beet convert -a does not convert singles

[personinblack]

There are some songs in my library that does not belong to any album of an artist and I put them in "/artist/Non-Album/" and I use beet convert to move them to my phone. The problem is without "-a" beets doesn't copy album arts and with "-a" it doesn't copy "Non-Album" folders. I do beet convert -ya && beet convert -y to hack around it, but I wanna know if there is a better way.

[Hikari-Tsai]

-a changes the query from items to albums, so singletons are intentionally excluded: by definition they have no album record. Conversely, copy_album_art is only run for albums selected with -a, because cover art is stored on the album record (artpath), not on a singleton.

So there is no single switch that makes -a include both object types. You can make the two passes explicit and non-overlapping:

# Albums (and their sidecar/embedded album art).
beet convert -ya 'singleton:false'

# Only non-album items.
beet convert -y 'singleton:true'

The second query will export the singletons, but beets cannot copy album art for them because they do not have an associated album/artpath. If you need one image per Non-Album folder, that has to be copied separately or handled by a small after_convert plugin/hook. Your existing two-pass approach is otherwise the correct model; adding the queries just avoids scanning/converting overlapping items.