Beets - VT Album Artist

This is a plugin for Beets. It provides a customizable flexible field/tag, vt_albumartist, which defaults to the track's albumartist. With this tag you'll be able to group different artists under a same group if your music player supports custom tags (e.g.: MusicBee).

Plugin only lightly tested by me. Use at your own risk!

Install

To install it, use pip:

pip install beets-vtalbumartist

or

git clone https://github.com/rafaelparente/beets-vtalbumartist.git
cd beets-vtalbumartist
python setup.py install

Configuration

Enable the plugin in beets' config.yaml

plugins: vtalbumartist

How to use it

It works primarily as an extra import stage, after Apply-like actions, which allows the user to Edit the "Virtual Album Artist", saving this value under the field/tag "vt_albumartist". If not edited, its value will be the same as the album's artist field/tag (default value) or some previously set value (current value).

To set or change this field/tag for already imported tracks, a new command is provided: vtalbumartist. To run it, just type beet vtalbumartist QUERY where QUERY matches the tracks to be set. By default the command will match only albums (and its tracks) which have at least one track missing the vt_albumartist field/tag for that QUERY. Additional command-line options include:

• --singletons or -s: match singleton tracks instead of albums

• -reset or -r: match even those with field/tag already set

• -quiet or -q: never prompt for input: set field/tag automatically It will try to set the field/tag to a current value, if any, or else it will use the default value.

It's compatible with built-in plugins that modify tags, like scrub and mbsync, as long as the field is still saved on the library.

Therefore, if so needed, you can remove the tag from the files by first removing the field from the library. For that you can use the default modify function on beets like it's explained in the Docs. For example:

beet modify vt_albumartist! QUERY

will remove the field for all tracks that match QUERY. Then, to remove the tag from the file, you can use the built-in plugin scrub: Scrub. Like so:

beet scrub QUERY

but be aware that it will also remove other tags on the file if they are not saved on the library's database.