Beets installation on Synology NAS

I recently discovered the Synology community which contains some excellent packages to enhance the capability of a Synology NAS however although listed the “beets” package doesn’t appear on my DS215j so after doing some digging and figuring out an easy way to install it I thought I’d share that knowledge.

I take no responsibility for damage to your system I am just sharing what I have learned.

First using package centre ensure python is installed on your NAS (I am using “python” from the community repo but “python3” should work aswell) and that telnet (not recommended) or SSH access is enabled.

I used the guide from primalcortex.wordpress to install pip but in a nutshell.

ssh into you NAS and type wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py to get the pip installer, then run sudo python get-pip.py to install pip

Once this is done you can install beets by typing sudo pip install beets then install requests (for fetchart to work) by typing sudo pip install requests

beets is now installed, to check its working type beet version this will return the beets and python version numbers and any active plugins (There won’t be any yet!)

Next we need to edit the beets config type beet config -p this will tell you the location of the config file you’ll need to copy this and edit it off the synology to edit it.

type cp /var/services/homes/admin/.config/beets/config.yaml /volume1/music/config.yaml to copy the blank file into the music folder, using my PC I edited the file to contain this: (You will need to edit this to reflect your folder structure and where you want the files to live!)

directory: /volume1/music/music
library: /volume1/music/music/beets.db
plugins: [fromfilename, discogs, fetchart, embedart]

Once edited save the file on the NAS in “music” and run the following  cp /volume1/music/config.yaml /var/services/homes/admin/.config/beets/config.yaml  this will overwrite the blank config file with the one in “music”.

You can now import your files, I have around 100GB of music in /volume1/music/old so I ran beet import /volume1/music/old -qg this automatic import took a long time (Several hours) and imported around 45GB of files, running beet import /volume1/music/old -qg imported another 10GB relatively quickly (A couple of hours)

Unfortunately once the Autotagging has run you’ll need to do a manual import and search to import the rest of the files using the command beet import /volume1/music/old once this starts you will be prompted to import media, unfortunately this process in laborious but its the price you’ll pay for an organised media collection. The one really useful feature missing from beets would be for an option to automatically skip duplicates but prompt for everything else!

Anyway hopefully this will be useful to someone!

5 thoughts on “Beets installation on Synology NAS

  1. Hi Mate I wish I could follow this I have been trying to do this for two weeks, still not getting anywhere.
    total newbie.

  2. is there any possibility to identify songs from an one hour music file with 10 tracks let’s say ?

Leave a Reply to ian young Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.