Beets plugin that fetches oldest recording or release date for each track. This is especially useful when tracks are
from best-of compilations, remasters, or re-releases. Originally based on beets-recordingdate by tweitzel, but almost
entirely rewritten to actually work with MusicBrainz's incomplete information. The only thing left intact is
the recording_ MP3 tags, for compatibility with beets-recordingdate.
Simply run pip install beets-oldestdate then add oldestdate to the list of active plugins in beets and configure as
necessary. The plugin is intended to be used in singleton mode. Undefined behaviour may occur otherwise.
| Key | Default Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| auto | True | Run oldestdate during the import phase |
| ignore_track_id | False | During import, ignore existing track_id. Needed if using plugin on a library already tagged by MusicBrainz |
| filter_on_import | True | During import, weight down candidates with no work_id so you are more likely to choose a recording with a work_id |
| prompt_missing_work_id | True | During import, prompt to fix work_id if missing from chosen recording |
| force | False | Run even if recording_ tags have already been applied to the track |
| overwrite_date | False | Overwrite the date MP3 tag field, inluding year, month, and day |
| overwrite_month | True | If overwriting date, also overwrite month field, otherwise leave blank |
| overwrite_day | True | If overwriting date, also overwrite day field, otherwise leave blank |
| filter_recordings | True | Skip recordings that have attributes before fetching them. This is usually live recordings |
| approach | releases | What approach to use to find oldest date. Possible values: recordings, releases, hybrid, both. recordings works like beets-recordingdate did, releases is a far more accurate method. Hybrid only fetches releases if no date was found in recordings. |
| release_types | None | Filter releases by type, e.g. ['Official']. Usually not needed |
| use_file_date | False | Use the file's embedded date too when looking for the oldest date |
| max_network_retries | 3 | Maximum amount of times a given network call will be retried, using exponential backoff, before giving up. |
musicbrainz:
searchlimit: 20
plugins: oldestdate
oldestdate:
auto: yes
ignore_track_id: yes
filter_on_import: yes
prompt_missing_work_id: yes
force: yes
overwrite_date: yes
overwrite_month: yes
overwrite_day: yes
filter_recordings: yes
approach: 'releases'
The plugin will take the recording that was chosen and get its work_id. From this, it gets all recordings associated
with said work. If using the recordings approach, it will look through these recordings' dates and find the oldest. If
using the releases approach, it will instead go through the dates for all releases for all recordings and find the
oldest (much more accurate). The difference between these two approaches is that with recordings it only takes one
API call to get the necessary data, while with releases it takes n calls, where n is the number of recordings.
This takes significantly longer due to MusicBrainz's default ratelimit of 1 API call per second. Due to this, the
option filter_recordings exists to cut down on the amount of calls needed.
If the chosen recording has no Work associated with it, the plugin cannot do its job. This is where filter_on_import
comes in: it applies a negative score to tracks that don't have an associated work so they are much less likely to be
chosen. However, this means some of the displayed tracks will be irrelevant. Thus, setting the searchlimit to 20 or so
tracks is needed to hit the one recording that does have a work. This happens to work quite well with famous songs
because there is usually a single recording with an associated work that is the original recording, and thus the oldest.
If we match with this one, the other recordings that we can't get to because they are not associated with the same work
are irrelevant, because we already have the oldest date.
However, it sometimes happens that there is no available recording that matches our track with an associated work. This
is what prompt_missing_work_id is for: it will prompt us to either just use the single matched recording, in which
case only the matched recording's data is used, and checked against the embedded date, or we can try again, or skip the
track. Trying again is so that we may go to the website and amend the data, so that the recordings will have an
associated work. To help with this process, the plugin prints out a URL to a search for that specific track. Your task
is to create a work and associate it with all the relevant recordings, then press try again. This can be quite a
laborious task, so if we see that the date printed by the plugin as being the oldest date found with just the selected
recording seems accurate, choosing Use this recording would be the best choice.
The plugin is also programmed to deal with covers effectively. Because a work actually contains both the recordings of
a song by the original author and any cover artists, when the song we are processing is not a cover, any recordings
tagged as covers are discarded, to save API calls. Conversely, if the processed song is a cover, then we only keep
cover recordings, and filter them by author, so only the relevant recordings are kept. This is so the oldest date for a
cover will be the oldest date in which that cover was made, and not the original song. This only works when
in releases mode, as we need to fetch the recordings to get the author data. In recordings mode, all covers are
treated as the same, even if they may be from different authors.