The Plugin

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. The plugin provides a template function called %the for use in path format expressions:

paths:
    default: %the{$albumartist}/($year) $album/$track $title

The default configuration moves all English articles to the end of the string, but you can override these defaults to make more complex changes:

the:
    # handle "The" (on by default)
    the: yes
    # handle "A/An" (on by default)
    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, space-separated
    patterns: ...

Custom patterns are case-insensitive regular expressions. Patterns can be matched anywhere in the string (not just the beginning), so use ^ if you intend to match leading words.