beets 1.3.18

This update adds a new hook that lets you integrate beets with command-line tools and an export that can dump data from the beets database as JSON. You can also automatically translate lyrics using a machine translation service.

The echonest plugin has been removed in this version because the API it used is shutting down. You might want to try the acousticbrainz instead.

Some of the larger new features:

• The new hook lets you execute commands in response to beets events.
• The new export can export data from beets' database as JSON. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki.
• lyrics: The plugin can now translate the fetched lyrics to your native language using the Bing translation API. Thanks to @Kraymer.
• fetchart: Album art can now be fetched from fanart.tv.

Smaller new things:

• There are two new functions available in templates: %first and %ifdef. See template-functions.
• convert: A new album_art_maxwidth setting lets you resize album art while copying it.
• convert: The extension setting is now optional for conversion formats. By default, the extension is the same as the name of the configured format.
• importadded: A new preserve_write_mtimes option lets you preserve mtime of files even when beets updates their metadata.
• fetchart: The enforce_ratio option now lets you tolerate images that are almost square but differ slightly from an exact 1:1 aspect ratio.
• fetchart: The plugin can now optionally save the artwork's source in an attribute in the database.
• The terminal_encoding configuration option can now also override the input encoding. (Previously, it only affected the encoding of the standard output stream.)
• A new ignore_hidden configuration option lets you ignore files that your OS marks as invisible.
• web: A new values endpoint lets you get the distinct values of a field. Thanks to @sumpfralle. #2010

Fixes:

• Fix a problem with the stats command in exact mode when filenames on Windows use non-ASCII characters. #1891
• Fix a crash when iTunes Sound Check tags contained invalid data. #1895
• mbcollection: The plugin now redacts your MusicBrainz password in the beet config output. #1907
• scrub: Fix an occasional problem where scrubbing on import could undo the id3v23 setting. #1903
• lyrics: Add compatibility with some changes to the LyricsWiki page markup. #1912 #1909
• lyrics: Fix retrieval from Musixmatch by improving the way we guess the URL for lyrics on that service. #1880
• edit: Fail gracefully when the configured text editor command can't be invoked. #1927
• fetchart: Fix a crash in the Wikipedia backend on non-ASCII artist and album names. #1960
• convert: Change the default ogg encoding quality from 2 to 3 (to fit the default from the oggenc(1) manpage). #1982
• convert: The never_convert_lossy_files option now considers AIFF a lossless format. #2005
• web: A proper 404 error, instead of an internal exception, is returned when missing album art is requested. Thanks to
  @sumpfralle. #2011
• Tolerate more malformed floating-point numbers in metadata tags. #2014
• The ignore configuration option now includes the lost+found directory by default.
• acousticbrainz: AcousticBrainz lookups are now done over HTTPS. Thanks to @Freso. #2007

beets 1.3.17

This release introduces one new plugin to fetch audio information from the AcousticBrainz project and another plugin to make it easier to submit your handcrafted metadata back to MusicBrainz. The importer also gained two oft-requested features: a way to skip the initial search process by specifying an ID ahead of time, and a way to manually provide metadata in the middle of the import process (via the edit plugin).

Also, as of this release, the beets project has some new Internet homes! Our new domain name is beets.io, and we have a shiny new GitHub organization: beetbox.

Here are the big new features:

• A new acousticbrainz fetches acoustic-analysis information from the AcousticBrainz project. Thanks to @opatel99, and thanks to Google Code-In! #1784
• A new mbsubmit lets you print music's current metadata in a format that the MusicBrainz data parser can understand. You can trigger it during an interactive import session. #1779
• A new --search-id importer option lets you manually specify IDs (i.e., MBIDs or Discogs IDs) for imported music. Doing this skips the initial candidate search, which can be important for huge albums where this initial lookup is slow. Also, the enter Id prompt choice now accepts several IDs, separated by spaces. #1808
• edit: You can now edit metadata on the fly during the import process. The plugin provides two new interactive options: one to edit your music's metadata, and one to edit the matched metadata retrieved from MusicBrainz (or another data source). This feature is still in its early stages, so please send feedback if you find anything missing. #1846 #396

There are even more new features:

• fetchart: The Google Images backend has been restored. It now requires an API key from Google. Thanks to @lcharlick. #1778
• info: A new option will print only fields' names and not their values. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki. #1812
• The fields command now displays flexible attributes. Thanks to @GuilhermeHideki. #1818
• The modify command lets you interactively select which albums or items you want to change. #1843
• The move command gained a new --timid flag to print and confirm which files you want to move. #1843
• The move command no longer prints filenames for files that don't actually need to be moved. #1583

Fixes:

