Release v2.8.0

New features

• Discogs Plugin: Add extra_tags option to use additional tags (such as barcode, catalognum, country, label, media, and year) in Discogs search queries.
• Lyrics Plugin: Add auto_ignore configuration option to skip fetching lyrics for items matching a beets query during auto import.
• Missing Plugin: When running in missing album mode, allows users to specify MusicBrainz release types to show using the --release-type flag. The default behavior is also changed to just show releases of type album. 🐛 (#2661)
• Play Plugin: Added -R/--randomize flag to shuffle the playlist order before passing it to the player.
• Smart Playlist Plugin: Add new configuration option dest_regen to regenerate items' path in the generated playlist instead of using those in the library. This is useful when items have been imported in don't copy-move (-C -M) mode in the library but are later passed through the Convert Plugin plugin which will regenerate new paths according to the Beets path format.

Bug fixes

• Beatport Plugin: Use va_name config for the album artist on VA releases instead of hardcoded "Various Artists". 🐛 (#6316)
• config command on Windows now uses cmd /c start "" for the default editor fallback so beet config -e works when VISUAL and EDITOR are unset. 🐛 (#6436)
• Fish Plugin: Fix AttributeError. 🐛 (#6340)
• import command Autotagging by explicit release or recording IDs now keeps candidates from all enabled metadata sources instead of dropping matches when different providers share the same ID. 🐛 (#6178) 🐛 (#6181)
• import command Simplify autotag metadata application for albums and singletons, fixing null-overwrite handling and keeping singular/plural artist metadata fields in sync during tagging.
• LastImport Plugin: Rename flexible field play_count to lastfm_play_count to avoid conflicts with MPDStats Plugin. Migration: This cannot be migrated automatically because of the field clash. If you use LastImport Plugin without MPDStats Plugin, migrate manually with beet modify lastfm_play_count='$play_count'.
• MBSync Plugin and Missing Plugin now use each item's stored data_source for ID lookups, with a fallback to MusicBrainz.
• Missing Plugin: Fix --album mode incorrectly reporting albums already in the library as missing. The comparison now correctly uses mb_releasegroupid.
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Use va_name config for albumartist_sort, albumartists_sort, albumartist_credit, albumartists_credit, and albumartists on VA releases instead of hardcoded "Various Artists". 🐛 (#6316)
• replace: Made drive_sep_replace regex logic more precise to prevent edge-case mismatches (e.g., a song titled "1:00 AM" would incorrectly be considered a Windows drive path).

For plugin developers

• beets.metadata_plugins.album_for_id and beets.metadata_plugins.track_for_id now require a data_source argument and query only that provider.
• Colorisation, diff and layout utility helpers previously imported from beets.ui now live in beets.util.color, beets.util.diff, and beets.util.layout. Update external imports accordingly.
• The lastgenre tunelog helper was generalized into beets.logging.BeetsLogger.extra_debug, which emits DEBUG messages only at verbosity level 3 or higher (for example -vvv). Plugin authors can use it via self._log.extra_debug(...).

Other changes

• Contributing: Update pipx installation guide link
• Getting Started: Update quick installation section to reflect current installation guide structure.
• Installation: Remove redundant macOS section from the installation guide. 🐛 (#5993)
• Installation: Update installation guide to document plugin management with pipx and move package manager instructions to the FAQ.
• Installation: Update pipx installation guide link
• API-backed metadata source plugins can now use SearchApiMetadataSourcePlugin for shared search orchestration. Implement provider behavior in ~beets.metadata_plugins.SearchApiMetadataSourcePlugin.get_search_query_with_filters and ~beets.metadata_plugins.SearchApiMetadataSourcePlugin.get_search_response.
• Deprecate the Beatport Plugin and BPSync Plugin plugins. Beatport has retired the API these plugins rely on, making them non-functional. 🐛 (#3862)

Release v2.7.1

Bug fixes

• Tests that depend on the optional langdetect package are now skipped when the package is not installed. 🐛 (#6421)

Release v2.7.0

New features

• LastGenre Plugin: Added cleanup_existing configuration flag to allow whitelist canonicalization of existing genres.

