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

beets 1.3.8

This release has two big new chunks of functionality. Queries now support sorting and user-defined fields can now have types.

If you want to see all your songs in reverse chronological order, just type beet list year-. It couldn't be easier.

Flexible field types mean that some functionality that has previously only worked for built-in fields, like range queries, can now work with plugin- and user-defined fields too. For starters, the /plugins/echonest/ and mpdstats now mark the types of the fields they provide---so you can now say, for example, beet ls liveness:0.5..1.5 for the Echo Nest "liveness" attribute. The types makes it easy to specify field types in your config file.

One upgrade note: if you use the discogs, you will need to upgrade the Discogs client library to use this version. Just type pip install -U discogs-client.

Other new features:

• info: Target files can now be specified through library queries (in addition to filenames). The --library option prints library fields instead of tags. Multiple files can be summarized together with the new --summarize option.
• mbcollection: A new option lets you automatically update your collection on import. Thanks to Olin Gay.
• convert: A new never_convert_lossy_files option can prevent lossy transcoding. Thanks to Simon Kohlmeyer.
• convert: A new --yes command-line flag skips the confirmation.

Still more fixes and little improvements:

• Invalid state files don't crash the importer.
• lyrics: Only strip featured artists and parenthesized title suffixes if no lyrics for the original artist and title were found.
• Fix a crash when reading some files with missing tags.
• discogs: Compatibility with the new 2.0 version of the discogs_client Python library. If you were using the old version, you wil need to upgrade to the latest version of the library to use the correspondingly new version of the plugin (e.g., with pip install -U discogs-client). Thanks to Andriy Kohut.
• Fix a crash when writing files that can't be read. Thanks to Jocelyn De La Rosa.
• The stats command now counts album artists. The album count also more accurately reflects the number of albums in the database.
• convert: Avoid crashes when tags cannot be written to newly converted files.
• Formatting templates with item data no longer confusingly shows album-level data when the two are inconsistent.
• Resuming imports and beginning incremental imports should now be much faster when there is a lot of previously-imported music to skip.
• lyrics: Remove <script> tags from scraped lyrics. Thanks to Bombardment.
• play: Add a relative_to config option. Thanks to BrainDamage.
• Fix a crash when a MusicBrainz release has zero tracks.
• The --version flag now works as an alias for the version command.
• lastgenre: Remove some unhelpful genres from the default whitelist. Thanks to gwern.
• importfeeds: A new echo output mode prints files' paths to standard error. Thanks to robotanarchy.
• replaygain: Restore some error handling when mp3gain output cannot be parsed. The verbose log now contains the bad tool output in this case.
• convert: Fix filename extensions when converting automatically.
• The write plugin event allows plugins to change the tags that are written to a media file.
• zero: Do not delete database values; only media file tags are affected.

beets 1.3.7

This release of beets fixes all the bugs, and you can be confident that you will never again find any bugs in beets, ever. It also adds support for plain old AIFF files and adds three more plugins, including a nifty one that lets you measure a song's tempo by tapping out the beat on your keyboard. The importer deals more elegantly with duplicates and you can broaden your cover art search to the entire web with Google Image Search.

The big new features are:

• Support for AIFF files. Tags are stored as ID3 frames in one of the file's IFF chunks. Thanks to Evan Purkhiser for contributing support to Mutagen.
• The new importadded reads files' modification times to set their "added" date. Thanks to Stig Inge Lea Bjørnsen.
• The new bpm lets you manually measure the tempo of a playing song. Thanks to aroquen.
• The new spotify generates playlists for your Spotify account. Thanks to Olin Gay.
• A new required configuration option for the importer skips matches that are missing certain data. Thanks to oprietop.
• When the importer detects duplicates, it now shows you some details about the potentially-replaced music so you can make an informed decision. Thanks to Howard Jones.
• fetchart: You can now optionally search for cover art on Google Image Search. Thanks to Lemutar.
• A new asciify-paths configuration option replaces all non-ASCII characters in paths.

