Beets

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2014–2025), in 4 threads.

People raised many different problems with Beets, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

Error message is cryptic and hard for nontechnical users to interpret2025-11-14
Can't find documentation saying which custom tags and formats are supported2025-11-11
Transcoding has no good out-of-the-box option, forcing users to write custom scripts2025-11-10
Importing non-commercial music takes hours of figuring out how to import each folder2025-11-10
Building a music library system with Beets is overwhelmingly complicated, requiring hours of figuring out2025-11-10
Beets is so slow it becomes unusable for a decently sized music library2021-10-19
Can't figure out how to tell it where to get metadata; it defaults to MusicBrainz2016-05-08
Cannot merge incomplete album with new tracks; must delete or split into separate album2014-03-04