Lyrics Plugin¶
The lyrics
plugin fetches and stores song lyrics from databases on the Web.
Namely, the current version of the plugin uses Musixmatch, Genius.com,
Tekstowo.pl, and, optionally, the Google custom search API.
Fetch Lyrics During Import¶
To automatically fetch lyrics for songs you import, enable the lyrics
plugin in your configuration (see Using Plugins).
Then, install the requests library by typing:
pip install requests
The plugin uses requests to download lyrics.
When importing new files, beets will now fetch lyrics for files that don’t
already have them. The lyrics will be stored in the beets database. If the
import.write
config option is on, then the lyrics will also be written to
the files’ tags.
Configuration¶
To configure the plugin, make a lyrics:
section in your
configuration file. The available options are:
auto: Fetch lyrics automatically during import. Default:
yes
.bing_client_secret: Your Bing Translation application password (to Activate On-the-Fly Translation)
bing_lang_from: By default all lyrics with a language other than
bing_lang_to
are translated. Use a list of lang codes to restrict the set of source languages to translate. Default:[]
bing_lang_to: Language to translate lyrics into. Default: None.
fallback: By default, the file will be left unchanged when no lyrics are found. Use the empty string
''
to reset the lyrics in such a case. Default: None.force: By default, beets won’t fetch lyrics if the files already have ones. To instead always fetch lyrics, set the
force
option toyes
. Default:no
.google_API_key: Your Google API key (to enable the Google Custom Search backend). Default: None.
google_engine_ID: The custom search engine to use. Default: The beets custom search engine, which gathers an updated list of sources known to be scrapeable.
sources: List of sources to search for lyrics. An asterisk
*
expands to all available sources. Default:google musixmatch genius tekstowo
, i.e., all the available sources. Thegoogle
source will be automatically deactivated if nogoogle_API_key
is setup. Thegoogle
,genius
, andtekstowo
sources will only be enabled if BeautifulSoup is installed.
Here’s an example of config.yaml
:
lyrics:
fallback: ''
google_API_key: AZERTYUIOPQSDFGHJKLMWXCVBN1234567890_ab
google_engine_ID: 009217259823014548361:lndtuqkycfu
Fetching Lyrics Manually¶
The lyrics
command provided by this plugin fetches lyrics for items that
match a query (see Queries). For example, beet lyrics magnetic
fields absolutely cuckoo
will get the lyrics for the appropriate Magnetic
Fields song, beet lyrics magnetic fields
will get lyrics for all my tracks
by that band, and beet lyrics
will get lyrics for my entire library. The
lyrics will be added to the beets database and, if import.write
is on,
embedded into files’ metadata.
The -p
option to the lyrics
command makes it print lyrics out to the
console so you can view the fetched (or previously-stored) lyrics.
The -f
option forces the command to fetch lyrics, even for tracks that
already have lyrics. Inversely, the -l
option restricts operations
to lyrics that are locally available, which show lyrics faster without using
the network at all.
Rendering Lyrics into Other Formats¶
The -r directory
option renders all lyrics as reStructuredText (ReST)
documents in directory
(by default, the current directory). That
directory, in turn, can be parsed by tools like Sphinx to generate HTML,
ePUB, or PDF documents.
A minimal conf.py
and index.rst
files are created the first time the
command is run. They are not overwritten on subsequent runs, so you can safely
modify these files to customize the output.
Sphinx supports various builders, but here are a few suggestions.
Build an HTML version:
sphinx-build -b html . _build/htmlBuild an ePUB3 formatted file, usable on ebook readers:
sphinx-build -b epub3 . _build/epubBuild a PDF file, which incidentally also builds a LaTeX file:
sphinx-build -b latex %s _build/latex && make -C _build/latex all-pdf
Activate Google Custom Search¶
Using the Google backend requires BeautifulSoup, which you can install using pip by typing:
pip install beautifulsoup4
You also need to register for a Google API key. Set the google_API_key
configuration option to your key.
Then add google
to the list of sources in your configuration (or use
default list, which includes it as long as you have an API key).
If you use default google_engine_ID
, we recommend limiting the sources to
musixmatch google
as the other sources are already included in the Google
results.
Optionally, you can define a custom search engine. Get your search engine’s
token and use it for your google_engine_ID
configuration option. By
default, beets use a list of sources known to be scrapeable.
Note that the Google custom search API is limited to 100 queries per day. After that, the lyrics plugin will fall back on other declared data sources.
Activate Genius and Tekstowo.pl Lyrics¶
Using the Genius or Tekstowo.pl backends requires BeautifulSoup, which you can install using pip by typing:
pip install beautifulsoup4
These backends are enabled by default.
Activate On-the-Fly Translation¶
Using the Bing Translation API requires langdetect, which you can install using pip by typing:
pip install langdetect
You also need to register for a Microsoft Azure Marketplace free account and
to the Microsoft Translator API. Follow the four steps process, specifically
at step 3 enter beets
as Client ID and copy/paste the generated
Client secret into your bing_client_secret
configuration, alongside
bing_lang_to
target language code.