Beets is a command-line music library manager that automates the organization, standardization, and maintenance of digital audio collections. It functions as a relational database-backed system that identifies audio content through acoustic fingerprinting and retrieves accurate metadata from online databases to ensure consistent tagging and directory structures.
The project distinguishes itself through an event-driven pipeline architecture and a modular plugin system, which allow users to intercept and customize library processing workflows. This extensibility enables the integration of external data sources and custom logic, supporting tasks ranging from automated metadata enrichment to complex file system operations defined by declarative path templates.
Beyond its core management capabilities, the system includes tools for auditing library integrity by detecting duplicates and missing files. It also provides a built-in web server that enables remote browsing, searching, and streaming of the organized collection directly through a standard web browser, alongside integrated support for transcoding audio files between different formats.
