Library augmentation

Beets stores what’s tagged in your files (artist, album, MusicBrainz IDs, and whatever else your import config pulled in). BeetstreamNext can add a fair amount of extra, live-fetched information on top of that, none of it required, and none of it written anywhere (unless you explicitly want to).

Every data point on this page marked (external) comes from a third-party service, not from your Beets library. See Features overview for the full list.

Metadata enrichment

• Artist biographies: From Last.fm if lastfm_api_key is set, otherwise from Wikipedia if fetch_artists_biographies is enabled. (external)
• Artist top tracks and similar artists/songs: From Last.fm, using lastfm_api_key. (external)
• Album/artist ratings: Either your users’ own local ratings, or Discogs’ public community rating via discogs_ratings (off / fallback / prefer). (external, opt-in)
• Lyrics: Served from Beets’ own stored lyrics if present, or fetched on-the-fly using Beets’ lyrics plugin (fetch_lyrics), optionally written back into Beets with save_lyrics.
• Album version/edition info (e.g. “Deluxe Edition”, “Japanese Expanded Edition”): From MusicBrainz, via fetch_album_version, optionally saved with save_album_version. (external)

Artwork

• Album art / artist images are served from your Beets library’s local art path when available: nothing external needed here.
• When missing, BeetstreamNext can fetch:
  • Album art from Cover Art Archive. (external)
  • Artist images from Deezer’s public search API. (external)
  • Controlled by fetch_artists_images. save_artists_images/save_album_art optionally persist what was fetched to disk.
• follow_playlist_embedded_urls additionally lets it pull cover art from a foreign playlist’s #EXTALBUMARTURL lines, for albums that have no local art. (external) - only enable for playlist sources you trust!

Sonic similarity

To expose OpenSubsonic’s sonicSimilarity extension, BeetstreamNext integrates with AudioMuse-AI: a self-hosted audio-analysis service. (external)

For acoustic similarity (based on the audio, not tags or genre): finding similar songs, and path-finding a playlist between two tracks based on their audio embeddings.

Point audiomuse_url at your AudioMuse-AI instance and set audiomuse_api_token to enable it. The admin panel can trigger a full-library fingerprinting run on AudioMuse-AI directly.

Advanced search: Beets query passthrough

Any search request can be turned into a raw Beets query by prefixing it with beets: or b:, for example b:length:..3:30 to find tracks under 3:30. This runs Beets’ own complex query DSL (regex, field-specific, fuzzy matching) straight from your client’s search bar, instead of a normal search.

See the configuration reference for any of the settings mentioned here.