• play: Fix a regression in the last version where there was no default command. #1793
• lastimport: The plugin now works again after being broken by some unannounced changes to the Last.fm API. #1574
• play: Fixed a typo in a configuration option. The option is now warning_threshold instead of warning_treshold, but we kept the old name around for compatibility. Thanks to @JesseWeinstein. #1802 #1803
• edit: Editing metadata now moves files, when appropriate (like the modify command). #1804
• The stats command no longer crashes when files are missing or inaccessible. #1806
• fetchart: Possibly fix a Unicode-related crash when using some versions of pyOpenSSL. #1805
• replaygain: Fix an intermittent crash with the GStreamer backend. #1855
• lastimport: The plugin now works with the beets API key by default. You can still provide a different key the configuration.
• replaygain: Fix a crash using the Python Audio Tools backend. #1873

beets 1.3.16

The big news in this release is a new interactive editor plugin. It's really nifty: you can now change your music's metadata by making changes in a visual text editor, which can sometimes be far more efficient than the built-in modify-cmd` command. No more carefully retyping the same artist name with slight capitalization changes.

This version also adds an oft-requested "not" operator to beets' queries, so you can exclude music from any operation. It also brings friendlier formatting (and querying!) of song durations.

The big new stuff:

• A new edit lets you manually edit your music's metadata using your favorite text editor. #164 #1706
• Queries can now use "not" logic. Type a ^ before part of a query to exclude matching music from the results. For example, beet list -a beatles ^album:1 will find all your albums by the Beatles except for their singles compilation, "1." See not_query. #819 #1728
• A new embyupdate can trigger a library refresh on an Emby server when your beets database changes.
• Track length is now displayed as "M:SS" rather than a raw number of seconds. Queries on track length also accept this format: for example, beet list length:5:30.. will find all your tracks that have a duration over 5 minutes and 30 seconds. You can turn off this new behavior using the format_raw_length configuration option. #1749

Smaller changes:

• Three commands, modify, update, and mbsync, would previously move files by default after changing their metadata. Now, these commands will only move files if you have the config-import-copy or config-import-move options enabled in your importer configuration. This way, if you configure the importer not to touch your filenames, other commands will respect that decision by default too. Each command also sprouted a --move command-line option to override this default (in addition to the --nomove flag they already had). #1697
• A new configuration option, va_name, controls the album artist name for various-artists albums. The setting defaults to "Various Artists," the MusicBrainz standard. In order to match MusicBrainz, the discogs also adopts the same setting.
• info: The info command now accepts a -f/--format option for customizing how items are displayed, just like the built-in list command. #1737

Some changes for developers:

• Two new plugin hooks , albuminfo_received and trackinfo_received, let plugins intercept metadata as soon as it is received, before it is applied to music in the database. #872
• Plugins can now add options to the interactive importer prompts. See append_prompt_choices. #1758

Fixes:

• plexupdate: Fix a crash when Plex libraries use non-ASCII collection names. #1649
• discogs: Maybe fix a crash when using some versions of the requests library. #1656
• Fix a race in the importer when importing two albums with the same artist and name in quick succession. The importer would fail to detect them as duplicates, claiming that there were "empty albums" in the database even when there were not. #1652
• plugins/lastgenre: Clean up the reggae-related genres somewhat. Thanks to @Freso. #1661
• The importer now correctly moves album art files when re-importing. #314
• fetchart: In auto mode, the plugin now skips albums that already have art attached to them so as not to interfere with re-imports. #314
• fetchart: The plugin now only resizes album art if necessary, rather than always by default. #1264
• fetchart: Fix a bug where a database reference to a non-existent album art file would prevent the command from fetching new art. #1126
• thumbnails: Fix a crash with Unicode paths. #1686
• embedart: The remove_art_file option now works on import (as well as with the explicit command). #1662 #1675
• metasync: Fix a crash when syncing with recent versions of iTunes. #1700
• duplicates: Fix a crash when merging items. #1699
• smartplaylist: More gracefully handle malformed queries and missing configuration.
• Fix a crash with some files with unreadable iTunes SoundCheck metadata. #1666
• thumbnails: Fix a nasty segmentation fault crash that arose with some library versions. #1433
• convert: Fix a crash with Unicode paths in --pretend mode. #1735
• Fix a crash when sorting by nonexistent fields on queries. #1734
• Probably fix some mysterious errors when dealing with images using ImageMagick on Windows. #1721
• Fix a crash when writing some Unicode comment strings to MP3s that used older encodings. The encoding is now always updated to UTF-8. #879
• fetchart: The Google Images backend has been removed. It used an API that has been shut down. #1760
• lyrics: Fix a crash in the Google backend when searching for bands with regular-expression characters in their names, like Sunn O))). #1673
• scrub: In auto mode, the plugin now actually only scrubs files on import, as the documentation always claimed it did---not every time files were written, as it previously did. #1657
• scrub: Also in auto mode, album art is now correctly restored. #1657
• Possibly allow flexible attributes to be used with the %aunique template function. #1775
• lyrics: The Genius backend is now more robust to communication errors. The backend has also been disabled by default, since the API it depends on is currently down. #1770

beets 1.3.15

This release adds a new plugin for checking file quality and a new source for lyrics. The larger features are:

