corrupt beets db: empy albums

[odoublewen]

Somehow, I've managed to create two "empty" albums in my beets db. Note that these are self-produced and self-tagged mp3 files. I may have tagged, and retagged, and imported them a couple times before I got everything right. Somehow, in the process of doing that, I've created two "empty" album IDs. In other words, I think the beets database is corrupt.

Here, I have two actual mp3 tracks associated with an album "Vernal Pools".

beet ls -f '$id - $album_id - $album' Vernal Pools
65174 - 4693 - Vernal Pools
65175 - 4693 - Vernal Pools

If I do a ls -a I see this:

$ beet ls -a -f '$id - $album' Vernal Pools
4672 - Vernal Pools
4679 - Vernal Pools
4693 - Vernal Pools

The problem is that album IDs 4672 and 4679 actually don't exist. For example, if I add $path to the output format, I get this:

$ beet ls -a -f '$id - $album - $path' Vernal Pools
Traceback (most recent call last):
...clip...
  File "/home/beets2/lib/python3.9/site-packages/beets/library.py", line 1409, in item_dir
    raise ValueError("empty album for album id %d" % self.id)
ValueError: empty album for album id 4672

I look at line 1409 in the library module and I scratch my head, wondering, is this exception caught somewhere else, or is it simply there to provide a more descriptive error message?

What can I do to fix this? From what I can tell from reading the docs and looking at the CLI, it doesn't seem that this is a common thing. Note that I cannot use the rm subcommand to remove the album:

$ beet rm album_id:4672
error: No matching items found.

It seems like I will need to get into the sqlite database and manually fix it by deleting these two album rows. Can anyone provide any tips?

[odoublewen]

Apparently, this situation is the result of me using --set to set the album_id at time of import. I now think this is a bug. See #5012 for more info.

[arsaboo]

Can you try using beet update to update the db?

[odoublewen]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately beet update doesn't seem to have any effect.

$ beet update
$ beet ls -a -p
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
  File "/home/beets2/lib/python3.9/site-packages/beets/library.py", line 1409, in item_dir
    raise ValueError("empty album for album id %d" % self.id)
ValueError: empty album for album id 2

The same ValueError also pops up if I do beet info -a