15560 stars · MIT — read from /blob/master/LICENSE, plain unmodified text, 'Copyright (c) 2010-2016 Adrian Sampson' · v2.14.1 of 2026-09-17, the yearless GitHub date confirmed by PyPI · Track this in Scout
Catalogues a music collection and corrects its tags against a public music database.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A Python program at 15,560 stars, created in August 2010, that keeps a searchable catalogue of a music library and matches each album against the MusicBrainz database. Almost everything beyond the core is a plug-in: artwork fetching, loudness levelling, acoustic fingerprinting, lyrics and genres.
What it is good for. Anyone with a large local music collection assembled over years from different sources, where half the albums have wrong track numbers and no artwork. It is also the right tool when files need to end up in a predictable folder shape for a media server to read.
- MIT, read from the licence file and plain.
- The matching is genuinely good, because it identifies the album rather than trusting whatever text the files arrived with.
- Actively released: version 2.14.1 is dated 17 September 2026.
- A plain install gets the cataloguing but not the features most people came for. Acoustic fingerprinting needs a separate program called Chromaprint plus an audio decoder chain, and the loudness plug-in needs an outside program for every one of its five methods — the names differ on Ubuntu, Arch, macOS and Windows, and this is where most people give up.
- It rewrites tags and moves files by design. Importing is a change to your collection, so a backup before the first large import is the honest precaution, not an optional one.
- The Python version window is narrow at both ends: 3.10 or later is required and the package refuses to install above 3.14, so a very new Python will not work.
- 636 open issues against 78 open pull requests, and the loudness plug-in alone offers five different back ends with different format coverage and two that cannot work in parallel. That is configuration effort, not a single blessed path.
- metabrainz/picard
Tags files against the same public music database and can also use acoustic fingerprinting, but it is a desktop window you drag files into rather than a catalogue you can query.
Track this in Scout - Lidarr/Lidarr
Also renames and sorts a music collection, but its purpose is watching feeds and acquiring new releases rather than fixing files that are already on the disk.
Track this in Scout - puddletag/puddletag
A spreadsheet-style tag editor for Linux where many files are edited by hand, the opposite approach to automatic matching.
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uv tool install beets
