How to organize classical music by composer, not composer and performers?

[socie9Ph]

I’m starting to use beets to tag and organize my music library (still at the stage where I’m working out whether it suits my purposes), and I’m running up against a few issues.

The first is that when I import a classical album, a folder is created that is titled ‘$composer; $artists’, which makes it very difficult to keep recordings of the same composer (and particularly of the same pieces) in the same place.

So, for example, beets seems to importthe disk at https://musicbrainz.org/release/0beaef35-3beb-4547-9a25-9b2d7b9f83b4 (Bernstein’s recording of Mahler 4 with the Concertgebouworkest) into a subfolder called ‘Symphonie No 4’ of a folder with the rather unwieldy name of ‘Gustav Mahler; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, Helmut Wittek’. And it records Gustav Mahler as both Composer (where I want his name) and Artist (where I don’t).

I’m optimistic that this can be fixed (although perhaps not consistently for a library that includes more than classical music): can anyone help me find the right configuration that will help me do the following?

Firstly, create a ‘composer’ folder (so ‘Gustav Mahler’), and then to create an appropriately named subfolder within it (so something like ‘Symphonie No 4 - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein’) within it?

And secondly, get Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, Helmut Wittek (rather than Gustav Mahler) into the Artist tags?

[benpage2]

Overall what you want to do is definitely possible!

I think making a path format in the config specifically for your classical music should solve your issue. You can find the documentation on path formats here: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/reference/config.html#path-format-configuration

Your issue then becomes finding a field or value for a field that is exclusive to just classical music. I know based on my library$composer is sometimes populated for music that's not just classical, so you may unfortunately have to manually set something if there's not a tag/value that already specifically identifies classical music.

If you use beet modify [query] 'genre=classical' to tag all your classical music with classical as the genre, then you could easily set a custom path based on it (documentation for the modify command here: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/reference/cli.html#modify).

For example adding
genre:classical: Classical/$composer/$album%aunique{}/$track $title
under your paths: in the config would put all albums with genre tagged with "classical" into a "Classical" folder in root library, with a subfolders by composer than by album.

Also, you might be interested in the ParentWork plugin, which was written for classical music! Here's a link: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.6.0/plugins/parentwork.html

Hope this helps!

[jeff47]

Some albums have tracks that have different composers. I've had issues with some Musicbrainz Picard scripts that end up splitting the album across several directories when this is the case. I think this approach might run into the same issue.