• A new badfiles helps you scan for corruption in your music collection. Thanks to @fxthomas. #1568
• lyrics: You can now fetch lyrics from Genius.com. Thanks to @sadatay. #1626 #1639
• zero: The plugin can now use a "whitelist" policy as an alternative to the (default) "blacklist" mode. Thanks to @adkow. #1621 #1641

And there are smaller new features too:

• Add new color aliases for standard terminal color names (e.g., cyan and magenta). Thanks to @mathstuf. #1548
• play: A new --args option lets you specify options for the player command. #1532
• play: A new raw configuration option lets the command work with players (such as VLC) that expect music filenames as arguments, rather than in a playlist. Thanks to @nathdwek. #1578
• play: You can now configure the number of tracks that trigger a "lots of music" warning. #1577
• embedart: A new remove_art_file option lets you clean up if you prefer only embedded album art. Thanks to @jackwilsdon. #1591 #733
• plexupdate: A new library_name option allows you to select which Plex library to update. #1572 #1595
• A new include option lets you import external configuration files.

This release has plenty of fixes:

• lastgenre: Fix a bug that prevented tag popularity from being considered. Thanks to @svoos. #1559
• Fixed a bug where plugins wouldn't be notified of the deletion of an item's art, for example with the clearart command from the embedart. Thanks to @nathdwek. #1565
• fetchart: The Google Images source is disabled by default (as it was before beets 1.3.9), as is the Wikipedia source (which was causing lots of unnecessary delays due to DBpedia downtime). To re-enable these sources, add wikipedia google to your sources configuration option.
• The list command's help output now has a small query and format string example. Thanks to @pkess. #1582
• fetchart: The plugin now fetches PNGs but not GIFs. (It still fetches JPEGs.) This avoids an error when trying to embed images, since not all formats support GIFs. #1588
• Date fields are now written in the correct order (year-month-day), which eliminates an intermittent bug where the latter two fields would not get written to files. Thanks to @jdetrey. #1303 #1589
• replaygain: Avoid a crash when the PyAudioTools backend encounters an error. #1592
• The case sensitivity of path queries is more useful now: rather than just guessing based on the platform, we now check the case sensitivity of your filesystem. #1586
• Case-insensitive path queries might have returned nothing because of a wrong SQL query.
• Fix a crash when a query contains a "+" or "-" alone in a component. #1605
• Fixed unit of file size to powers of two (MiB, GiB, etc.) instead of powers of ten (MB, GB, etc.). #1623

beets 1.3.14

This is mainly a bugfix release, but we also have a nifty new plugin for ipfs and a bunch of new configuration options.

The new features:

• A new ipfs plugin lets you share music via a new, global, decentralized filesystem. #1397
• duplicates: You can now merge duplicate track metadata (when detecting duplicate items), or duplicate album tracks (when detecting duplicate albums).
• duplicates: Duplicate resolution now uses an ordering to prioritize duplicates. By default, it prefers music with more complete metadata, but you can configure it to use any list of attributes.
• metasync: Added a new backend to fetch metadata from iTunes. This plugin is still in an experimental phase. #1450
• The move command has a new --pretend option, making the command show how the items will be moved without actually changing anything.
• The importer now supports matching of "pregap" or HTOA (hidden track-one audio) tracks when they are listed in MusicBrainz. (This feature depends on a new version of the musicbrainzngs library that is not yet released, but will start working when it is available.) Thanks to @ruippeixotog. #1104 #1493
• plexupdate: A new token configuration option lets you specify a key for Plex Home setups. Thanks to @edcarroll. #1494
• zero: A new update_database configuration option nulls out fields in the database along with files' tags. #1516

Fixes:

