Why is maintaining a separate beets installation recommended?

[jrouly]

Perhaps this is a silly question, but why do the docs recommend keeping a separate installation of beets just for audiobooks?

[Neurrone]

You'd have a bad time trying to use Beets for both audiobooks and music without using separate installations.

The audible plugin should be used with lookup from other music data sources disabled, and vice versa.

[jrouly]

I don't mean to be pedantic, but why exactly?

I understand that books and music won't have metadata present on the same external database - but I figure this would behave the same way as any song present on one metadata source but not another. Wouldn't the lookup just fallback?

[Neurrone]

No. It would try to look up your audiobook titles on Musicbrainz or whatever music metadata service you've configured. Likewise, it would also try to look up your music tracks on Audible.

You're welcome to try, it should technically work.

[SenorSmartyPants]

I have one docker beets install, but I have separate config files and databases. One for music, and another for audiobooks. There is a flag to use a config different from the default.

[Neurrone]

What's the flag? I didn't know this existed.

[SenorSmartyPants]

-c

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/cli.html#global-flags