beets 1.4.6

The highlight of this release is "album merging," an oft-requested option in the importer to add new tracks to an existing album you already have in your library. This way, you no longer need to resort to removing the partial album from your library, combining the files manually, and importing again.

Here are the larger new features in this release:

• When the importer finds duplicate albums, you can now merge all the tracks—old and new—together and try importing them as a single, combined album. Thanks to @udiboy1209. #112 #2725
• lyrics: The plugin can now produce reStructuredText files for beautiful, readable books of lyrics. Thanks to @anarcat. #2628
• A new from_scratch configuration option makes the importer remove old metadata before applying new metadata. This new feature complements the zero and scrub plugins but is slightly different: beets clears out all the old tags it knows about and only keeps the new data it gets from the remote metadata source. Thanks to @tummychow. #934 #2755

There are also somewhat littler, but still great, new features:

• convert: A new no_convert option lets you skip transcoding items matching a query. Instead, the files are just copied as-is. Thanks to @Stunner. #2732 #2751
• fetchart: A new quiet switch that only prints out messages when album art is missing. Thanks to @euri10. #2683
• mbcollection: You can configure a custom MusicBrainz collection via the new collection configuration option. #2685
• mbcollection: The collection update command can now remove albums from collections that are longer in the beets library.
• fetchart: The clearart command now asks for confirmation before touching your files. Thanks to @konman2. #2708 #2427
• mpdstats: The plugin now correctly updates song statistics when MPD switches from a song to a stream and when it plays the same song multiple times consecutively. #2707
• acousticbrainz: The plugin can now be configured to write only a specific list of tags. Thanks to @woparry.

There are lots and lots of bug fixes:

• hook: Fixed a problem where accessing non-string properties of item or album (e.g., item.track) would cause a crash. Thanks to @broddo. #2740
• play: When relative_to is set, the plugin correctly emits relative paths even when querying for albums rather than tracks. Thanks to @j000. #2702
• We suppress a spurious Python warning about a BrokenPipeError being ignored. This was an issue when using beets in simple shell scripts. Thanks to @Azphreal. #2622 #2631
• replaygain: Fix a regression in the previous release related to the new R128 tags. #2615 #2623
• lyrics: The MusixMatch backend now detects and warns when the server has blocked the client. Thanks to @anarcat. #2634 #2632
• importfeeds: Fix an error on Python 3 in certain configurations. Thanks to @djl. #2467 #2658
• edit: Fix a bug when editing items during a re-import with the -L flag. Previously, diffs against against unrelated items could be shown or beets could crash. #2659
• kodiupdate: Fix the server URL and add better error reporting. #2662
• Fixed a problem where "no-op" modifications would reset files' mtimes, resulting in unnecessary writes. This most prominently affected the edit plugin when saving the text file without making changes to some music. #2667
• chroma: Fix a crash when running the submit command on Python 3 on Windows with non-ASCII filenames. #2671
• absubmit: Fix an occasional crash on Python 3 when the AB analysis tool produced non-ASCII metadata. #2673
• duplicates: Use the default tiebreak for items or albums when the configuration only specifies a tiebreak for the other kind of entity. Thanks to @cgevans. #2758
• duplicates: Fix the --key command line option, which was ignored.
• replaygain: Fix album ReplayGain calculation with the GStreamer backend. #2636
• scrub: Handle errors when manipulating files using newer versions of Mutagen. #2716
• fetchart: The plugin no longer gets skipped during import when the "Edit Candidates" option is used from the edit plugin. #2734
• Fix a crash when numeric metadata fields contain just a minus or plus sign with no following numbers. Thanks to @eigengrau. #2741
• fromfilename: Recognize file names that contain only a track number, such as 01.mp3. Also, the plugin now allows underscores as a separator between fields. Thanks to @Vrihub. #2738 #2759
• Fixed an issue where images would be resized according to their longest edge, instead of their width, when using the maxwidth config option in the fetchart and embedart plugins.

