Path Formats#
The paths:
section of the config file (see Configuration) lets
you specify the directory and file naming scheme for your music library.
Templates substitute symbols like $title
(any field value prefixed by $
)
with the appropriate value from the track’s metadata. Beets adds the filename
extension automatically.
For example, consider this path format string:
$albumartist/$album/$track $title
Here are some paths this format will generate:
Yeah Yeah Yeahs/It's Blitz!/01 Zero.mp3
Spank Rock/YoYoYoYoYo/11 Competition.mp3
The Magnetic Fields/Realism/01 You Must Be Out of Your Mind.mp3
Because $
is used to delineate a field reference, you can use $$
to emit
a dollars sign. As with Python template strings, ${title}
is equivalent
to $title
; you can use this if you need to separate a field name from the
text that follows it.
A Note About Artists#
Note that in path formats, you almost certainly want to use $albumartist
and
not $artist
. The latter refers to the “track artist” when it is present,
which means that albums that have tracks from different artists on them (like
Stop Making Sense, for example) will be placed into different folders!
Continuing with the Stop Making Sense example, you’ll end up with most of the
tracks in a “Talking Heads” directory and one in a “Tom Tom Club” directory. You
probably don’t want that! So use $albumartist
.
As a convenience, however, beets allows $albumartist
to fall back to the value for $artist
and vice-versa if one tag is present but the other is not.
Template Functions#
Beets path formats also support function calls, which can be used to transform
text and perform logical manipulations. The syntax for function calls is like
this: %func{arg,arg}
. For example, the upper
function makes its argument
upper-case, so %upper{beets rocks}
will be replaced with BEETS ROCKS
.
You can, of course, nest function calls and place variable references in
function arguments, so %upper{$artist}
becomes the upper-case version of the
track’s artists.
These functions are built in to beets:
%lower{text}
: Converttext
to lowercase.%upper{text}
: Converttext
to UPPERCASE.%title{text}
: Converttext
to Title Case.%left{text,n}
: Return the firstn
characters oftext
.%right{text,n}
: Return the lastn
characters oftext
.%if{condition,text}
or%if{condition,truetext,falsetext}
: Ifcondition
is nonempty (or nonzero, if it’s a number), then returns the second argument. Otherwise, returns the third argument if specified (or nothing iffalsetext
is left off).%asciify{text}
: Convert non-ASCII characters to their ASCII equivalents. For example, “café” becomes “cafe”. Uses the mapping provided by the unidecode module. See the asciify_paths configuration option.%aunique{identifiers,disambiguators,brackets}
: Provides a unique string to disambiguate similar albums in the database. See Album Disambiguation, below.%sunique{identifiers,disambiguators,brackets}
: Similarly, a unique string to disambiguate similar singletons in the database. See Singleton Disambiguation, below.%time{date_time,format}
: Return the date and time in any format accepted by strftime. For example, to get the year some music was added to your library, use%time{$added,%Y}
.%first{text}
: Returns the first item, separated by;
(a semicolon followed by a space). You can use%first{text,count,skip}
, wherecount
is the number of items (default 1) andskip
is number to skip (default 0). You can also use%first{text,count,skip,sep,join}
wheresep
is the separator, like;
or/
and join is the text to concatenate the items.%ifdef{field}
,%ifdef{field,truetext}
or%ifdef{field,truetext,falsetext}
: Checks if an flexible attributefield
is defined. If it exists, then returntruetext
orfield
(default). Otherwise, returnsfalsetext
. Thefield
should be entered without$
. Note that this doesn’t work with built-in Available Values, as they are always defined.
Plugins can extend beets with more template functions (see Template functions and values provided by plugins).
Album Disambiguation#
Occasionally, bands release two albums with the same name (c.f. Crystal Castles,
Weezer, and any situation where a single has the same name as an album or EP).
Beets ships with special support, in the form of the %aunique{}
template
function, to avoid placing two identically-named albums in the same directory on
disk.
The aunique
function detects situations where two albums have some identical
fields and emits text from additional fields to disambiguate the albums. For
example, if you have both Crystal Castles albums in your library, %aunique{}
will expand to “[2008]” for one album and “[2010]” for the other. The
function detects that you have two albums with the same artist and title but
that they have different release years.
For full flexibility, the %aunique
function takes three arguments. The
first two are whitespace-separated lists of album field names: a set of
identifiers and a set of disambiguators. The third argument is a pair of
characters used to surround the disambiguator.
Any group of albums with identical values for all the identifiers will be
considered “duplicates”. Then, the function tries each disambiguator field,
looking for one that distinguishes each of the duplicate albums from each
other. The first such field is used as the result for %aunique
. If no field
suffices, an arbitrary number is used to distinguish the two albums.
