Beetcamp questions: Capitalize genre names / Catalognumber missing

[JOJ0]

Hi @snejus, before I open an issue in the beetcamp repo I wanted to make sure it's not user error and clarify what the expected behaviour / current implementation of beetcamp is. Two things:

I'm not yet sure if it's configurable but I see genres coming from beetcamp/bandcamp seem to be all lower case. Genre plugins like lastgenre have a capitalize option. This is how genres from bandcamp look for me:

LMajor - Can't Do It - 01 - Can't Do It (2021/GB) [] f:FLAC a:23-05/bandcamp |2-step, breaks, jungle, techno

lastgenre would give me something like this even though it might have received it in non-caps from last.fm: 2-step, Breaks, Jungle, Techno, providing the title_case option is set: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/lastgenre.html#configuration

Does such an option exist in beetcamp? If not, I would open a feature request over at the repo and hope someone picks it up :-)

Another thing we see in the output above: I often (but not always) miss the catalog number in bandcamp-tagged albums (The empty square brackets above, the actual catno of this release on Discogs or MusicBrainz is APHA025, which means: There is one, it's not a release that doesn't have one - I guess stuff like that exists in the world ;-))

I fear this is due to lacking information in the bandcamp database. Can you confirm this or tell me how to doublecheck if for this particular release (https://lmajormusic.bandcamp.com/album/cant-do-it) bandcamp/the bandcamp api has a catalog number?

[snejus]

hi @JOJ0,

1. Capitalisation: use bandcamp.genre.capitalize = yes configuration option

2. Catalogue numbers: beetcamp has a fairly advanced catalogue number parser which checks album name, description, media information and even track titles, but often the catalogue number is simply missing. Have just checked the album page for your example and unfortunately the catalogue number does not get mentioned 😞. beetcamp only checks the bandcamp page for information and does not query any external sources.

You can use the url2json script from the repository root to obtain the JSON data that it works with

url2json https://lmajormusic.bandcamp.com/album/cant-do-it

you will find that most of that information gets displayed on the screen, and that the catalogue number does not have its own field.

[JOJ0]

Oh my gosh! So sorry for not reading your awesome docs in the first place! Those genre features are awesome!

And I just realise that it's even possible to exclude comments tag, which I always cleaned out with a beet mod command manually (seems often there is a whole lot of information about the whole release or label which disturbs beets queries)

Thanks again, awesome stuff 🤩

[snejus]

No worries!

Regarding cleaning things up, you may find beets-importreplace useful. I have a separate configuration file for it where I do a fair bit of clean-up:

# config.yaml
---
directory: /run/media/sarunas/music/Music
library: library.db
include:
  - replacements.yaml
...

# replacements.yaml
---
.albumreplace: &albumreplace
  "𝙐𝙕𝙑𝘼": "UZVA"
  "𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙢𝙪𝙩𝙖𝙧": "Transmutar"
  "₀₃": "03"
  "₀₄": "04"

.artistreplace: &artistreplace
  "Dj ": "DJ "
  ".*Acolytes Of.*": "Acolytes Of Yama"
  1LUU: 1luu
  Alya7h: ALYA7H
  Chane: Chané
  Clair: CLAIR
  "(?i:Die+rich)": "Die+Rich"
  DJLOSER: "DJ LOSER"
  "DJ mantis": "DJ Mantis"
  DJSUPER: "DJ SUPER"
...

importreplace:
  replacements:
    - album_fields: album
      replace:
        <<: *albumreplace
    - album_fields: artist
      replace:
        <<: *artistreplace

    - item_fields: album
      replace:
        <<: *albumreplace
        <<: *artistreplace
    - item_fields: artist
      replace:
        <<: *artistreplace

[JOJ0]

Oh wow! Yeah I will look into that plugin, I have heard of it and wanted to try it anyway.

One question about that syntax: Is that a regular yaml syntax thing you are using here. Defining a variable and using it later on? Or ist that a specific thing of that plugin:

.albumreplace: &albumreplace
...
...
<<: *albumreplace

I was trying to use something like that (defining var and reusing it somewhere else in the yaml file) together with the smartplaylist plugin to easily reuse "search pattern snippets"

[snejus]

These are standard YAML Anchors - I stumbled upon them in docker-compose docs for the first time.

I don't get to see them in the wild a lot, but they work nicely here :)

[snejus]

If you're interested in the madness behind catalogue number extraction, see here and here 😅

[JOJ0]

wtf? haha need look into that magic!! 😅

[JOJ0]

ok, so in short: Bancamp does not simply provide the catalognumber via its API, but you need to extract it from anywhere on the website? That correct?

[snejus]

Indeed! Those regular expressions evolved with time: I tried to cover all cases I was coming about. Some of this is documented: open beetcamp changelog and search for catalognum

[JOJ0]

Ah, another question comes up. With lastgenre I always exclude the genre "Electronic" because I think it doesn't tell much. I see we can do always_include but can we exclude a specific genre, or do you think I could use import_replace to do it?

[snejus]

Ah good point - beetcamp does not support genre.exclude or equivalent.

For now, yes - it would be best to use the importreplace plugin.

I always exclude the genre "Electronic" because I think it doesn't tell much

Though keep in mind that if style gets parsed as Electronic, you should not see it in the genre field: beetcamp has logic which always removes style from the genre field.

Is this the case on your end, or did you find a bug, potentially? 😄