symlink support for paths

[mfiano]

What I think would be an nice feature...
Suppose you wanted to sort your music on the filesystem by multiple criteria with a hierarchy like:

~/music/by-artist/$albumartist/$album/$track $title
~/music/by-genre/$genre/[symlink albumartist dir from above]
~/music/by-type/$albumtype/[symlink albumartist dir from above]
~/music/by-import-date/$beets-date-added/[symlink albumartist dir from above]

If we could have children path formats that symlink for every 1 real parent path format, it would offer a way to really get to know your music collection just by browsing your filesystem and without copying files taking up space.

I wonder how hard something like this would be to implement?

[sampsyo]

Interesting idea! This is related to #153 and #114—maybe there are ways we can address a few of these at once?

This doesn't strike me as a particularly tricky standalone plugin to write—perhaps look to the "importfeeds" plugin for inspiration.

[franciscolourenco]

+10

It would also be useful to simply have symlink option in addition to move and copy

[mfiano]

Any progress on this yet?

[sampsyo]

@mfiano This thread is the canonical source of information about progress. 😃 If you're interested in the feature, the best thing you can do is pitch in yourself!

[geigerzaehler]

Hi @mfiano. I’m working on a plugin that creates symlinked views. I would be grateful for some feedback.

[three80]

I would also appreciate this. I haven't been able to check out that plugin yet, but it would be nice if it could both move and symlink

eg.

beet import --lynk /music/Beatles/

this would then both move the Beatles to main library folder and symlink to a folder as set by the .config:

(symlink:
symlink_dir=/music/other/)

beet imp -lynk /music/Beatles/

ends up with Beatles in the main music dir:

/../../music/Rock/Beatles

and also in the symlink directory:

(symlinks) /../../music/other/Beatles

It would take care of my scenario where 1 server is used by 2 or more people and using xbmc/kodi to pull music from and to separate music symlinks would be great as the one that likes the Beatles doesn't need to sift thru lots of Hip Hop or Dubstep or whatever else they don't like to get to it.

[geigerzaehler]

@three80 This should be possible with the alternatives plugin.

An example configuration would look like this

plugins: alternatives
alternatives:
  other:
    directory: /music/other
    formats: link
    query: "artist:beatles"

Then run beet alt update other to create the symlinks for all tracks from The Beatles.

There are two things the plugin won’t do for you

• It will not import the file’s as symlinks. Use the import.link option for that
• It will not create the symlinks automatically after importing new files, though I might add this to the plugin.

[three80]

@geigerzaehler

Yeah, other than on import, after trying out your plugin it does everything I need. Great work.

[geigerzaehler]

@sampsyo I think we can close this issue since the mentioned plugin solves the original request.

[sampsyo]

Sounds good, @geigerzaehler. The plugin sounds great. Let me know if you're ever interested in shipping it with beets.