ImportReplace

A plugin for beets to perform regex replacements during import.

It works on metadata in AlbumInfo and TrackInfo objects as they come in. Running many replacements (or on many fields) might negatively impact import performance.

A good usecase for this plugin is replacing the Unicode apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens used by MusicBrainz with their ASCII counterparts. The built-in replace configuration won't work for this, because it only acts on filenames.

Installation

Install the plugin using pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/edgars-supe/beets-importreplace.git

Then, configure the plugin in your config.yaml file.

Configuration

First, add importreplace to your list of enabled plugins.

plugins: importreplace

Then, add a importreplace: configuration block in your beets config.yaml file. Add one or more replacement configurations under replacements: This example configuration replaces Unicode apostrophes, quotes and hyphen used by MusicBrainz with their ASCII counterparts.

importreplace:
  replacements:
    - item_fields: title artist artist_sort artist_credit
      album_fields: album artist artist_sort artist_credit
      replace:
        '[\u2018-\u201B]': ''''
        '[\u201C-\u201F]': '"'
        '[\u2010-\u2015]': '-'

• item_fields is a set of fields to run replacements on for items
• album_fields is a set of fields to run replacements on for albums
• replace is a set of regex/replacement pairs

That's about it.

You can add more replacement configurations for different fields. For example, to replace certain strings only for tracks, but different strings only for albums.

importreplace:
  replacements:
    - item_fields: title
      replace:
        'The': 'That'
    - item_fields: album
      album_fields: album
      replace:
        'Foo': 'Bar'

This config will convert

Artist - The Fighters of Foo/Artist - The Foo Song

into

Artist - The Fighters of Bar/Artist - That Foo Song