Poll: What's your expected behavior of set_fields and --set?

[bertbesser]

Hi everybody,

we are discussing the expected behavior of the set_fields configuration, which uses the set_fields configuration file block and the --set command line option. #3927

Question for you: Should fields be set on the imported album only, or also on each individual track?

In the current implementation, fields are set on the imported album only. Hence beet list won't let you filter for those fields unless you provide the -a flag. With -a, however, you will see a list of albums instead of individual tracks.

There are some discussions on the board (e.g. here or here or here) and on the internet (e.g. here) where people expect that fields are also set on each individual track. In particular, this would imply that the fields are also written to the metadata of the track files instead of only beets' database.

Main question: Would changing the implementation from album in database only to write each individual track file break your setup?

Please share your thoughts.
Thank you!

PS: Also posted on discourse.

[teogramm]

For me the main issue is that if fields are not set on each individual track, they are not detected in paths configuration. For example I used to have a configuration like this:

paths:
    default: ....
    custom:1: custom_folder/......
    custom2:1: custom2/.....

But this meant that I could not simply do beet import --set custom=1 but instead had to run beet modify custom=1 ... after importing each album which got pretty tiring. I now use a configuration like this one: #2797 (comment) and it works pretty well.

Anyway, a way to change this is to maybe split the set_fields into set_album_fields and set_track_fields while making set_fields set both fields. People relying on the old behaviour could then change set_fields to set_album_fields. ( I do not know how easy or hard this would technically be).

[rnkn]

(Duplicated from Discourse...)
I assumed it tried to set the values on each individual track and when it didn't seem to work I always just thought this was a bug.