MPD: Using beets to manage your music!

MPD is an excellent way to play your music collection, but you do not want to depend on MPD or its database. Maybe you want to use your library also in other playback programms.

Beets is a really beautiful Python application. It allows you to import your music collection, while fetching metadata from online databases like musicbrainz.org or discogs.com. There are also some plugins available which allow you to fetch genres from LastFm, fetch music art images or create intelligent auto-updating playlists, which use regex to match songs. This allows to to create an (almost) perfect music library with minimal effort.

Here’s my config with some more plugins. You can look them up here.

 1directory: /media/music/library/
 2library: /media/music/library.db
 3ui:
 4    color: yes
 5    colors:
 6        text_success: green
 7        text_warning: yellow
 8        text_error: red
 9        text_highlight: red
10        text_highlight_minor: lightgray
11        action_default: turquoise
12        action: blue
13
14plugins: web fetchart fromfilename lastgenre mpdstats mpdupdate duplicates missing follow lastimport smartplaylist embedart
15
16import:
17    move: yes
18    copy: no
19
20lastfm:
21    user: ammannmax
22
23mpd:
24    host: localhost
25    port: 6600
26
27follow:
28    auto: yes
29    email: **** 
30    password: ****
31    userid: **** 
32
33smartplaylist:
34    relative_to: /media/music/library
35    playlist_dir: /media/music/library
36    playlists:
37        - name: already_listened.m3u
38          query: 'play_count:1..'
39        - name: reggae.m3u
40          query: 'genre::(Reggae|Ska)'             
41        - name: rock.m3u
42          query: 'genre::(Metal|Rock|Hardcore)'
43        - name: other.m3u
44          query: 'genre::^(?:(?!Rock|Metal|Hardcore|Reggae).)*$\r?\n?'
45embedart:
46    auto: yes

Do you have questions? Send an email to max@maxammann.org