• fetchart: Complain when the enforce_ratio or min_width options are enabled but no local imaging backend is available to carry them out. #1460
• importfeeds: Avoid generating incorrect m3u filename when both of the m3u and m3u_multi options are enabled. #1490
• duplicates: Avoid a crash when misconfigured. #1457
• mpdstats: Avoid a crash when the music played is not in the beets library. Thanks to @CodyReichert. #1443
• Fix a crash with ArtResizer on Windows systems (affecting embedart, fetchart, and thumbnails). #1448
• permissions: Fix an error with non-ASCII paths. #1449
• Fix sorting by paths when the sort_case_insensitive option is enabled. #1451
• embedart: Avoid an error when trying to embed invalid images into MPEG-4 files.
• fetchart: The Wikipedia source can now better deal artists that use non-standard capitalization (e.g., alt-J, dEUS).
• web: Fix searching for non-ASCII queries. Thanks to
  @oldtopman. #1470
• mpdupdate: We now recommend the newer python-mpd2 library instead of its unmaintained parent. Thanks to @somasis. #1472
• The importer interface and log file now output a useful list of files (instead of the word "None") when in album-grouping mode. #1475 #825
• Fix some logging errors when filenames and other user-provided strings contain curly braces. #1481
• Regular expression queries over paths now work more reliably with non-ASCII characters in filenames. #1482
• Fix a bug where the autotagger's ignored setting was sometimes, well, ignored. #1487
• Fix a bug with Unicode strings when generating image thumbnails. #1485
• keyfinder: Fix handling of Unicode paths. #1502
• fetchart: When album art is already present, the message is now printed in the text_highlight_minor color (light gray). Thanks to
  @somasis. #1512
• Some messages in the console UI now use plural nouns correctly. Thanks to
  @JesseWeinstein. #1521
• Sorting numerical fields (such as track) now works again. #1511
• replaygain: Missing GStreamer plugins now cause a helpful error message instead of a crash. #1518
• Fix an edge case when producing sanitized filenames where the maximum path length conflicted with the replace rules. Thanks to Ben Ockmore. #496 #1361
• Fix an incompatibility with OS X 10.11 (where /usr/sbin seems not to be on the user's path by default).
• Fix an incompatibility with certain JPEG files. Here's a relevant Python bug. Thanks to @nathdwek. #1545
• Fix the group_albums importer mode so that it works correctly when files are not already in order by album. #1550
• The fields command no longer separates built-in fields from plugin-provided ones. This distinction was becoming increasingly unreliable.
• duplicates: Fix a Unicode warning when paths contained non-ASCII characters. #1551
• fetchart: Work around a urllib3 bug that could cause a crash. #1555 #1556
• When you edit the configuration file with beet config -e and the file does not exist, beets creates an empty file before editing it. This fixes an error on OS X, where the open command does not work with non-existent files. #1480

beets 1.3.13

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

beets 1.3.12

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 combiningqueries. #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 query-sort. #1429
• An experimental new metasync lets you get metadata from your favorite music players, starting with Amarok. #1386
• fetchart: 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: 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: 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: Better error handling when we can't communicate with Discogs on setup. #1417
• importadded: Fix a crash when importing singletons in-place. #1416
• fuzzy: 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

beets 1.3.11

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, which only worked with the Dolphin file manager.)
• replaygain: 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: 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: The command has a new --strict option that will only report duplicates if all attributes are explicitly set. #1000
• smartplaylist: 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: 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: 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: Add support for cross-origin resource sharing for more flexible in-browser clients. Thanks to Andre Miller. #1236 #1237
• plugins/mbsync: A new -f/--format option controls the output format when listing unrecognized items. The output is also now more helpful by default. #1246
• fetchart: 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: 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: The plugin now also adjusts the permissions of the directories. (Previously, it only affected files.) #1308 #1324
• ftintitle: 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: Stop applying replaygain directly to source files when using the mp3gain backend. #1316
• Path queries are case-sensitive on non-Windows OSes. #1165
• lyrics: Silence a warning about insecure requests in the new MusixMatch backend. #1204
• Fix a crash when beet is invoked without arguments. #1205 #1207
• fetchart: Do not attempt to import directories as album art. #1177 #1211
• mpdstats: Avoid double-counting some play events. #773 #1212
• Fix a crash when the importer deals with Unicode metadata in --pretend mode. #1214
• smartplaylist: 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: Handle errors in ImageMagick's output. #1241
• keyfinder: Parse the underlying tool's output more robustly. #1248
• embedart: 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 and smartplaylist: Automatically create parent directories for playlist files (instead of crashing when the parent directory does not exist). #1266
• The write-cmd` 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: Fix a crash that occured when used together with the check plugin. #1241
• scrub: 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: Handle and log more kinds of communication errors. #1299 #1305
• lastgenre: Bugs in the pylast library can no longer crash beets.
• convert: You can now configure the temporary directory for conversions. Thanks to @autochthe. #1382 #1383
• rewrite: Fix a regression that prevented the plugin's rewriting from applying to album-level fields like $albumartist. #1393
• play: The plugin now sorts items according to the configuration in album mode.
• fetchart: 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_subcommands. #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 plugin-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.

beets 1.3.10

This 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-cmdcommand 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.

beets 1.3.9

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