Automatically convert all smartplaylists using the convert plugin

[pierreay]

First of all, hello to everyone of the project, I just discovered Beets a few weeks ago, what a great piece of software! Truly amazing.

I have a workflow where a have several dozens of automatic playlists defined and generated using the smartplayilst plugin for my lossless library. I would like to automatically export those playlists and convert the associated files to my lossy library.

I can easily implement this using external ad-hoc bash scripts. However, I started considering using the hook plugin. And then, started considering implementing it as a new command for the smartplaylist plugin, named for example, splconvert. At this stage, I though how we should handle cross-plugins dependencies (e.g., smartplaylist will depends on convert for this command), and even if it is authorized in the development rules of the team.

What do you think about this?

[pierreay]

After posting this, I finally went to a very simple one-liner that suits my needs. Implementing the feature inside beets may be overkill? Anyway, for those interested:

cat ~/.config/beets/config.yaml | grep -E "name:.*.m3u" | cut -d ":" -f 2 | sed "s/.m3u//" | xargs -I% beet --plugin="convert,playlist" convert -y playlist:% -m %.m3u

It will find all the declared playlists using smartplaylist inside the configuration file using a simple regex and use the beet convert command matching the songs containing in each playlist with the -m flag set according to the playlist name.

Since I have one playlist with all songs, it will first convert my entire library into the destination directory, and then it will go over the songs contained in each playlists but skip their conversion since they are already converted -- and finally generate the new playlist containing the converted files instead of the original ones.