path queries not returning all results

[vredesbyyrd]

beets version 1.6.1
Python version 3.11.5

Hello,

I'm not confident this is a bug, so asking for some help here rather than make a bug report.

Some background on the problem. My music collection is separated into 3 categories: Artists, Composers & Scores. The Directory structure reflects the categories. Years ago I accomplished this by using 3 separate beets configs, one for each category. I always thought this was convoluted so I dug into the doc looking for a more sane approach - Using flexible attributes appears to be what I was looking for.

The relevant part of my config now looks like:

library: /mnt/TARS/Media/library.db
directory: /mnt/TARS/Media/Music
paths:
    default: Artists/%the{$albumartist}/$year - $album%aunique{}/%if{$multidisc,Disc $disc/}$track - $title
    category:artists: Artists/%the{$albumartist}/$year - $album%aunique{}/%if{$multidisc,Disc $disc/}$track - $title
    category:composers: Composers/%asciify{$albumartist}/$year - %asciify{$album%aunique{}}/%if{$multidisc,Disc $disc/}%asciify{$track - $title}
    category:scores: Scores/%the{$albumartist}/$year - $album%aunique{}/%if{$multidisc,Disc $disc/}$track - $title

I first tried to tag all the files in each category by doing:

beet modify category="artists" path:/mnt/TARS/Media/Music/Artists
beet modify category="composers" path:/mnt/TARS/Media/Music/Composers
beet modify category="scores" path:/mnt/TARS/Media/Music/Scores

But this was not finding any files. To be sure:

beet ls path:/mnt/TARS/Media/Music/Artists

would not return anything.

By a happy accident typo I noticed prepending path:: to the filepath instead of path: would return all the files. I know the double :: is for regex, but not sure why this finds the files when the single : does not.

Perhaps wrecklessly, I ran the beet modify category="foobar" path::/foo/bar for each category and everything looks correct, e.g, beet ls category:artists | wc -l return the expected count of files, 24878

So that's the background, this is the issue I cannot figure out - Running:

beet ls path:/mnt/TARS/Media/Music/Artists | wc -l

returns 5871, the correct count being 24878. I expected it to find either none, like the above issue or hopefully 24878 after having run the modify command

Using the path::/foo/bar regex returns the correct count. The same issue happens on each category, eg, scores, composers.

Do any of have an idea what could be going on here? It's possible there is something wrong with the database, but querying the db directly with sql works fine. Any ideas would be very appreciated!

EDIT:

So if I run beet info -l on a file that is not returned from beet ls path:/foo/bar - the command also returns nothing. So it's apparent beets thinks most files are not in the library. This I find confusing because when examining the database directly or querying the database directly, everything is there. Am I overlooking something obvious?

[sindreruud]

Not tested if it matters, but the docs specify this as the correct way to use modify
beet modify QUERY [FIELD=VALUE...]
It seems you have it the other way around in your example.

Other then that, I unfortunately do not have much to come with her. My next course of action would be to maybe check the path of all the items with category="artists" to see if you can spot anything. Something like
beet ls -p category:artists

[vredesbyyrd]

Not tested if it matters, but the docs specify this as the correct way to use modify
beet modify QUERY [FIELD=VALUE...]
It seems you have it the other way around in your example.

Your right, although it does look like the command format I used worked.

My next course of action would be to maybe check the path of all the items with category="artists" to see if you can spot anything. Something like
beet ls -p category:artists

The paths look good, and the above command returns the correct count of items, 24878.

Thanks for the tips

[JOJ0]

FWIW usually unix commands don't care - and as a principle are designed to work like that - if --options are at the beginning or the end. Or to be more precise be after positional arguments or before - well, that's the theory, often it doesn't matter but sometimes it does! ;-)

In that particular case: The modify command doesn't really care where you put the query and where "the mods". I used it in all kinds of orders already :-)

[arsaboo]

beet ls -f '$album - $title' path:"/data/music/FOLDER/" worked for me.

Try using quotes around the path.

[vredesbyyrd]

Yeah, unfortunately quoting the path does not make a difference.

[JOJ0]

Duplicate of #4955

[vredesbyyrd]

apologies for the duplicate.