The default identifiers are albumartist album
and the default
disambiguators are albumtype year label catalognum albumdisambig
releasegroupdisambig
. So you can get reasonable disambiguation
behavior if you just use %aunique{}
with no parameters in your
path forms (as in the default path formats), but you can customize the
disambiguation if, for example, you include the year by default in
path formats.
The default characters used as brackets are []
. To change this, provide a
third argument to the %aunique
function consisting of two characters: the left
and right brackets. Or, to turn off bracketing entirely, leave argument blank.
One caveat: When you import an album that is named identically to one already in
your library, the first album—the one already in your library— will not
consider itself a duplicate at import time. This means that %aunique{}
will
expand to nothing for this album and no disambiguation string will be used at
its import time. Only the second album will receive a disambiguation string. If
you want to add the disambiguation string to both albums, just run beet move
(possibly restricted by a query) to update the paths for the albums.
Singleton Disambiguation#
It is also possible to have singleton tracks with the same name and the same
artist. Beets provides the %sunique{}
template to avoid giving these
tracks the same file path.
It has the same arguments as the %aunique template, but the default
values are different. The default identifiers are artist title
and the
default disambiguators are year trackdisambig
.
Syntax Details#
The characters $
, %
, {
, }
, and ,
are “special” in the path
template syntax. This means that, for example, if you want a %
character to
appear in your paths, you’ll need to be careful that you don’t accidentally
write a function call. To escape any of these characters (except {
, and
,
outside a function argument), prefix it with a $
. For example,
$$
becomes $
; $%
becomes %
, etc. The only exceptions are:
${
, which is ambiguous with the variable reference syntax (like${title}
). To insert a{
alone, it’s always sufficient to just type{
.commas are used as argument separators in function calls. Inside of a function’s argument, use
$,
to get a literal,
character. Outside of any function argument, escaping is not necessary:,
by itself will produce,
in the output.
If a value or function is undefined, the syntax is simply left unreplaced. For
example, if you write $foo
in a path template, this will yield $foo
in
the resulting paths because “foo” is not a valid field name. The same is true of
syntax errors like unclosed {}
pairs; if you ever see template syntax
constructs leaking into your paths, check your template for errors.
If an error occurs in the Python code that implements a function, the function
call will be expanded to a string that describes the exception so you can debug
your template. For example, the second parameter to %left
must be an
integer; if you write %left{foo,bar}
, this will be expanded to something
like <ValueError: invalid literal for int()>
.
Available Values#
Here’s a list of the different values available to path formats. The current
list can be found definitively by running the command beet fields
. Note that
plugins can add new (or replace existing) template values (see
Template functions and values provided by plugins).
Ordinary metadata:
title
artist
artist_sort: The “sort name” of the track artist (e.g., “Beatles, The” or “White, Jack”).
artist_credit: The track-specific artist credit name, which may be a variation of the artist’s “canonical” name.
album
albumartist: The artist for the entire album, which may be different from the artists for the individual tracks.
albumartist_sort
albumartist_credit
genre
composer
grouping
year, month, day: The release date of the specific release.
original_year, original_month, original_day: The release date of the original version of the album.
track
tracktotal
disc
disctotal
lyrics
comments
bpm
comp: Compilation flag.
albumtype: The MusicBrainz album type; the MusicBrainz wiki has a list of type names.
label
asin
catalognum
script
language
country
albumstatus
media
albumdisambig
disctitle
encoder
Audio information:
length (in seconds)
bitrate (in kilobits per second, with units: e.g., “192kbps”)
bitrate_mode (e.g., “CBR”, “VBR” or “ABR”, only available for the MP3 format)
encoder_info (e.g., “LAME 3.97.0”, only available for some formats)
encoder_settings (e.g., “-V2”, only available for the MP3 format)
format (e.g., “MP3” or “FLAC”)
channels
bitdepth (only available for some formats)
samplerate (in kilohertz, with units: e.g., “48kHz”)
MusicBrainz and fingerprint information:
mb_trackid
mb_releasetrackid
mb_albumid
mb_artistid
mb_albumartistid
mb_releasegroupid
acoustid_fingerprint
acoustid_id
Library metadata:
mtime: The modification time of the audio file.
added: The date and time that the music was added to your library.
path: The item’s filename.
Template functions and values provided by plugins#
Beets plugins can provide additional fields and functions to templates. See the Plugins page for a full list of plugins. Some plugin-provided constructs include:
$missing
by Missing Plugin: The number of missing tracks per album.%bucket{text}
by Bucket Plugin: Substitute a string by the range it belongs to.%the{text}
by The Plugin: Moves English articles to ends of strings.
The Inline Plugin lets you define template fields in your beets configuration file using Python snippets. And for more advanced processing, you can go all-in and write a dedicated plugin to register your own fields and functions (see Writing Plugins).