Ignoring title change when updating metadata

[caJohnson21]

Hello,

I'm a DJ and new to Beets.io so thank you in advance for your patience and guidance.

I wanted to know if it was possible for Beets.io to change everything about the metadata except the track title.

I have a bunch of different versions of songs that are denoted in the track title as Clean/Dirty/Acapella/Instrumental etc. and I want to keep that listed for my personal organization. Currently, when I run beet import and it finds a track listed as clean/radio edit, even if I find the clean ID version manually, it still asks to remove the clean/radio edit from the title.

Do I need a specific plugin or flag to do that?

[halloleo]

Yes, you can modify individual metadata as you specify then - keeping all others as they are. With the modify subcommand you change specific fields. From the documentation:

For example, beet modify artist='$artist_sort' will copy the artist sort name into the artist field for all your tracks

But the track title will not be changed; as long as your modify command does not contain the title you'll be fine.

Regarding the import subcommand: Just import without auto-tagging (beet import -A) and then tag the metadata afterwards.