There are some changes for developers:

• "Fixed fields" in Album and Item objects are now more strict about translating missing values into type-specific null-like values. This should help in cases where a string field is unexpectedly None sometimes instead of just showing up as an empty string. #2605
• Refactored the move functions the beets.library module and the manipulate_files function in beets.importer to use a single parameter describing the file operation instead of multiple Boolean flags. There is a new numerated type describing how to move, copy, or link files. #2682

beets 1.4.5

Version 1.4.5 adds some oft-requested features. When you're importing files, you can now manually set fields on the new music. Date queries have gotten much more powerful: you can write precise queries down to the second, and we now have relative queries like -1w, which means one week ago.

Here are the new features:

• You can now set fields to certain values during import, using either a --set field=value command-line flag or a new set_fields configuration option under the importer section. Thanks to @bartkl. #1881 #2581
• Date queries can now include times, so you can filter your music down to the second. Thanks to @discopatrick. #2506 #2528
• Date queries can also be relative. You can say added:-1w.. to match music added in the last week, for example. Thanks to @euri10. #2598
• A new gmusic lets you interact with your Google Play Music library. Thanks to @tigranl. #2553 #2586
• replaygain: We now keep R128 data in separate tags from classic ReplayGain data for formats that need it (namely, Ogg Opus). A new r128 configuration option enables this behavior for specific formats. Thanks to @autrimpo. #2557 #2560
• The move command gained a new --export flag, which copies files to an external location without changing their paths in the library database. Thanks to @SpirosChadoulos. #435 #2510

There are also some bug fixes:

• lastgenre: Fix a crash when using the prefer_specific and canonical options together. Thanks to @yacoob. #2459 #2583
• web: Fix a crash on Windows under Python 2 when serving non-ASCII filenames. Thanks to @robot3498712. #2592 #2593
• metasync: Fix a crash in the Amarok backend when filenames contain quotes. Thanks to @aranc23. #2595 #2596
• More informative error messages are displayed when the file format is not recognized. #2599

beets 1.4.4

This release built up a longer-than-normal list of nifty new features. We now support DSF audio files and the importer can hard-link your files, for example.

Here's a full list of new features:

• Added support for DSF files, once a future version of Mutagen is released that supports them. Thanks to @docbobo. #459 #2379
• A new hardlink config option instructs the importer to create hard links on filesystems that support them. Thanks to @jacobwgillespie. #2445
• A new kodiupdate lets you keep your Kodi library in sync with beets. Thanks to @Pauligrinder. #2411
• A new bell configuration option under the import section enables a terminal bell when input is required. Thanks to @SpirosChadoulos. #2366 #2495
• A new field, composer_sort, is now supported and fetched from MusicBrainz. Thanks to @dosoe. #2519 #2529
• The MusicBrainz backend and discogs now both provide a new attribute called track_alt that stores more nuanced, possibly non-numeric track index data. For example, some vinyl or tape media will report the side of the record using a letter instead of a number in that field. #1831 #2363
• web: Added a new endpoint, /item/path/foo, which will return the item info for the file at the given path, or 404.
• web: Added a new config option, include_paths, which will cause paths to be included in item API responses if set to true.
• The %aunique template function for aunique now takes a third argument that specifies which brackets to use around the disambiguator value. The argument can be any two characters that represent the left and right brackets. It defaults to [] and can also be blank to turn off bracketing. #2397 #2399
• Added a --move or -m option to the importer so that the files can be moved to the library instead of being copied or added "in place." #2252 #2429
• badfiles: Added a --verbose or -v option. Results are now displayed only for corrupted files by default and for all the files when the verbose option is set. #1654 #2434
• embedart: The explicit embedart command now asks for confirmation before embedding art into music files. Thanks to
  @Stunner. #1999
• You can now run beets by typing python -m beets. #2453
• smartplaylist: Different playlist specifications that generate identically-named playlist files no longer conflict; instead, the resulting lists of tracks are concatenated. #2468
• missing: A new mode lets you see missing albums from artists you have in your library. Thanks to @qlyoung. #2481
• web : Add new reverse_proxy config option to allow serving the web plugins under a reverse proxy.
• Importing a release with multiple release events now selects the event based on your preferred countries. #2501
• play: A new -y or --yes parameter lets you skip the warning message if you enqueue more items than the warning threshold usually allows.
• Fix a bug where commands which forked subprocesses would sometimes prevent further inputs. This bug mainly affected convert. Thanks to @jansol. #2488 #2524

