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Playlists & CUE Sheets

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Adrian Sampson edited this page Apr 7, 2018 · 3 revisions

Traditionally, music players give the users the ability to create smart playlists and manual playlists based on music in their library. Although Beets isn't strictly a music player, the very fact it's a music management tool means it lends itself beautifully to the creation of playlists and management of CUE sheets.

Background

Smart Playlists

smartplaylist is a plugin to generate smart playlists in m3u format based on beets queries every time your library changes. http://beets.readthedocs.org/en/v1.3.13/plugins/smartplaylist.html

Smartplaylist is a powerful tool that enables users to automatically generate playlists but currently there is no way to manually create a playlist using beets. Due to the way Beets manages paths and structure, it makes sense to use it to control manual playlists too.

Manual Playlists

Use Cases

  • A user wants to be able to compile a playlist of tracks from their favourite artist. A smart playlist would compile a playlist with every track from that artist, or refined further with more explicit criteria, however, it could never allow the user the flexibility to cherry pick particular songs from specific albums.
  • Similarly, a user may not wish to import duplicate tracks on a compilation release, but rather, would want to compile a playlist based on existing tracks to make the compilation.
  • A user wants to be able to compile a playlist of their favourite tracks from the year 2014. A smart playlist would likely compile all tracks from the given year, but the user would like to cherry pick specific tracks from various artists and albums for the playlist - A "2014 top 10" for example.
  • Manual playlists created would need to be updated if the library or paths change.
  • Ability to import playlists into Beets
  • Ability to export playlists out of Beets - into CUE, M3U, XSPF

Configuration

CLI

CUE Sheet Management

CUE sheets can be an important part of peoples collection, management of the CUE sheets through Beets would be beneficial in many ways.

CUE Sheets associated with albums and album rips

Use Cases

  • A user has many CUE sheets from an old library. When importing their music into Beets, the CUE sheets are now wrong and deemed unusable. Beets could change the paths in these CUE sheets to match the new structure.
  • Ability to bulk edit CUE sheets
  • Discuss CUE sheets used to split large files into separate tracks and importing those into library - https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/issues/136
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