• Add native support for multiple genres per album/track. The genres field now stores genres as a list and is written to files as multiple individual genre tags (e.g., separate GENRE tags for FLAC/MP3). The MusicBrainz Plugin, Beatport Plugin, Discogs Plugin and LastGenre Plugin plugins have been updated to populate the genres field as a list.

  Migration: Existing libraries with comma-separated, semicolon-separated, or slash-separated genre strings (e.g., "Rock, Alternative, Indie") are automatically migrated to the genres list when you first run beets after upgrading. The migration runs once when the database schema is updated, splitting genre strings and writing the changes to the database. The updated genres values will be written to media files the next time you run a command that writes tags (such as write command or during import). No manual action or MBSync Plugin is required.

  The genre field is split by the first separator found in the string, in the following order of precedence:

  1. LastGenre Plugin separator configuration
  2. Semicolon followed by a space
  3. Comma followed by a space
  4. Slash wrapped by spaces

• Lyrics Plugin: With synced enabled, existing synced lyrics are no longer replaced by newly fetched plain lyrics, even when force is enabled.

• Lyrics Plugin: Remove Source: <lyrics-url> suffix from lyrics. Store the backend name in lyrics_backend, URL in lyrics_url, language in lyrics_language and translation language (if translations present) in lyrics_translation_language flexible attributes. Lyrics are automatically migrated on the first beets run. 🐛 (#6370)

Bug fixes

• Convert Plugin: Fix extension substitution inside path of the exported playlist.
• FetchArt Plugin: Prevent deletion of configured fallback cover art
• FtInTitle Plugin: Fix handling of multiple featured artists with ampersand.
• Fuzzy Search Plugin: Force slow query evaluation whenever the fuzzy prefix is used (for example ~foo or %%foo), so fuzzy matching is applied consistently. 🐛 (#5638)
• Fuzzy Search Plugin: Improve fuzzy matching when the query is shorter than the field value so substring-style searches produce more useful results. 🐛 (#2043)
• import command Duplicate detection now works for as-is imports (when autotag is disabled). Previously, duplicate_keys and duplicate_action config options were silently ignored for as-is imports.
• import command When autotagging, initialise empty multi-valued fields with None instead of empty list, which caused beets to overwrite existing metadata with empty list values instead of leaving them unchanged. 🐛 (#6403)
• Zero Plugin: When the omit_single_disc option is set, disctotal is zeroed alongside disc.

For plugin developers

• If you maintain a metadata source plugin that populates the genre field, please update it to populate a list of genres instead. You will see a deprecation warning for now, but support for populating the single genre field will be removed in version 3.0.0.

Other changes

• Edit Plugin: Editing multi-valued fields now behaves more naturally, with list values handled directly to make metadata edits smoother and more predictable.
• LastGenre Plugin: The separator configuration option is removed. Since genres are now stored as a list in the genres field and written to files as individual genre tags, this option has no effect and has been removed.
• Lyrics Plugin: To cut down noise from the lrclib lyrics source, synced lyrics are now checked to ensure the final verse falls within the track's duration.
• modify command: Use the following separator to delimit multiple field values: ; . For example beet modify albumtypes="album; ep". Previously, \␀ was used as a separator. This applies to fields such as artists, AlbumTypes Plugin etc.
• Improve highlighting of multi-valued fields changes.
• Updated URLs in the documentation to use HTTPS where possible and updated outdated links.

Release v2.6.2

Bug fixes

• Bad Files Plugin: Fix number of found errors in log message
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Fix crash when release mediums lack the tracks key. 🐛 (#6302)
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Fix fetching very large releases that have more than 500 tracks. 🐛 (#6355)
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Fix search terms escaping. 🐛 (#6347)
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Fix support for alias and tracks extra_tags.
• MusicBrainz Pseudo-Release Plugin: Fix crash due to missing artist_credit field in the MusicBrainz API response. 🐛 (#6339)
• ReplayGain Plugin: Avoid magic Windows prefix in calls to command backends, such as mp3gain. 🐛 (#2946)

Other changes

• Lyrics Plugin: Disable tekstowo by default because it blocks the beets User-Agent.

Release v2.6.1

Bug fixes

• Make packaging a required dependency. 🐛 (#6332)

Release v2.6.0

Beets now requires Python 3.10 or later since support for EOL Python 3.9 has been dropped.

