The beets reimport functionality should really be thought of as a sanity check / rescan / quality control. So it will recognize the "untracked files" to borrow

The beets reimport functionality should really be thought of as a sanity check / rescan / quality control. So it will recognize the "untracked files" to borrow some git terminology. That is for adding files. As far as removing, moving, modifying files (i am assuming you mean metadata?) goes take a look at the move/remove/update beet commands. What follows is a slightly rambly not well edited description of my importing. I apologize for the length/grammar. I think I was in a similar situation as you. I started with 5 or 6 big collections of music that had diverged over the years; flac/shn bootlegs, old itunes installations, xmms libraries, etc and a couple of small collections from netbooks: /music/itunes /music/olditunes /music/olditunes-ibookg3 /music/current /music/blah ... Before touching beets I ran rdfind over the itunes directories and then over the non itunes directories. rdfind leaves the copy in the directory listed earliest so I listed the directories in order of most recently used. This essentially wiped out the oldest directory from the itunes and non-itunes sets. I then ran rdfind against all of the directories (once again in order of most recently used). The amount of space I saved was insane. Once I had manually cleaned up the low hanging duplicate fruit I did the two step import. I got hit with the CD1/CD2 quirk the first time I did the two step import. Because I had the backup directory I just blew away the beet library and started over. This time before I ran the quiet import I tried to do a best effort of consolidating the cd1/2 albums. `tree` came in handy for finding the problem albums: $ tree -i -f -d --prune /music |grep -i "cd1\|disc1\|cd\ 1\|disc\ 1"" I did the `mv cd1/* cd2/` by hand. It did not take as long as I thought it would. I gave it my best effort and reran the quiet import. This solved a ton of the problems. Before doing the interactive import I sorted /music with $ du --max-depth=3 -h /music |sort -h Because I used the move import instead of copying it was easy to see if there were any recurring problems. The only things that are left are the things beets could not ID by itself. My biggest import hiccup was concerts from archive.org's etree archive. I still have to move them in. I am still deciding how I want to handle the one hit wonder songs. Right now my config has the following for paths: paths: default: $albumartist/$album%aunique{}/$track $title singleton: 0xSingles/$genre/$artist/$title comp: 0xCompilations/$genre/$album%aunique{}/$track $title The singleton and compilation defaults are: singleton: Non-Album/$artist/$title comp: Compilations/$album%aunique{}/$track $title This was going to mean my non-album and compilation album directories had hundreds of directories. Feel free to followup with any more questions.