I do not like beets, but I like everything else less, especially manual Music metadata management. Because I must, my setup is a bit non-standard, I do some hackery with paths and tags in beets to organize my music so that Syncthing can more easily sync important parts to my devices rather than fucking around with generating file-exclusion lists and such.

I install it in home-manager with the copyArtifacts plugin.

nix:tangle ~/nix/hm/beets.nix

{ pkgs, config, ... }:

let
  myBeets = pkgs.python3.pkgs.beets.override {
    pluginOverrides = {
      beetcamp = {
        propagatedBuildInputs = [ pkgs.beetcamp ];
      };
#       filetote = {
#        propagatedBuildInputs = [ pkgs.python3.pkgs.beets-filetote ];
  #    };
    };
  };
in {
  home.activation.beets-config =
    pkgs.lib.mkActivationLocalLink config
      "~/Music/beets/config.yaml"
      ".config/beets/config.yaml";

  # home.packages = [ myBeets  ];
  home.packages = [ myBeets pkgs.beetcamp ];
}

DONE check up on nixpkgs comment about copyartifacts plugin

INPROGRESS add beetcamp to package external plugins

Linked from

Music Library Management with beets

References

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/176978

The beetcamp source is pulled in as a flake input pinned by flake.lock:

nix:tangle ~/nix/snippets/beetcamp-input.nix:mkdirp yes

beetcamp = {
  url = "github:snejus/beetcamp";
  flake = false;
};

nix:tangle ~/nix/pkgs/beetcamp.nix

{ inputs,
  lib,
  callPackage,
  buildPythonPackage,
  beets,

  setuptools,
  poetry-core,
  requests,
  cached-property,
  pycountry,
  python-dateutil,
  ordered-set,

  pytest-cov,
  pytest-randomly,
  pytest-lazy-fixture,
  rich,
  tox,
  types-setuptools,
  types-requests,

  propagateBeets ? false
}:

buildPythonPackage {
  pname = "beets-beetcamp";

  version = "unstable-2026-04-17";
  src = inputs.beetcamp;

  format = "pyproject";

  propagatedBuildInputs = [ setuptools poetry-core requests cached-property pycountry python-dateutil ordered-set ]
                          ++ (lib.optional propagateBeets [ beets ]);

  postInstall = ''
    # rm $out/lib/python*/site-packages/LICENSE
    # mkdir -p $out/share/doc/beetcamp
    # mv $out/lib/python*/site-packages/README.md $out/share/doc/beetcamp/README.md
  '';

  checkInputs = [
    # pytestCheckHook
    pytest-cov
    pytest-randomly
    pytest-lazy-fixture
    rich
    tox
    types-setuptools
    types-requests
  ] ++ [
    beets
  ];

  meta = {
    homepage = "https://github.com/snejus/beetcamp";
    description = "Bandcamp autotagger plugin for beets.";
    license = lib.licenses.gpl2;
    inherit (beets.meta) platforms;
    maintainers = with lib.maintainers; [ rrix ];
  };
}

File Organization

I keep my music in ~/Music and a few subdirectories underneath it so that i can use Syncthing's filtering to narrow the Music i sync to devices with less storage like the Cosmo Communicator or whatever.

Albums I download go in to New, usually just unzipped and kept outside of beets.
High contains music I want anywhere
Middle contains music that is interesting but I do not listen to often
Low is where music I don't listen to or purchased without fully intending to listen to live
Archive is where music goes to die
Archive Old contains low quality rips and music I listened to when I was much younger.

To import an album in a particular class collection:

shell

~/.nix-profile/bin/beet -c ~/Music/beets/config.yaml import --set=class=high --write --resume $IMPORT_PATH

to modify existing and move them:

shell

~/.nix-profile/bin/beet -c ~/Music/beets/config.yaml modify class=low low:1

interactive command for importing a zip file or glob of them in to beets from Dired File Manager

I hate using unzip, such terrible ergonomics. I have this tiny helper shell-script to unzip to /tmp and then I wrap it in an interactive command (cce/import-to-beets) to make it most easy:

emacs-lisp:tangle ~/nix/lisp/beets.el

(defvar beet-command "~/.nix-profile/bin/beet -c ~/Music/beets/config.yaml import --write --resume")
(defun cce/import-to-beets (file class)
  "Import a Bandcamp zip FILE in to a CLASS in my Music folder."
  (interactive "ffile or directory to import? \nMimport-class? ")
  (let ((directory
         (if (s-ends-with? "zip" file)
             (progn
               (shell-command (format "bash ~/org/cce/beets_unzip.sh \"%s\"" (expand-file-name file)) "*beets_unzip*" "*beets_unzip_error*")
               (if (and (get-buffer "*beets_unzip_error*") (buffer-size (get-buffer "*beets_unzip_error*")))
                   (error "zip script failed")
                 (with-current-buffer (get-buffer "*beets_unzip*")
                   (buffer-string))))
           file)))
    (async-shell-command
     (format "%s --set=class=%s \"%s\""
             beet-command class
             directory)
     "*beets-import*")))

shell:tangle ~/nix/files/beets_unzip.sh:shebang #!/bin/env

TMPD=$(mktemp -d /tmp/bandcampXXXX)
cd $TMPD
unzip "$1" &>/tmp/bandcamp_unzip.log
echo $TMPD