New features

• Added support for Python 3.13.
• Convert Plugin: force can be passed to override checks like no_convert, never_convert_lossy_files, same format, and max_bitrate
• Discogs Plugin: Added support for multi value fields. 🐛 (#6068)
• EmbedArt Plugin: Embedded arts can now be cleared during import with the clearart_on_import config option. Also, beet clearart is only going to update the files matching the query and with an embedded art, leaving untouched the files without.
• FetchArt Plugin: Added config setting for a fallback cover art image.
• FetchArt Plugin: Fix colorized output text.
• Fish Plugin: Filenames are now completed in more places, like after import.
• FtInTitle Plugin: Added album template value album_artist_no_feat.
• FtInTitle Plugin: Added argument for custom feat. words in ftintitle.
• FtInTitle Plugin: Added argument to skip the processing of artist and album artist are the same in ftintitle.
• FtInTitle Plugin: Featured artists are now inserted before brackets containing remix/edit-related keywords (e.g., "Remix", "Live", "Edit") instead of being appended at the end. This improves formatting for titles like "Song 1 (Carol Remix) ft. Bob" which becomes "Song 1 ft. Bob (Carol Remix)". A variety of brackets are supported and a new bracket_keywords configuration option allows customizing the keywords. Setting bracket_keywords to an empty list matches any bracket content regardless of keywords.
• ImportSource Plugin: Added new plugin that tracks original import paths and optionally suggests removing source files when items are removed from the library.
• LastGenre Plugin: For tuning plugin settings -vvv can be passed to receive extra verbose logging around last.fm results and how they are resolved. The extended_debug config setting and --debug option have been removed.
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Allow selecting tags or genres to populate the genres tag.
• MusicBrainz Pseudo-Release Plugin: Add a new MusicBrainz Pseudo-Release Plugin plugin to proactively receive MusicBrainz pseudo-releases as recommendations during import.
• Play Plugin: Added $playlist marker to precisely edit the playlist filepath into the command calling the player program.
• Random Plugin: Added --field option to specify which field to use for equal-chance sampling (default: albumartist).
• Spotify Plugin: Added support for multi-artist albums and tracks, saving all contributing artists to the respective fields.
• Titlecase Plugin: Add the Titlecase Plugin plugin to allow users to resolve differences in metadata source styles.

Bug fixes

• Errors in metadata plugins during autotage process will now be logged but won't crash beets anymore. If you want to raise exceptions instead, set the new configuration option raise_on_error to yes 🐛 (#5903), 🐛 (#4789).
• Fix a bug introduced in release 2.4.0 where import from any valid import-log-file always threw a "none of the paths are importable" error.
• Handle potential OSError when unlinking temporary files in ArtResizer. 🐛 (#5615)
• Running beet --config <mypath> config -e now edits <mypath> rather than the default config path. 🐛 (#5652)
• Sanitize log messages by removing control characters preventing terminal rendering issues.
• When hardlinking from a symlink (e.g. importing a symlink with hardlinking enabled), dereference the symlink then hardlink, rather than creating a new (potentially broken) symlink 🐛 (#5676)
• When using FromFilename Plugin together with Edit Plugin, temporary tags extracted from filenames are no longer lost when discarding or cancelling an edit session during import. 🐛 (#6104)
• Command-Line Interface: Fix 'from_scratch' option for singleton imports: delete all (old) metadata when new metadata is applied. 🐛 (#3706)
• Convert Plugin: auto_keep now respects no_convert and never_convert_lossy_files when deciding whether to copy/transcode items, avoiding extra lossy duplicates.
• Discogs Plugin: Fixed unexpected flex attr from the Discogs plugin. 🐛 (#6177)
• FtInTitle Plugin: Fixed artist name splitting to prioritize explicit featuring tokens (feat, ft, featuring) over generic separators (&, and), preventing incorrect splits when both are present.
• Inline Plugin: Fix recursion error when an inline field definition shadows a built-in item field (e.g., redefining track_no). Inline expressions now skip self-references during evaluation to avoid infinite recursion. 🐛 (#6115)
• LastGenre Plugin: Canonicalize genres when force and keep_existing are on, yet no genre info on lastfm could be found. 🐛 (#6303)
• LastGenre Plugin: Fix the issue where last.fm doesn't return any result in the artist genre stage because "concatenation" words in the artist name (like "feat.", "+", or "&") prevent it. Using the albumartists list field and fetching a genre for each artist separately improves the chance of receiving valid results in that stage.
• Lyrics Plugin: Accepts strings for lyrics sources (previously only accepted a list of strings). 🐛 (#5962)
• Smart Playlist Plugin: Fixed an issue where multiple queries in a playlist configuration were not preserving their order, causing items to appear in database order rather than the order specified in the config. 🐛 (#6183)
• Spotify Plugin: The plugin now gracefully handles audio-features API deprecation (HTTP 403 errors). When a 403 error is encountered from the audio-features endpoint, the plugin logs a warning once and skips audio features for all remaining tracks in the session, avoiding unnecessary API calls and rate limit exhaustion.
• Spotify Plugin: Updated Spotify API credentials. 🐛 (#6270)
• Web Plugin: repair broken /item/values/… and /albums/values/… endpoints. Previously, due to single-quotes (ie. string literal) in the SQL query, the query eg. GET /item/values/albumartist would return the literal "albumartist" instead of a list of unique album artists.
• update Edit Plugin fix display formatting of field changes to clearly show added and removed flexible fields.

