loading the plugins they contain.

New in Beets 1.0 Beta 15 (Jul 28, 2012)

The autotagger can now find matches for albums when you have extra tracks on your filesystem that aren’t present in the MusicBrainz catalog. Previously, if you tried to match album with 15 audio files but the MusicBrainz entry had only 14 tracks, beets would ignore this match. Now, beets will show you matches even when they are “too short” and indicate which tracks from your disk are unmatched.
Tracks on multi-disc albums can now be numbered per-disc instead of per-album via the per_disc_numbering config option.
The default output format for the beet list command is now configurable via the list_format_item and list_format_album config options. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
Album cover art fetching is now encapsulated in the FetchArt Plugin. Be sure to enable this plugin if you’re using this functionality. As a result of this new organization, the new plugin has gained a few new features:
“As-is” and non-autotagged imports can now have album art imported from the local filesystem (although Web repositories are still not searched in these cases).
A new command, beet fetchart, allows you to download album art post-import. If you only want to fetch art manually, not automatically during import, set the new plugin’s autofetch option to no.
New album art sources have been added.
Errors when communicating with MusicBrainz now log an error message instead of halting the importer.
Similarly, filesystem manipulation errors now print helpful error messages instead of a messy traceback. They still interrupt beets, but they should now be easier for users to understand. Tracebacks are still available in verbose mode.
New metadata fields for artist credits: artist_credit and albumartist_credit can now contain release- and recording-specific variations of the artist’s name. See Available Values.
Revamped the way beets handles concurrent database access to avoid nondeterministic SQLite-related crashes when using the multithreaded importer. On systems where SQLite was compiled without usleep(3) support, multithreaded database access could cause an internal error (with the message “database is locked”). This release synchronizes access to the database to avoid internal SQLite contention, which should avoid this error.
Plugins can now add parallel stages to the import pipeline. See Writing Plugins.
Beets now prints out an error when you use an unrecognized field name in a query: for example, when running beet ls -a artist:foo (because artist is an item-level field).
New plugin events:
import_task_choice is called after an import task has an action assigned.
import_task_files is called after a task’s file manipulation has finished (copying or moving files, writing metadata tags).
library_opened is called when beets starts up and opens the library database.
LastGenre Plugin: Fixed a problem where path formats containing $genre would use the old genre instead of the newly discovered one.
Fix a crash when moving files to a Samba share.
MPDUpdate Plugin: Fix TypeError crash (thanks to Philippe Mongeau).
When re-importing files with import_copy enabled, only files inside the library directory are moved. Files outside the library directory are still copied. This solves a problem (introduced in 1.0b14) where beets could crash after adding files to the library but before finishing copying them; during the next import, the (external) files would be moved instead of copied.
Artist sort names are now populated correctly for multi-artist tracks and releases. (Previously, they only reflected the first artist.)
When previewing changes during import, differences in track duration are now shown as “2:50 vs. 3:10” rather than separated with -> like track numbers. This should clarify that beets isn’t doing anything to modify lengths.
Fix a problem with query-based path format matching where a field-qualified pattern, like albumtype_soundtrack, would match everything.
Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix matching with ambiguous Acoustids. Some Acoustids are identified with multiple recordings; beets now considers any associated recording a valid match. This should reduce some cases of errant track reordering when using chroma.
Fix the ID3 tag name for the catalog number field.
Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: Fix occasional crash at end of fingerprint submission and give more context to “failed fingerprint generation” errors.
Interactive prompts are sent to stdout instead of stderr.
EmbedArt Plugin: Fix crash when audio files are unreadable.
BPD Plugin: Fix crash when sockets disconnect (thanks to Matteo Mecucci).
Fix an assertion failure while importing with moving enabled when the file was already at its destination.
Fix Unicode values in the replace config option (thanks to Jakob Borg).
Use a nicer error message when input is requested but stdin is closed.
Fix errors on Windows for certain Unicode characters that can’t be represented in the MBCS encoding. This required a change to the way that paths are represented in the database on Windows; if you find that beets’ paths are out of sync with your filesystem with this release, delete and recreate your database with beet import -AWC /path/to/music.
Fix import with relative path arguments on Windows.