Empty database entries, how can they occur and how to remove them?

[j-peeters]

I noticed when running a beet ls -a command that the output contained four empty lines/entries.

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1 Giant Leap - 1 Giant Leap
1 Giant Leap - What About Me?

I'm wondering:

1. How could empty records get into the database?
2. How would one go about removing these?

Thanks, Jan

[jackwilsdon]

Importing tracks "as-is" without any metadata could lead to having albums without names or artists. The easiest way to find these albums is by finding their tracks using field::^$, which matches empty fields.

For example:

$ beet ls -f '$path' album::^$

To delete all tracks without albums, you could just use the above query with beet rm. Alternatively you could remove them one-by-one with the paths output by the above command:

$ beet rm path:"<path here>"

[j-peeters]

Thanks a lot @jackwilsdon that was a very clear explanation.