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

The Web server hostname (and port, optionally) that will be contacted by beets. You can use this to configure beets to use your own MusicBrainz database instead of the main server.

The server must have search indices enabled (see Building search indexes).

Example:

musicbrainz:
    host: localhost:5000
https (default: no)#

Makes the client use HTTPS instead of HTTP. This setting applies only to custom servers. The official MusicBrainz server always uses HTTPS.

ratelimit (default: 1)#

Controls the number of Web service requests per second. This setting applies only to custom servers. The official MusicBrainz server enforces a rate limit of 1 request per second.

ratelimit_interval (default: 1.0)#

The time interval (in seconds) for the rate limit. Only applies to custom servers.

enabled (default: yes)#

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

extra_tags (default: [])#

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.

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

Tags supported by this setting:

  • alias (also search for release aliases matching the query)

  • barcode

  • catalognum

  • country

  • label

  • media

  • tracks (number of tracks on the release)

  • year

Example:

musicbrainz:
    extra_tags: [alias, barcode, catalognum, country, label, media, tracks, year]
genres (default: no)#

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.

external_ids#

Default

musicbrainz:
    external_ids:
        discogs: no
        spotify: no
        bandcamp: no
        beatport: no
        deezer: no
        tidal: no

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.

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

genres_tag (default: genre)#

Either genre or tag. Specify genre to use just musicbrainz genre and tag to use all user-supplied musicbrainz tags.

data_source_mismatch_penalty (default: 0.5)#

Penalty applied when the data source of a match candidate differs from the original source of your existing tracks. Any decimal number between 0.0 and 1.0

This setting controls how much to penalize matches from different metadata sources during import. The penalty is applied when beets detects that a match candidate comes from a different data source than what appears to be the original source of your music collection.

Example configurations:

# Prefer MusicBrainz over Discogs when sources don't match
plugins: musicbrainz discogs

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.3  # Lower penalty = preferred
discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.8  # Higher penalty = less preferred

# Do not penalise candidates from Discogs at all
plugins: musicbrainz discogs

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.5
discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.0

# Disable cross-source penalties entirely
plugins: musicbrainz discogs

musicbrainz:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.0
discogs:
    data_source_mismatch_penalty: 0.0

Tip

The last configuration is equivalent to setting:

match:
    distance_weights:
        data_source: 0.0  # Disable data source matching
source_weight (default: 0.5)#

Deprecated since version 2.5: Use data_source_mismatch_penalty instead.

search_limit (default: 5)#

Maximum number of search results to return.