please help with config: artist first letter in front of artist folder?

[prankousky]

Hi everybody,

I have to move my entire audio collection due to a new setup, so I thought I'd change the naming system as well.

current

pattern /mnt/nas/audio/beets/<artist>/<album>
example /mnt/nas/audio/beets/Misfits/Walk Amoung Us

wanted

pattern /mnt/nas/audio/beets/<artist first letter>/<artist>/<album>
example /mnt/nas/audio/beets/M/Misfits/Walk Amoung Us

Can beets do this? It does not have to do this to existing files; I need to copy them manually, so I can create the folder structure myself. But when adding new media, it'd be great if beets could take care of this.

Thank you in advance for your help :)

~/.config/beets/config.yaml

directory: /mnt/ds918/audio/music/beets
library: ~/.config/beets/library.db
# asciify_paths: yes

import:
  move: yes
  copy: no
  write: yes
  from_scratch: yes

ui:
  color: yes

art_filename: cover

plugins: fetchart embedart fromfilename bandcamp

bandcamp:
  lyrics: true
  art: true

fetchart:
  cautious: true
  cover_names: cover front
  sources: filesystem coverart amazon albumart

embedart:
  auto: yes
  # ifempty: yes

fromfilename:
  auto: yes

[JOJ0]

Hi @prankousky, the bucket plugin might do that: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/bucket.html?highlight=bucket
I don't use it and the docs seem to state ranges of letters, but it might even work if you just put 'A', 'B' into the [] brackets. Not sure if there is an easier solution though ;-) Give it a try, have fun playing around. HTH :-)

[mistwyrm]

You can get the first letter of an album artist using %left{$albumartist,1} and add that as part of your paths configuration. See https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/pathformat.html for documentation on paths.