Custom tag templating

[sublunarian]

Hi - first off, thanks for wrtag, finally replaced a beets setup I'd been dragging around for years and I'm really happy with it.

I've got a small thing I'm hoping is possible. I use artistsEn in my path-format, which works exactly like I want - an artist like Mohammad Reza Shajarian gets a nice readable folder name instead of the Persian spelling, so I can actually find him when I'm browsing.

But the tags written into the files still use the original script. So my folder says "Mohammad Reza Shajarian" and my music player shows "محمدرضا شجریان" for the same album. Since I can't read Persian, I can't search for the artist in my player at all.

Would it be possible to have an option to use the English alias for the tags as well? Only for artists whose main MusicBrainz name is in another script. Most of my library is unaffected. Kayhan Kalhor, for instance, is stored in Latin on MusicBrainz, so his tags come out fine.

Thanks!

[sentriz]

hi! and thanks for the nice words!

can you provide a link to an example track/recording/release?

wrtag will write the artist name, and the artist credit name. for many releases and tracks/recordings, the credit name is in english, where the canonical artist name is native

[sublunarian]

Thanks - here's the release: https://musicbrainz.org/release/d84fdeca-4058-4f3d-9563-507367136400

You're right that the credit name is in English there ("Mohammad-Reza Shajarian"), and I can see wrtag writing it. The trouble is nothing I use actually reads it. Navidrome doesn't have the credit tags in its tag mappings at all, so they're just ignored, and Plex and Apple Music both show the plain artist tag too. So in practice the Persian name is what I see everywhere, even though the English one is sitting right there in the file.

That's why I was hoping for an option on the artist tag itself rather than the credit.

[sentriz]

hm, ok seems like a player/client bug at it's core. lms and gonic for example will read _CREDIT tags

that said I do see the point for allowing wrtag users to customise what's written 👍

[sublunarian]

I hadn't noticed your gonic repo... I'll check it out!

In the meantime I appreciate the upcoming customization option in wrtag. Thanks!

[sentriz]

you're welcome! though if you want to stick with navidrome, there is a workaround with the subproc addon (https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag#addon-subprocess) and the metadata tool (https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag#tool-metadata)

the script copies the credit names over the plain artist names after each import. it handles multi-valued ARTISTS/ALBUMARTISTS too, and it's POSIX sh so it runs as-is inside the docker image

credit-artist.sh:

#!/bin/sh

set -eu

for file in "$@"; do
    metadata read ARTIST_CREDIT ARTISTS_CREDIT ALBUMARTIST_CREDIT ALBUMARTISTS_CREDIT -- "$file" \
        | awk -F'\t' -v file="$file" '
            {
              tag = $2; sub(/_CREDIT$/, "", tag)
              if (tag != prev) { printf ",%c%s%c", 0, tag, 0; prev = tag }
              printf "%s%c", $3, 0
            }
            END {
                printf "--%c%s%c", 0, file, 0
            }
        ' \
        | xargs -0 metadata write
done

then, in config

addon subproc /path/to/credit-artist.sh <files>

note this uses credited names everywhere, not just for non-Latin artists. also it's not nearly as efficient as the first pass wrtag does, but should still be pretty fast. but could be parallelised if needs be