How do I make beets use musicbrainz tags and ignore everything else?

[sdfg2]

I use Lidarr to sort a canonical set of lossless media, including Musicbrainz tagging and so on. It then calls a script which normalizes and transcodes to lossless, that then calls beet import so that beets managed my lossy media.

Beets keeps asking me questions, and telling me about missing tracks and so on!

I had a look through the issues, and found #3548, I've set album_id to 1000 and yet it still does it on some albums. What else do I need to configure to make it forget about searching any other details and only using the MB ID it's been given? Do I need to set (all!) the other weights to zero? Or is there a shorthand way of doing this? I've already gone through curating the release information with lidarr.

[sampsyo]

Do I need to set (all!) the other weights to zero?

That would certainly do it! You could also consider using quiet mode, and perhaps adjusting strong_rec_thresh to make the importer automatically apply matches above a given threshold:
https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html#autotagger-matching-options

[sdfg2]

Well, I guess what I'm looking for is the results to always be 100%. Adjusting strong_rec_thresh won't stop beets from processing the other means of identifying. Same with using quiet.

Will setting the other weights to 0 mean that they won't even be processed, or will they be processed and just multiplied by the weight?

[sampsyo]

Yep, multiplied by the weight.

Another approach you might consider could be importing as-is (by disabling the autotagger with -A), and then using the mbsync plugin. mbsync trusts IDs blindly, but otherwise works a little like an import, which may be what you want.

[sdfg2]

I set all the others to 0, and it seems to do what I want. I know it's probably an edge case, but if a weight is zero, it seems to me like there's no point processing that information in the first place - just skip that calculation, get through the rest quicker!

[sdfg2]

Answer: set all other weights to zero.

match:
    distance_weights:
        source: 0
        artist: 0
        album: 0
        media: 0
        mediums: 0
        year: 0
        country: 0
        label: 0
        catalognum: 0
        albumdisambig: 0
        album_id: 5.0
        tracks: 0
        missing_tracks: 0
        unmatched_tracks: 0
        track_title: 0
        track_artist: 0
        track_index: 0
        track_length: 0
        track_id: 0