2025-06-24, 07:06 PM
I just had to do this myself. I used Beets import several times on the same home collection directory in "incremental" mode, and had to go very slowly, identifying the releases on musicbrainz and then supplying the musicbrainz ID to Beets with clicking, copying, and pasting. I did some reading on the different modes and timidness sensitivities available for Beets, and the philosophy of that software in particular seemed to be that in the end it's worth it to be very manual and hands-on with your music collection (because after all, if you do it correctly the first time, you won't have to on subsequent times). I did screw up with some of my release IDs and have spent a lot more time fixing my own mistakes than I anticipated so maybe I should have adopted this philosophy more wholeheartedly before beginning with my collection, haha.
I don't know what kind of music you're dealing with - it's true that on Bandcamp there are a lot of artists whose data may be hard or impossible to track down outside bandcamp itself - but there are beets import settings that could substantially reduce the amount of work you have to do assessing your collection. For example, there's a "quiet" mode which will skip tagging all tracks where you would need to make a decision or provide information about which release you have. There's also a logging feature which can log all skipped tracks. So you could potentially run it in quiet mode with logging and then get a list of all the music in your collection which needs (any amount of) manual work. This could save a lot of time even if you do end up having to do a lot of that manually.
I don't know what kind of music you're dealing with - it's true that on Bandcamp there are a lot of artists whose data may be hard or impossible to track down outside bandcamp itself - but there are beets import settings that could substantially reduce the amount of work you have to do assessing your collection. For example, there's a "quiet" mode which will skip tagging all tracks where you would need to make a decision or provide information about which release you have. There's also a logging feature which can log all skipped tracks. So you could potentially run it in quiet mode with logging and then get a list of all the music in your collection which needs (any amount of) manual work. This could save a lot of time even if you do end up having to do a lot of that manually.
