Library augmentation

A lot of what shows up in your Subsonic client (artist photos, biographies, community ratings, “songs like this one”, etc) isn’t in your Beets library: BeetstreamNext collects and serves additional data.

Metadata enrichment

• Artist biographies: From Last.fm if lastfm_api_key is set, otherwise from Wikipedia if fetch_artists_biographies is enabled.

• Artist top tracks and similar artists/songs: From Last.fm, using lastfm_api_key.

• Album/artist ratings: Either your local users’ ratings, or Discogs’ public community rating via discogs_ratings (off / fallback / prefer).

• Lyrics: Served from Beets’ stored lyrics if present, from .lrc files next to the audio files (tip: use the filetote plugin), 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.

Artwork

• Album art / artist images are served from your Beets library’s local art path when available.

• When missing:

  • Album art from Cover Art Archive.

  • Artist images from Deezer’s public search API.

  • Controlled by fetch_artists_images.

  • save_album_art allows saving album art next to the music files.

  • follow_playlist_embedded_urls lets cover art be pulled from a foreign playlist’s #EXTALBUMARTURL lines, for albums that have no local art. (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. This is used for acoustic similarity (based on the audio, not tags or genre), to find 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.