Support for single-track imports in inbox

[Neostrics]

Hi,

currently the inbox in beets-flask seems to be designed around album imports. Even if as_album: no is set in the Beets config, the UI still tries to match items from the inbox to album releases, which does not work well when the inbox contains a collection of unrelated tracks (e.g. downloaded singles, mixed playlists, loose files).

It would be very useful to have an option to:

• Import individual tracks from the inbox without album-matching (equivalent to Beets CLI -s / singletons: yes)
• An option to define a separate inbox in the beets-flask config that is always treated as single-track mode

This would make the workflow more flexible for users who manage both albums and single tracks in their library.

Thanks for considering!

[semohr]

Heya, thanks a lot for the suggestion!

We’ve thought about this before, and the main difficulty is that the current design of beets-flask is heavily oriented around folder-based operations. The library and inbox views were originally built as hierarchical, album-centric representations. That makes it tricky to handle “loose” tracks cleanly, especially when album metadata is missing, which complicates searching and displaying them in the UI.

That said, it’s definitely a valid use case, and we might revisit this idea in the future. I can’t promise anything concrete yet, but it’s on our radar.

For now, there are a couple of workarounds you might try:

• enable album grouping for tagging: If you drop unrelated tracks into the same folder, each one should still get its own import task. It requires a bit more manual checking, but it works reasonably well.
• Single-track imports via dedicated folders: For one-off tracks (e.g. your own productions), putting each file in its own folder with the track name lets you run a standard import without issues.

Not perfect, but those approaches work for me and might help bridge the gap until we have more flexible handling of singletons.

[Neostrics]

Thanks for the quick and detailed response. I’ll give your suggested approaches a try. It’s not as convenient as a direct singleton inbox for example, but sounds like a good workaround for now :)