The beets plugin for paranoid obsessive-compulsive music geeks.

beets-check lets you verify the integrity of your audio files. It computes and validates file checksums and uses third party tools to check the integrity of audio data.

If you want to use this plugin, make sure your have version 1.3.4 of beets installed.

pip install --upgrade beets>=1.3.4
pip install git+git://github.com/geigerzaehler/beets-check.git

If you want to use third-party tools to verify the integrity of your audio files you have to manually install them on your system. Run beet check --list-tools to see a list of programs that the plugin can use.

Let’s get started and add some checksums to your library.

$ beet check -a
WARNING integrity error: /music/Abbey Road/01 Come Together.mp3
Adding unknown checksums:  1032/8337 [12%]

The check command looks for all files that don’t have a checksum yet. It computes the checksum for each of these files and stores it in the database. The command also prints a warning if one of the integrity tools has found an error.

After some time (or maybe a system crash) you’ll probably want to go back to your library and verify that none of the files has changed. To do this run

$ beet check
WARNING integrity error: /music/Abbey Road/01 Come Together.mp3
FAILED: /music/Sgt. Pepper/13 A Day in the Life.mp3
Verifying checksums:  5102/8337 [53%]

For later inspection you might want to keep a log. To do that just redirect the error output with beet check 2>check.log. All WARNING and ERROR lines are sent to stderr, so you will still see the progressbar.

If you have changed one of the files on purpose, its checksum most certainly will have changed, too. So go ahead and update the database.

$ beet check -u 'album:Sgt. Pepper'
Updating checksums:  2/13 [15%]

Since it would be tedious to run check -a every time you import new music into beets, beets-check will add checksum automatically. Before an album or track is imported an integrity check is run. If the check fails beets will ask you to confirm the import.

$ beet import 'Abbey Road'
Tagging:
    The Beatles - Abbey Road
URL:
    http://musicbrainz.org/release/eca8996a-a637-3259-ba07-d2573c601a1b
(Similarity: 100.0%) (Vinyl, 1969, DE, Apple Records)
Warning: failed to verify integrity
  Abbey Road/01 Come Together.mp3: MPEG stream error
Do you want to skip this album? (Y/n)

After a track has been added to the database and all modifications to the tags have been written, beets-check adds the checksums. This is virtually the same as running beets check -a after the import.

If you run import with the --quiet flag the importer will skip corrupted files automatically and log an error.

The write and modify commands change a file’s content and this invalidates its checksum. To relieve you from updating the checksum manually, the plugin will recalculate the checksums of all the files that were changed.

$ beet check -e 'title:A Day in the Life'
ded5...363f */music/life.mp3

$ beet modify 'artist=The Beatles' title:A Day in the Life'

$ beet check -e 'title:A Day in the Life'
d942...5a82 */music/life.mp3

This is basically equivalent to running beets check -u QUERY after a write or modify command

To make sure that a file hasn’t changed before beets changes it, the plugin will verify the checksum before the file is written. If the check fails, beets will not write the file and issue a warning.

$ beet modify 'artist=The Beatles' 'title:A Day in the Life'
could not write /music/life.mp3: checksum did not match value in library

The convert plugin can replace an audio file with a transcoded version using the --keep-new flag. This will invalidate you checksum, but beets-check knows about this and will update the checksum automatically. You can disable this behaviour in the plugin configuration. Note that, at the moment we do not verify the checksum prior to the conversion, so a corrupted file might go undetected. This feature is also only available with the master branch of beets

beet check [--quiet] [--add | [--update [--force]] | --export] [QUERY...]
beet check --list-tools

The QUERY argument will restrict all operations to files matching the query. Remember, if a query contains a slash beets will interpret it as a path and match all files that are contained in a subdirectory of that path.

Without any of the -a, -u, -e, and -l flags, the command will verify all items that are matched by the query. If the standard output is a terminal it shows a progress statement like in the example above. If the checksum verification of a file failed the command prints FAILED: /path/to/file to the error output. And if one of the third-party tools detects an error it will print WARNING error description: /path/to/file to stderr . If at least one file has an invalid checksum the program will exit with status code 15.

• -a, --add [QUERY...] Look for files in the database that don’t have a checksum, compute it from the file and add it to the database. This will also print warnings for failed integrity checks.

• -u, --update [QUERY...] Calculate checksums for all files matching the query and write the them to the database. If no query is given this will overwrite all checksums already in the database. Since that is almost certainly not what you want, beets will ask you for confirmation in that case unless the --force flag is set.

• -e, --export [QUERY...] Outputs a list of filenames with corresponding checksums in the format used by the sha256sum command. You can then use that command to check your files externally. For example beet check -e | sha256sum -c.

• -l, --list-tools Outputs a list of third party programs that beets-check uses to verify file integrity and shows whether they are installed. The plugin comes with support for the oggz-validate, mp3val and flac commands.

• -q, --quiet Suppresse the progress line but still print verification errors. This is the default if stdout is not connected to a terminal.

By default beets-check uses the following configuration.

check:
  import: yes
  write-check: yes
  write-update: yes
  convert-update: yes
  integrity: yes
  threads: num_of_cpus

These option control at which point beets-check will be used automatically by other beets commands. You can disable each option by setting its value to no.

• import: no Don’t add checksums for new files during the import process. This also disables integrity checks on import and will not ask you to skip the import of corrupted files.
• write-check: no Don’t verify checksums before writing files with beet write or beet modify.
• write-update: no Don’t update checksums after writing files with beet write or beet modify.
• convert-update: no Don’t updated the checksum if a file has been converted with the --keep-new flag.
• integrity: no Don’t use third party tools to check the integrity of a file.
• threads: 4 Use four threads to compute checksums.

Copyright (c) 2014 Thomas Scholtes

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