For plugin developers

• A new plugin event, album_matched, is sent when an album that is being imported has been matched to its metadata and the corresponding distance has been calculated.

• Added a reusable requests handler which can be used by plugins to make HTTP requests with built-in retry and backoff logic. It uses beets user-agent and configures timeouts. See beetsplug._utils.requests.RequestHandler for documentation.

• Replaced dependency on python-musicbrainzngs with a lightweight custom MusicBrainz client implementation and updated relevant plugins accordingly:

  • ListenBrainz Plugin
  • MusicBrainz Collection Plugin
  • MusicBrainz Pseudo-Release Plugin
  • Missing Plugin
  • MusicBrainz Plugin
  • [ParentWork Plugin](https://beets.re...

Release v2.5.1

New features

• Zero Plugin: Add new configuration option, omit_single_disc, to allow zeroing the disc number on write for single-disc albums. Defaults to False.

Bug fixes

• beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin: load the last plugin class defined in the plugin namespace. 🐛 (#6093)

For packagers

• Fixed issue with legacy metadata plugins not copying properties from the base class.
• Reverted the following: When installing beets via git or locally the version string now reflects the current git branch and commit hash. 🐛 (#6089)

Other changes

• Removed outdated mailing list contact information from the documentation 🐛 (#5462).
• Getting Started: Modernized the Getting Started guide with tabbed sections and dropdown menus. Installation instructions have been streamlined, and a new subpage now provides additional setup details.

Release v2.5.0

New features

• Convert Plugin: Add a config option to disable writing metadata to converted files.
• Discogs Plugin Added support for featured artists. 🐛 (#6038)
• Discogs Plugin New configuration option featured_string to change the default string used to join featured artists. The default string is Feat..
• Discogs Plugin Support for artist_credit in Discogs tags. 🐛 (#3354)
• Discogs Plugin Support for name variations and config options to specify where the variations are written. 🐛 (#3354)
• Discogs Plugin: New config option strip_disambiguation to toggle stripping discogs numeric disambiguation on artist and label fields.
• LastGenre Plugin: Add a --pretend option to preview genre changes without storing or writing them.

Bug fixes

• Metadata source plugins: Fixed data source penalty calculation that was incorrectly applied during import matching. The source_weight configuration option has been renamed to data_source_mismatch_penalty to better reflect its purpose. 🐛 (#6066)
• Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin BPSync Plugin Fix plugin loading issue caused by an import of another beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin class. 🐛 (#6033)
• Discogs Plugin Fixed inconsistency in stripping disambiguation from artists but not labels. 🐛 (#5366)
• FromFilename Plugin: Fix 🐛 (#5218), improve the code (refactor regexps, allow for more cases, add some logging), add tests.
• MusicBrainz Plugin Refresh flexible MusicBrainz metadata on reimport so format changes are applied. 🐛 (#6036)
• Spotify Plugin Ensure spotifysync keeps popularity, ISRC, and related fields current even when audio features requests fail. 🐛 (#6061)
• Spotify Plugin Fixed an issue where candidate lookup would not find matches due to query escaping (single vs double quotes).
• Spotify Plugin Fixed an issue where track matching and lookups could return incorrect or misleading results when using the Spotify plugin. The problem occurred primarily when no album was provided or when the album field was an empty string. 🐛 (#5189)
• Spotify Plugin Removed old and undocumented config options artist_field, album_field and track that were causing issues with track matching. 🐛 (#5189)