There are also quite a few fixes:

• In the replace configuration option, we now replace a leading hyphen (-) with an underscore. #549 #2509
• absubmit: We no longer filter audio files for specific formats---we will attempt the submission process for all formats. #2471
• mpdupdate: Fix Python 3 compatibility. #2381
• replaygain: Fix Python 3 compatibility in the bs1770gain backend. #2382
• bpd: Report playback times as integers. #2394
• mpdstats: Fix Python 3 compatibility. The plugin also now requires version 0.4.2 or later of the python-mpd2 library. #2405
• mpdstats: Improve handling of MPD status queries.
• badfiles: Fix Python 3 compatibility.
• Fix some cases where album-level ReplayGain/SoundCheck metadata would be written to files incorrectly. #2426
• badfiles: The command no longer bails out if the validator command is not found or exits with an error. #2430 #2433
• lyrics: The Google search backend no longer crashes when the server responds with an error. #2437
• discogs: You can now authenticate with Discogs using a personal access token. #2447
• Fix Python 3 compatibility when extracting rar archives in the importer. Thanks to @Lompik. #2443 #2448
• duplicates: Fix Python 3 compatibility when using the copy and move options. #2444
• mbsubmit: The tracks are now sorted properly. Thanks to
  @awesomer. #2457
• thumbnails: Fix a string-related crash on Python 3. #2466
• beatport: More than just 10 songs are now fetched per album. #2469
• On Python 3, the terminal_encoding setting is respected again for output and printing will no longer crash on systems configured with a limited encoding.
• convert: The default configuration uses FFmpeg's built-in AAC codec instead of faac. Thanks to @jansol. #2484
• Fix the importer's detection of multi-disc albums when other subdirectories are present. #2493
• Invalid date queries now print an error message instead of being silently ignored. Thanks to @discopatrick. #2513 #2517
• When the SQLite database stops being accessible, we now print a friendly error message. Thanks to @Mary011196. #1676 #2508
• web: Avoid a crash when sending binary data, such as Chromaprint fingerprints, in music attributes. #2542 #2532
• Fix a hang when parsing templates that end in newlines. #2562
• Fix a crash when reading non-ASCII characters in configuration files on Windows under Python 3. #2456 #2565 #2566

We removed backends from two metadata plugins because of bitrot:

• lyrics: The Lyrics.com backend has been removed. (It stopped working because of changes to the site's URL structure.) #2548 #2549
• fetchart: The documentation no longer recommends iTunes Store artwork lookup because the unmaintained python-itunes is broken. Want to adopt it? #2371 #1610

beets 1.4.3

Happy new year! This new version includes a cornucopia of new features from contributors, including new tags related to classical music and a new AcousticBrainz Submit plugin for performing acoustic analysis on your music. The Random plugin has a new mode that lets you generate time-limited music---for example, you might generate a random playlist that lasts the perfect length for your walk to work. We also access as many Web services as possible over secure connections now---HTTPS everywhere!