And the multitude of little improvements and fixes:

• Compatibility with the latest version of Mutagen, 1.23.
• web: Lyrics now display readably with correct line breaks. Also, the detail view scrolls to reveal all of the lyrics. Thanks to Meet Udeshi.
• play: The command config option can now contain arguments (rather than just an executable). Thanks to Alessandro Ghedini.
• Fix an error when using the modify command to remove a flexible attribute. Thanks to Pierre Rust.
• info: The command now shows audio properties (e.g., bitrate) in addition to metadata. Thanks Alessandro Ghedini.
• Avoid a crash on Windows when writing to files with special characters in their names.
• play: Playing albums now generates filenames by default (as opposed to directories) for better compatibility. The use_folders option restores the old behavior. Thanks to Lucas Duailibe.
• Fix an error when importing an empty directory with the --flat option.
• mpdstats: The last song in a playlist is now correctly counted as played. Thanks to Johann Klähn.
• zero: Prevent accidental nulling of dangerous fields (IDs and paths). Thanks to brunal.
• The remove command now shows the paths of files that will be deleted. Thanks again to brunal.
• Don't display changes for fields that are not in the restricted field set. This fixes write showing changes for fields that are not written to the file.
• The write command avoids displaying the item name if there are no changes for it.
• When using both the convert and the scrub, avoid scrubbing the source file of conversions. (Fix a regression introduced in the previous release.)
• replaygain: Logging is now quieter during import. Thanks to Yevgeny Bezman.
• fetchart: When loading art from the filesystem, we now prioritize covers with more keywords in them. This means that cover-front.jpg will now be taken before cover-back.jpg because it contains two keywords rather than one. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
• lastgenre: Remove duplicates from canonicalized genre lists. Thanks again to Fabrice Laporte.
• The importer now records its progress when skipping albums. This means that incremental imports will no longer try to import albums again after you've chosen to skip them, and erroneous invitations to resume "interrupted" imports should be reduced. Thanks to jcassette.
• bucket: You can now customize the definition of alphanumeric "ranges" using regular expressions. And the heuristic for detecting years has been improved. Thanks to sotho.
• Already-imported singleton tracks are skipped when resuming an import.
• chroma: A new auto configuration option disables fingerprinting on import. Thanks to ddettrittus.
• convert: A new --format option to can select the transcoding preset from the command-line.
• convert: Transcoding presets can now omit their filename extensions (extensions default to the name of the preset).
• convert: A new --pretend option lets you preview the commands the plugin will execute without actually taking any action. Thanks to Dietrich Daroch.
• Fix a crash when a float-valued tag field only contained a + or - character.
• Fixed a regression in the core that caused the scrub not to work in auto mode. Thanks to Harry Khanna.
• The write command now has a --force flag. Thanks again to Harry Khanna.
• mbsync: Track alignment now works with albums that have multiple copies of the same recording. Thanks to Rui Gonçalves.

beets 1.3.6

This is primarily a bugfix release, but it also brings two new plugins: one for playing music in desktop players and another for organizing your directories into "buckets." It also brings huge performance optimizations to queries—your beet ls commands will now go much faster.

New features:

• The new play lets you start your desktop music player with the songs that match a query. Thanks to David Hamp-Gonsalves.
• The new bucket provides a %bucket{} function for path formatting to generate folder names representing ranges of years or initial letter. Thanks to Fabrice Laporte.
• Item and album queries are much faster.
• ftintitle: A new option lets you remove featured artists entirely instead of moving them to the title. Thanks to SUTJael.

And those all-important bug fixes:

• mbsync: Fix a regression in 1.3.5 that broke the plugin entirely.
• Shell completion now searches more common paths for its bash_completion dependency.
• Fix encoding-related logging errors in convert and replaygain.
• replaygain: Suppress a deprecation warning emitted by later versions of PyGI.
• Fix a crash when reading files whose iTunes SoundCheck tags contain non-ASCII characters.
• The %if{} template function now appropriately interprets the condition as false when it contains the string "false". Thanks to Ayberk Yilmaz.
• convert: Fix conversion for files that include a video stream by ignoring it. Thanks to brunal.
• fetchart: Log an error instead of crashing when tag manipulation fails.
• convert: Log an error instead of crashing when embedding album art fails.
• convert: Embed cover art into converted files. Previously they were embedded into the source files.
• New plugin event: before_item_moved. Thanks to Robert Speicher.