do not add lyrics when instrumental is detected

[againstpetra]

Proposed solution

Currently when lyrics are fetched and the track is an instrumental, the lyrics will get set to [Instrumental]. I think this defeats the purpose of the lyrics tag and in those cases the lyrics tag just should not be set.

Objective

More accurate lyrics. If a track is an instrumental it doesn't have lyrics and that is better communicated by an empty lyrics tag, not by a tag that says "instrumental", imo.

[snejus]

An empty lyrics tag means lyrics are missing for this track. Meanwhile, [Instrumental] lyrics mean this track cannot possibly have lyrics. This provides users a way to exclude such tracks when they fetch lyrics: for example:

# exclude electronic tracks
$ beet lyrics '^lyrics:instrumental'

and

# populate missing lyrics
$ beet lyrics '^lyrics::..'

will exclude [Instrumental] lyrics.

Otherwise, if we use empty lyrics, we will keep attempting to fetch lyrics for electronic tracks, wasting time and requests :)

[againstpetra]

An empty lyrics tag means lyrics are missing for this track. Meanwhile, [Instrumental] lyrics mean this track cannot possibly have lyrics.

I see where you're coming from but I don't agree with this definition of the tag. When clients detect anything in the tag they display the option to view a track's lyrics, the [Instrumental] tag isn't standard / parsed as a track not having lyrics by any client I've used at least.

This provides users a way to exclude such tracks when they fetch lyrics

could this information be written into the beets DB and not directly into a file's metadata instead? that way users could still avoid those tracks / beets won't keep trying to fetch their lyrics. but clients won't communicate the track having lyrics to a user

[snejus]

You're right! We can surely handle it with a flexible attribute, something like a boolean lyrics_instrumental. Will get it sorted.