Other changes

• Moved art.py utility module from beets into beetsplug namespace as it is not used in the core beets codebase. It can now be found in beetsplug._utils.
• Moved vfs.py utility module from beets into beetsplug namespace as it is not used in the core beets codebase. It can now be found in beetsplug._utils.
• When installing beets via git or locally the version string now reflects the current git branch and commit hash. 🐛 (#4448)
• Autotagger Matching Options: match.distance_weights.source configuration has been renamed to match.distance_weights.data_source for consistency with the name of the field it refers to.
• FAQ: Add check for musicbrainz plugin if auto-tagger can't find a match 🐛 (#6020)
• Plugins: Clarify that musicbrainz must be mentioned if plugin list modified 🐛 (#6020)
• Using the Auto-Tagger: Section on no matching release found, related to possibly disabled musicbrainz plugin 🐛 (#6020)
• beets.metadata_plugin.MetadataSourcePlugin: Remove discogs specific disambiguation stripping.

For developers and plugin authors

• Metadata source plugins are now registered globally when instantiated, which makes their handling slightly more efficient.
• The track_distance() and album_distance() methods have been removed from MetadataSourcePlugin. Distance calculation for data source mismatches is now handled automatically by the core matching logic. This change simplifies the plugin architecture and fixes incorrect penalty calculations. 🐛 (#6066)
• Typing improvements in beets/logging.py: getLogger now returns BeetsLogger when called with a name, or RootLogger when called without a name.

Release v2.4.0

New features

• Discogs Plugin: Add configurable search_limit option to limit the number of results returned by the Discogs metadata search queries.
• Discogs Plugin: Implement track_for_id method to allow retrieving singletons by their Discogs ID. 🐛 (#4661)
• Duplicates Plugin: Add --remove option, allowing to remove from the library without deleting media files. 🐛 (#5832)
• MPDStats Plugin: Add new configuration option, played_ratio_threshold, to allow configuring the percentage the song must be played for it to be counted as played instead of skipped.
• MusicBrainz Collection Plugin: When getting the user collections, only consider collections of releases, and ignore collections of other entity types.
• MusicBrainz Plugin: The MusicBrainz autotagger has been moved to a separate plugin. The default plugins includes MusicBrainz Plugin, but if you've customized your plugins list in your configuration, you'll need to explicitly add MusicBrainz Plugin to continue using this functionality. Configuration option musicbrainz.enabled has thus been deprecated. 🐛 (#2686) 🐛 (#4605)
• Playlist Plugin: Support files with the .m3u8 extension. 🐛 (#5829)
• Replace Plugin: Add new plugin.
• Spotify Plugin Deezer Plugin: Add new configuration option search_limit to limit the number of results returned by search queries.
• Web Plugin: Display artist and album as part of the search results.
• Web Plugin: Show notifications when a track plays. This uses the Media Session API to customize media notifications.

