Import with move to beets, fixing old playlists

[diresi]

Hi!

I have the usual unsorted dusty pile of music that I never managed to organize. Now with beets I'm moving everything to its music library with its nice structure. I do have a number of playlists pointing into the old mess, though, which break since files are moved and renamed.
Now, I want those files to be moved and renamed, but I also want to update my old playlists to point to the new locations.

I tried the importfeeds plugin with "links", but that just generates links in "some other place", not where the original file used to be before it got imported, so that' s not what I'm looking for.

Ideally there'd be a log somewhere with all the file moves, such as old_path -> new_path and a tool (or some scripting on my end) to resolve all my old playlists using that log and update its paths.

Does that sound reasonable?
How can I address this?
I wonder how this isn't affecting a whole bunch of users (that lived with their mess for years).

Thanks,
Chri

p.s. I tried to fiddle with the importfeeds plugin to change how it generates links, but I failed to find the original path of imported items :(

[JOJ0]

You could try a combination of setting a custom beets field during import --set-field original_playlist_name=<playlist_name> and the smartplaylist plugin with a filter entry like:

    - name: generated_playlist_name
      query: >
        original_playlist_name: <playlist_name>

During an import run you would have to specifically tell beets to only import files from that playlist though. That is tricky already but could be solved with some shell magic. I asked an AI friend for that but didn't test it. Theoretically it should take care of ignoring comments as well as spaces in file names:

grep -v '^#' <playlist_name>.m3u | grep -v '^\s*$' | xargs -d '\n' beet import --set-field ...

[diresi]

Hmm, this is a good idea!
Does your AI friend know whether I should import as singletons? And if so, what if some tracks are parts of albums, can I just import twice or something?

My playlists are mostly mixes, but I do have a number of full albums in disk..

[JOJ0]

For that I'd rather ask myself instead of AI buddy 😂

Import as albums. Set duplicate_action: ask option. beets should detect tracks from same albums. Choose merge at the prompt.

also enable

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html#duplicate-verbose-prompt

[JOJ0]

beets doesn't work well with mixes and merging since for that it requires a proper online datasource (discogs, mb, ...) that matches the metadata.

official mix cd's work! recorded dj sets don't! That what you mean by mixes?

if by mixes you mean just random tracks in your m3us that are found on discogs, mb, that approach should work though!

[diresi]

It's the latter what I mean with mixes, mix tapes in my early years. Anyway, the duplicate_action is probably what I was missing. I'll give it a try and will report back. Thank you!