bcgenre

A beets plugin that fetches genre tags from Bandcamp release pages and merges them into your library’s genres field.

It is meant to complement lastgenre: Last.fm often misses artist-authored Bandcamp tags (and Bandcamp’s hyphenated forms like hip-hop / neo-soul). bcgenre reads those tags from the release page, normalizes them with lastgenre’s helpers, and filters them against a MusicBrainz genre whitelist.

Requirements

• beets (includes the lastgenre package used for whitelist / aliases / canonicalization data)
• beetcamp (bandcamp plugin) for Bandcamp HTML parsing and slug helpers
• A Bandcamp URL in each item’s comments field (artist root or album URL), e.g. Visit https://artist.bandcamp.com

Install

Clone or copy this package so beets can see beetsplug/bcgenre:

beetsplug/
  bcgenre/
    __init__.py
    genres.py
    resolve.py
    README.md

Point pluginpath at the parent of that beetsplug directory (or at the beetsplug directory itself — both work with beets), then enable the plugin:

plugins: lastgenre bandcamp bcgenre
pluginpath: /path/to/parent   # directory that contains beetsplug/

Confirm it loads:

beet bcgenre -h

Configuration

Options live under bcgenre: and mirror lastgenre’s shared settings (they do not inherit from your lastgenre: block):

bcgenre:
    auto: no
    force: no
    keep_existing: no
    count: 1
    whitelist: yes          # yes = lastgenre's genres.txt; or a path to your own list
    aliases: yes            # yes = lastgenre's aliases.yaml; no = off; or an inline mapping
    canonical: no           # yes = add parent genres from lastgenre's genres-tree.yaml
    title_case: yes
    fallback:               # optional genre when Bandcamp yields nothing
    pretend: no

File writes follow your global import.write setting (same as lastgenre).

Usage

# Preview changes (no DB / file writes)
beet bcgenre -p

# Apply (uses config force / keep_existing)
beet bcgenre

# Force + replace existing genres
beet bcgenre -f -K

# Force + union with existing genres
beet bcgenre -f -k

# Limit to a query (albums by default)
beet bcgenre -p albumartist:Aesop\ Rock
beet bcgenre -A artist:Aesop\ Rock    # items instead of albums

CLI flags match lastgenre: -p/--pretend, -f/-F (force), -k/-K (keep-existing), -a/-A (albums/items).

Output shows the same per-track genres: + / - diffs as lastgenre.

How URL resolution works

For each album, bcgenre:

1. Reuses a cached bandcamp_album_url flex field if present
2. Uses a deep /album/... (or /track/...) URL from comments when available
3. Otherwise takes the Bandcamp root from comments and guesses /album/{slug}
4. On miss, scrapes {root}/music and fuzzy-matches the album title (handles Bandcamp’s -2 slug collisions)

Resolved URLs are stored in bandcamp_album_url so re-runs avoid most network work.

Requests are paced at about 1 per second (not configurable), with backoff and abort on repeated HTTP 429 responses.

Tips

• Prefer a pretend pass first: beet bcgenre -p -f -k
• Albums without a Bandcamp URL in comments are skipped
• Translated or heavily renamed titles may not match Bandcamp’s discography listing; set bandcamp_album_url manually or restore a closer title
• lastgenre does not need to be enabled for bcgenre to use its data files, but enabling both is the usual setup