The the plugin allows you to move patterns in path formats. It’s suitable, for example, for moving articles from string start to the end. This is useful for quick search on filesystems and generally looks good. Plugin DOES NOT change tags. By default plugin supports English “the, a, an”, but custom regexp patterns can be added by user. How it works:
The Something -> Something, The
A Band -> Band, A
An Orchestra -> Orchestra, An
To use plugin, enable it by including the into plugins line of your beets config:
[beets]
plugins = the
Plugin provides template function %the, so you can use it on $albumartist or $artist:
[paths]
default: %the{$albumartist}/($year) $album/$track $title
Default options are acceptable (moves all English articles to the end), but you can add plugin section into config file:
[the]
# handle The, default is on
the=yes
# handle A/An, default is on
a=yes
# format string, {0} - part w/o article, {1} - article
# spaces already trimmed from ends of both parts
# default is '{0}, {1}'
format={0}, {1}
# strip instead of moving to the end, default is off
strip=no
# custom regexp patterns, separated by space
patterns=
Custom patterns are usual regular expressions. Ignore case is turned on, but ^ is not added automatically, so be careful. Actually, you can swap arguments in format option and write regexp to match end of the string, so things will be moved from the end of the string to start.