The most visible new features are:

• We now support the composer, lyricist, and arranger tags. The MusicBrainz data source will fetch data for these fields when the next version of python-musicbrainzngs_ is released. Thanks to @ibmibmibm. #506 #507 #1547 #2333
• A new absubmit lets you run acoustic analysis software and upload the results for others to use. Thanks to @inytar. #2253 #2342
• play: The plugin now provides an importer prompt choice to play the music you're about to import. Thanks to @diomekes. #2008 #2360
• We now use SSL to access Web services whenever possible. That includes MusicBrainz itself, several album art sources, some lyrics sources, and other servers. Thanks to @tigranl. #2307
• random: A new --time option lets you generate a random playlist that takes a given amount of time. Thanks to @diomekes. #2305 #2322

Some smaller new features:

• zero: A new zero command manually triggers the zero plugin. Thanks to @SJoshBrown. #2274 #2329
• acousticbrainz: The plugin will avoid re-downloading data for files that already have it by default. You can override this behavior using a new force option. Thanks to @SusannaMaria. #2347 #2349
• bpm: The import.write configuration option now decides whether or not to write tracks after updating their BPM. #1992

And the fixes:

• bpd: Fix a crash on non-ASCII MPD commands. #2332
• scrub: Avoid a crash when files cannot be read or written. #2351
• scrub: The image type values on scrubbed files are preserved instead of being reset to "other." #2339
• web: Fix a crash on Python 3 when serving files from the filesystem. #2353
• discogs: Improve the handling of releases that contain subtracks. #2318
• discogs: Fix a crash when a release does not contain format information, and increase robustness when other fields are missing. #2302
• lyrics: The plugin now reports a beets-specific User-Agent header when requesting lyrics. #2357
• embyupdate: The plugin now checks whether an API key or a password is provided in the configuration.
• play: The misspelled configuration option warning_treshold is no longer supported.

For plugin developers: when providing new importer prompt choices (see append_prompt_choices), you can now provide new candidates for the user to consider. For example, you might provide an alternative strategy for picking between the available alternatives or for looking up a release on MusicBrainz.

beets 1.4.2

This is just a little bug fix release. With 1.4.2, we're also confident enough to recommend that anyone who's interested give Python 3 a try: bugs may still lurk, but we've deemed things safe enough for broad adoption. If you can, please install beets with pip3 instead of pip2 this time and let us know how it goes!

Here are the fixes:

• badfiles: Fix a crash on non-ASCII filenames. #2299
• The %asciify{} path formatting function and the asciify-paths setting properly substitute path separators generated by converting some Unicode characters, such as ½ and ¢, into ASCII.
• convert: Fix a logging-related crash when filenames contain curly braces. Thanks to @kierdavis. #2323
• We've rolled back some changes to the included zsh completion script that were causing problems for some users. #2266

Also, we've removed some special handling for logging in the discogs that we believe was unnecessary. If spurious log messages appear in this version, please let us know by filing a bug.

beets 1.4.1

Version 1.4 has alpha-level Python 3 support. Thanks to the heroic efforts of @jrobeson, beets should run both under Python 2.7, as before, and now under Python 3.4 and above. The support is still new: it undoubtedly contains bugs, so it may replace all your music with Limp Bizkit—but if you're brave and you have backups, please try installing on Python 3. Let us know how it goes.

If you package beets for distribution, here's what you'll want to know:

• This version of beets now depends on the six library.
• We also bumped our minimum required version of Mutagen to 1.33 (from 1.27).
• Please don't package beets as a Python 3 application yet, even though most things work under Python 3.4 and later.

This version also makes a few changes to the command-line interface and configuration that you may need to know about:

• duplicates: The duplicates command no longer accepts multiple field arguments in the form -k title albumartist album. Each argument must be prefixed with -k, as in -k title -k albumartist -k album.
• The old top-level colors configuration option has been removed (the setting is now under ui).
• The deprecated list_format_album and list_format_item configuration options have been removed (see format_album and format_item).

