Release v2.6.0
Repository: beetbox/beets · Tag: v2.6.0 · Commit: 680473b · Released by: github-actions[bot]

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
See ~beetsplug._utils.musicbrainz.MusicBrainzAPI for documentation.

For packagers
An unused dependency on mock has been removed.
The minimum supported Python version is now 3.10.
Other changes
Finally removed gmusic plugin and all related code/docs as the Google Play Music service was shut down in 2020.
Moved beets/random.py into beetsplug/random.py to cleanup core module.
Refactored the beets/ui/commands.py monolithic file (2000+ lines) into multiple modules within the beets/ui/commands directory for better maintainability.
The documentation chapter Handling Paths has been moved to the "For Developers" section and revised to reflect current best practices (pathlib usage).
Updated color documentation with bright_* and bg_bright_* entries.
BPD Plugin: Raise ImportError instead of ValueError when GStreamer is unavailable, enabling importorskip usage in pytest setup.
dbcore: Allow models to declare SQL indices; add an items.album_id index to speed up album.items() queries. 🐛 (#5809)

Reproducible: Always