Importing from RDLibrary to beets

This is a beet plug-in able to import music (it will only import from the MUSIC group) from RDLibrary to beets. It uses the "Artist" and "Title" tags from RDLibrary to re-tag files. It also uses acoustid to hopefully fix missing tags or wrong tags like [new cart].

This is intended for big music libraries (over 10k carts) that have lived a long time in Rivendell. In perticular we translate Rivendell's importation date: if you've keep on importing music to Rivendell until the migration, you'll still be able to filter recent tracks with a beets filter like added:-3m.. (added 3 months ago).

Before starting

Identify where your Rivendell installation is storing its sounds (typically /srv/rivendell/snd). Get a MySQL export of its database.

Install pip3, for example with sudo apt-get install pip3.

Install beets: As we're writing this the beets package downloaded by pip is still a bit out of date. Therefore, if pip3 install beets installs version 1.4.9: rollback with pip3 uninstall beets and clone from the main repository

git clone https://github.com/beetbox/beets.git
cd beets
pip3 install -e .

In beets' configuration, you must enable this plug-in: check that rivendell2beets is listed in plugins.

Install Chromaprint:

sudo apt-get install libchromaprint1
pip3 install pyacoustid

You will need an AcouticID API key: register as an application at https://acoustid.org/

Sound files

Rivendell converts everything to WAV files normalized at a LUFS scale ... which ended up quite low, in our experience. Convert at least to FLAC : it will use less disk space, and support metadata. Our script also normalized to 0db peaks.

see conversion.sh. You'll have to:

• install ffmpeg and the ffmpeg-normalize package
• in conversion.sh
  • adjust the path to srv/rivendell/snd (Rivendell's WAV folder)
  • adjust the path to the target folder (currently ~/SndFromRivendell)

the DB

This repository includes mysql2sqlite as a submodule. Convert your Rivendell DB dump to Sqlite with:

./mysql2sqlite database-20201118-0625.sql | sqlite3 rivendell.db

The result file, rivendell.db, will be used by the import script. When you'll launch the import it must be in the current folder.

Scheduler codes

The plugin contains a map of scheduler code : each code is associated either to None or to a dict that will be merged with items' attributes. See examples in source.

Each rivendell cart's importation time will be imported to beets' added field.

The import itself

Launch it with

beet rivendell2beets [ACOUSTICID_KEY] [rivendellSoundFolder]

Where

• [rivendellSoundFolder] is /srv/rivendell/snd or just . if you call this from a back-up.
• [ACOUSTICID_KEY] is your application's AcouticID API key

A file that is not correctly tagged in Rivendell (like "[new cart]", "Track 01" or nothing) and not recoginzed by AcousticID will be moved to a "failed" subfolder, renamed with the few things we knew form Rivendell. You will have to import those manually.

For some reason, tags are not written to files. You might want to run beet write.