I can't seem to use this tool correctly, am I missing something?

[mdotwills]

Very excited to be trying this tool out. Sadly I haven't been able to extract much out of it yet, and I wonder if I'm missing something fundamental here.

My moe setup

Install

$ pipx list
   package moe 2.5.0, installed using Python 3.13.8
    - moe

config

library_path = "~/Music/moe_data"

[move]
album_path = "{album.artist}/{album.title}"
track_path = "{f'Disc {track.disc:02}' if album.disc_total > 1 else ''}/{track.track_num:02} {track.title}{track.path.suffix}"
extra_path = "{e_unique(extra)}"
asciify_paths = false
copy = false
link = false

I'll give you an example. I've added the following EP to my library with moe add and here is the result correctly in place on the filesystem

$ tree ./moe_data
# truncated...
├── In2stellar
│   └── Soft Launch EP
│       ├── 01 Mixed Messages.flac
│       ├── 02 Soft Launch.flac
│       └── cover.jpg
# ...

Tracks and directories have been renamed correctly against the config file etc. I can't seem to query or edit this data though

$ moe ls "In2stellar"
ERROR: Invalid query term. [term='In2stellar']
$ moe ls "artist:In2stellar"
ERROR: No items found for given query.
$ moe ls "'artist:In2stellar'"
ERROR: No items found for given query.
$ moe ls -a "In2stellar"
ERROR: Invalid query term. [term='In2stellar']

Here is a snippet of metadata from one of the tracks, so I can see that here is information to query

 $ exiftool In2stellar/Soft\ Launch\ EP/01\ Mixed\ Messages.flac
# truncated...
Mediatype                       : Web
Album                           : Soft Launch EP
Album Artist                    : In2stellar
Albumartist                     : In2stellar
Artist                          : In2stellar
# ...

Ultimately I'm trying to edit the tags to correct In2stellar -> IN2STELLAR. What am I missing here?

[jtpavlock]

Hello there! First, I'll point you towards the query docs as that explains a bit more about how to format a query. I'll try to explain the errors though:

$ moe ls "In2stellar"
ERROR: Invalid query term. [term='In2stellar']
$ moe ls "In2stellar"
ERROR: Invalid query term. [term='In2stellar']

A "term" is a field:value pairing. So there's no inherent field specified to search which is why you get that error for both of these cases.

$ moe ls "artist:In2stellar"
ERROR: No items found for given query.
$ moe ls "'artist:In2stellar'"
ERROR: No items found for given query.

Here you have valid queries which is a step forward! But unfortunately they're not returning anything. The single quote ' is only necessary if you have a space in your query term, so not needed here. The first query though looks fine to me and should be returning tracks where the track artist is In2stellar.

Another point of clarification is that moe isn't exactly querying from the tags. It reads whatever tags a track has and stores it in its database, and then queries the database. Perhaps it's worth looking at moe ls --info '*' to list the full information moe is storing in the database for all your tracks to see if there's a disconnect between the tags and the information stored.

A couple of other query terms you could try:
a:artist:In2stellar - this matches album artist field (albumartist) Int2stellar
a:artist:I% - this matches albumartists beginning with an I
* - this outputs all data in the library

Let me know if any of these work, or if you're still experiencing issues not being able to query information moe has saved in it's database after looking at ls --info.