Bash script to monitor all albums with missing tracks in Lidarr

[peterjdolan]

Hi all,

I have a lot of albums in my Beets library that are missing tracks, and I want to monitor them in Lidarr so that I can get new (and hopefully complete) copies of them. How to do this? Lidarr has a REST API, which supports two key functions:

1. Given a MusicBrainz release group id, look up the album's id in the Lidarr database, and
2. Given the Lidarr database's album id, set it to monitored or unmonitored

This is definitely something we can work with, and my first thought was to write a Python script to handle it for me, but executing shell commands and making HTTP requests in Python is a bit of a pain.

Happily, I recently learned how to use the jq command-line tool, so of course I have to use it for everything.

Here's a "one line" shell script that identifies all albums with missing tracks, looks up the Lidarr album id for each, and sets them all to monitored:

(API_KEY=<your Lidarr API key>;
LIDARR_BASE=<your Lidarr instance URL>;
LIDARR_ALBUM=$LIDARR_BASE/api/v1/album?apikey=$API_KEY;
LIDARR_MONITOR=$LIDARR_BASE/v1/album/monitor?apikey=$API_KEY;
beet missing -f '$mb_releasegroupid' '^mb_releasegroupid::$^' | \
sort | uniq | \
xargs -I {} curl "$LIDARR_ALBUM&foreignAlbumId={}" | \
jq '.[].releases[].albumId' | \
sort | uniq | \
xargs -I {} curl -X PUT "$LIDARR_MONITOR" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d "{\"albumIds\": [{}], \"monitored\": true}")

To run this, you need to have the curl, jq, and xargs command line tools (plus the standard sort and uniq tools), and you need to have the Beets missing plugin.

I hope this saves someone else a few minutes!