The are a few new features:

• mpdupdate, mpdstats: When the host option is not set, these plugins will now look for the $MPD_HOST environment variable before falling back to localhost. Thanks to @tarruda. #2175
• web: Added an expand option to show the items of an album. #2050
• embyupdate: The plugin can now use an API key instead of a password to authenticate with Emby. #2045 #2117
• acousticbrainz: The plugin now adds a bpm field.
• beet --version now includes the Python version used to run beets.
• /reference/pathformat can now include unescaped commas (,) when they are not part of a function call. #2166 #2213
• The update command takes a new -F flag to specify the fields to update. Thanks to @dangmai. #2229 #2231

And there are a few bug fixes too:

• convert: The plugin no longer asks for confirmation if the query did not return anything to convert. #2260 #2262
• embedart: The plugin now uses jpg as an extension rather than jpeg, to ensure consistency with the plugins/fetchart. Thanks to @tweitzel. #2254 #2255
• embedart: The plugin now works for all jpeg files, including those that are only recognizable by their magic bytes. #1545 #2255
• web: The JSON output is no longer pretty-printed (for a space savings). #2050
• permissions: Fix a regression in the previous release where the plugin would always fail to set permissions (and log a warning). #2089
• beatport: Use track numbers from Beatport (instead of determining them from the order of tracks) and set the medium_index value.
• With per_disc_numbering enabled, some metadata sources (notably, the beatport) would not set the track number at all. This is fixed. #2085
• play: Fix $args getting passed verbatim to the play command if it was set in the configuration but -A or --args was omitted.
• With ignore_hidden enabled, non-UTF-8 filenames would cause a crash. This is fixed. #2168
• embyupdate: Fixes authentication header problem that caused a problem that it was not possible to get tokens from the Emby API.
• lyrics: Some titles use a colon to separate the main title from a subtitle. To find more matches, the plugin now also searches for lyrics using the part part preceding the colon character. #2206
• Fix a crash when a query uses a date field and some items are missing that field. #1938
• discogs: Subtracks are now detected and combined into a single track, two-sided mediums are treated as single discs, and tracks have media, medium_total and medium set correctly. #2222 #2228.
• missing: missing is now treated as an integer, allowing the use of (for example) ranges in queries.
• smartplaylist: Playlist names will be sanitized to ensure valid filenames. #2258
• The ID3 APIC tag now uses the Latin-1 encoding when possible instead of a Unicode encoding. This should increase compatibility with other software, especially with iTunes and when using ID3v2.3. Thanks to @lazka. #899 #2264 #2270

The last release, 1.3.19, also erroneously reported its version as "1.3.18" when you typed beet version. This has been corrected.

beets 1.3.19

This is primarily a bug fix release: it cleans up a couple of regressions that appeared in the last version. But it also features the triumphant return of the beatport and a modernized bpd.

It's also the first version where beets passes all its tests on Windows! May this herald a new age of cross-platform reliability for beets.

New features:

• beatport: This metadata source plugin has arisen from the dead! It now works with Beatport's new OAuth-based API. Thanks to
  @jbaiter. #1989 #2067
• bpd: The plugin now uses the modern GStreamer 1.0 instead of the old 0.10. Thanks to @philippbeckmann. #2057 #2062
• A new --force option for the remove command allows removal of items without prompting beforehand. #2042
• A new duplicate_action importer config option controls how duplicate albums or tracks treated in import task. #185

Some fixes for Windows:

• Queries are now detected as paths when they contain backslashes (in addition to forward slashes). This only applies on Windows.
• embedart: Image similarity comparison with ImageMagick should now work on Windows.
• fetchart: The plugin should work more reliably with non-ASCII paths.

And other fixes:

• replaygain: The bs1770gain backend now correctly calculates sample peak instead of true peak. This comes with a major speed increase. #2031
• lyrics: Avoid a crash and a spurious warning introduced in the last version about a Google API key, which appeared even when you hadn't enabled the Google lyrics source.
• Fix a hard-coded path to bash-completion to work better with Homebrew installations. Thanks to @bismark. #2038
• Fix a crash introduced in the previous version when the standard input was connected to a Unix pipe. #2041
• Fix a crash when specifying non-ASCII format strings on the command line with the -f option for many commands. #2063
• fetchart: Determine the file extension for downloaded images based on the image's magic bytes. The plugin prints a warning if result is not consistent with the server-supplied Content-Type header. In previous versions, the plugin would use a .jpg extension for all images. #2053

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