📢 Announcement: beet_monitor - A Collection Assistant for Beets

[sc-alf]

📢 Announcement: beet_monitor - A Collection Assistant for Beets

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🙏 First and foremost, a huge thank you

I would like to express my profound gratitude to the entire Beets team and all the contributors who have made this project possible.

Beets is so much more than just a music manager: it's an extraordinary tool that has transformed the way I manage my music library. The rigor with which Beets organizes metadata and the power of its plugin system make it an indispensable piece of software for any serious collector.

beet_monitor would never have existed without Beets. This script was born from my daily use of Beets and the desire to go even further in exploring and enriching my collection.

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🤖 About This Project

beet_monitor was developed with the assistance of an AI assistant (sorry...). It's offered as-is, freely available to anyone who finds it useful. Thus, you can :

• Fork it, modify it, improve it
• Add features you'd like to see
• Fix bugs I may have missed
• Make it your own

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🎵 Introducing beet_monitor

beet_monitor is a collection assistant that compares your Beets library with the MusicBrainz database to identify missing studio albums.

What beet_monitor does:

• 🔍 Smart Discovery - Identifies studio albums you don't yet own
• 📦 Edition Grouping - Automatically groups deluxe, remaster, anniversary editions, etc. (shows only the best edition)
• 💾 Intelligent Caching - Stores MusicBrainz data locally for near-instantaneous queries
• 🎯 Flexible Filtering - By artist, year, date range, or recency
• 🚫 Exclusion Management - Ignore specific albums or entire artists
• 🔒 Integrity Checking - Verifies your library has proper MusicBrainz identifiers

Why it's useful:

Imagine you have a collection of thousands of albums and you want to know what's missing from your favorite artists. beet_monitor does this work in seconds:

# Discover all missing albums
beet_monitor missing

# Find what's missing from Pink Floyd after 1973
beet_monitor missing -a "Pink Floyd" -y ">1973"

# See releases from the last 6 months
beet_monitor missing -r 6

🚀 Quick Installation

# Install from repository
git clone https://framagit.org/scalf/beet-monitor.git
cd beet-monitor
pip install -e .

# Basic usage
beet_monitor scan      # First download of MusicBrainz data
beet_monitor missing   # Find missing albums

📊 A Concrete Example

With a library of thousands of albums:

$ beet_monitor missing -r 6

=== Missing Studio Albums (Last 6 Months) ===

Found 12 missing album(s) from 8 artist(s):

The Cure (1 missing):
  [2024-10-01] Songs of a Lost World

Radiohead (2 missing):
  [2024-11-22] A Moon Shaped Pool (Deluxe Edition)
  [...]

💡 What beet_monitor Adds to the Beets Ecosystem

1. A comprehensive overview of what's missing from your collection
2. Intelligent edition handling (no more deciding between deluxe and standard versions)
3. A filtered approach by year, artist, or recency
4. An exclusion system for artists/albums you don't want to collect
5. Seamless integration with Beets' existing structure

🔗 Useful Links

• FramaGit Repository: https://framagit.org/scalf/beet-monitor
• Full Documentation: See the README

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📝 Final Note

I want to emphasize that beet_monitor is a complementary tool, not a replacement. It relies entirely on Beets' data structure and philosophy. Without the rigor of Beets' metadata organization, such a tool would be impossible to create.

This is an open source. Whether you're a Python developer, a Beets power user, or just someone with great ideas, you are welcome!

Special thanks to: The Beets team, the MusicBrainz community, and the entire open-source ecosystem that makes projects like this possible.

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🎵 Better organization for better listening.