beetbox/beets

Beets is a command-line tool that organizes a personal digital music collection. The README describes it as a media library management system for obsessive music geeks. The core idea is to clean up the metadata attached to your music files (artist names, album titles, track numbers, and so on) so that the collection becomes consistent, then offer a set of tools for browsing and listening to it. The central feature is an automatic tag corrector. When you run beet import on a folder of music, beets looks up each album against MusicBrainz, a community-run database of music information, and proposes corrected tags. The README shows a sample session where it identifies a Ladytron album with 98.4% similarity and rewrites several track titles. It can also pull metadata from Discogs and Beatport, or guess from filenames and from acoustic fingerprints generated from the audio itself. Beets is built as a Python library with a plugin system, and most of the extra capabilities ship as optional plugins. The README lists examples: fetching album art, fetching lyrics, tagging by genre or tempo, calculating ReplayGain volume levels, transcoding audio to a different format, finding duplicate tracks and albums, finding albums with missing tracks, embedding or extracting cover art, and serving the library through a web browser using HTML5 audio. It can also act as a backend for music players that speak the MPD protocol, and the README says writing your own plugin is straightforward if you know a little Python. Installation is a single pip install beets, with packages also available in several Linux distribution repositories. The documentation site at beets.readthedocs.org hosts a Getting Started guide and per-plugin pages. The project was created by Adrian Sampson and has accumulated many contributors over time. Help and news are organized through a GitHub issue tracker, GitHub Discussions, and a Mastodon account at @b33ts.