Bug fixes

• Fix HiddenFileTest by using bytestring_path().
• Fix an issue where calling Library.add would cause the database_change event to be sent twice, not once. 🐛 (#5560)
• Fixed regression with ListenBrainz Plugin where the plugin could not be loaded 🐛 (#5975)
• Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugin: AcoustID lookup HTTP requests will now time out after 10 seconds, rather than hanging the entire import process.
• Deezer Plugin: Fix the issue with that every query to deezer was ascii encoded. This resulted in bad matches for queries that contained special e.g. non latin characters as 盗作. If you want to keep the legacy behavior set the config option deezer.search_query_ascii: yes. 🐛 (#5860)
• Discogs Plugin: Beets will no longer crash if a release has been deleted, and returns a 404.
• LastGenre Plugin: Fix the issue introduced in Beets 2.3.0 where non-whitelisted last.fm genres were not canonicalized to parent genres. 🐛 (#5930)
• MusicBrainz Plugin: Fix the MusicBrainz search not taking into account the album/recording aliases
• MusicBrainz Plugin: fix regression where user configured extra_tags have been read incorrectly. 🐛 (#5788)
• Spotify Plugin: Fix the issue with that every query to spotify was ascii encoded. This resulted in bad matches for queries that contained special e.g. non latin characters as 盗作. If you want to keep the legacy behavior set the config option spotify.search_query_ascii: yes. 🐛 (#5699)
• tests: Fix library tests failing on Windows when run from outside D:/. 🐛 (#5802)
• tests: Fix tests failing without langdetect (by making it required). 🐛 (#5797)

For packagers

• Loosened typing_extensions dependency in pyproject.toml to apply to every python version.
• Optional extra_tags parameter has been removed from BeetsPlugin.candidates method signature since it is never passed in. If you override this method in your plugin, feel free to remove this parameter.

For plugin developers

• The FetchArt Plugin plugins has seen a few changes to function signatures and source registration in the process of introducing typings to the code. Custom art sources might need to be adapted.

• We split the responsibilities of plugins into two base classes

  1. beets.plugins.BeetsPlugin is the base class for all plugins, any plugin needs to inherit from this class.
  2. beets.metadata_plugin.MetadataSourcePlugin allows plugins to act like metadata sources. E.g. used by the MusicBrainz plugin. All plugins in the beets repo are opted into this class where applicable. If you are maintaining a plugin that acts like a metadata source, i.e. you expose any of track_for_id, album_for_id, candidates, item_candidates, album_distance, track_distance methods, please update your plugin to inherit from the new baseclass, as otherwise your plugin will stop working with the next major release.

• Several definitions have been moved:

  • BLOB_TYPE constant, PathQuery and SingletonQuery queries have moved from beets.library to beets.dbcore.query module
  • DateType, DurationType, PathType types and MusicalKey class have moved from beets.library to beets.dbcore.types module.
  • Distance has moved from beets.autotag to beets.autotag.distance module.
  • beets.autotag.current_metadata has been renamed to beets.util.get_most_common_tags.

  Old imports are now deprecated and will be removed in version 3.0.0.

• beets.ui.decargs is deprecated and will be removed in version 3.0.0.

• Beets is now PEP 561 compliant, which means that it provides type hints for all public APIs. This allows IDEs to provide better autocompletion and type checking for downstream users of the beets API.

• plugins.find_plugins function does not anymore load plugins. You need to explicitly call plugins.load_plugins() to load them.

• plugins.load_plugins function does not anymore accept the list of plugins to load. Instead, it loads all plugins that are configured by plugins configuration.

• Flexible fields, which can be used by plugins to store additional metadata, now also support list values. Previously, beets would throw an error while storing the data in the SQL database due to missing type conversion. 🐛 (#5698)

Other changes

• Added a test to check that all plugins can be imported without errors.
• Documentation structure for auto generated API references changed slightly. Autogenerated API references are now located in the docs/api subdirectory.
• Refactor: Split responsibilities of Plugins into MetaDataPlugins and general Plugins.
• Refactored library.py file by splitting it into multiple modules within the beets/library directory.
• UI: Update default text_diff_added color from bold red to bold green.
• UI: Use text_diff_added and text_diff_removed colors in all diff comparisons, including case differences.
• Getting Started: Add instructions to install beets on Void Linux.
• LastGenre Plugin: Refactor loading whitelist and canonicalization file. 🐛 (#5979)
• LastGenre Plugin: Updated and streamlined the genre whitelist and canonicalization tree 🐛 (#5977)
• Substitute Plugin: Fix rST formatting for example cases so that each case is shown on separate lines.

Release v2.3.1

Bug fixes:

• Path Formats: Fixed a regression where path legalization incorrectly removed parts of user-configured path formats that followed a dot (.). 🐛 (#5771)

For packagers:

• Force poetry version below 2 to avoid it mangling file modification times in sdist package. 🐛 (#5770)