Album fields in path

DavidGA · August 3, 2020, 10:28pm

I’m pretty sure the answer to this is “no” but I figured I’ll ask anyway…

Can you use album-level fields in a path format?

I have an album-level “rating” field that it would be nice to use to organize on the disk, but I don’t think I can do that. Paths can only use item-level fields, right?

adrian · August 3, 2020, 11:28pm

Hello! That should actually work—templates (in paths but not elsewhere) try the album first and fall back to item-level data if that’s empty. Here is where it happens in the code:

github.com

beetbox/beets/blob/78d8e31eeb56bfbe0ee4031d0c86d49b2634fd52/beets/library.py#L374


    def __str__(self):
        return format(self)

    def __bytes__(self):
        return self.__str__().encode('utf-8')


class FormattedItemMapping(dbcore.db.FormattedMapping):
    """Add lookup for album-level fields.

    Album-level fields take precedence if `for_path` is true.
    """

    def __init__(self, item, for_path=False):
        super(FormattedItemMapping, self).__init__(item, for_path)
        self.item = item

    @lazy_property
    def all_keys(self):
        return set(self.model_keys).union(self.album_keys)

However, queries are a different story: https://github.com/beetbox/beets/pull/2988

DavidGA · August 4, 2020, 12:25am

Hm. Well I have this on my config but it doesn’t work:

paths:
    rating:-1: blah/path/here/etc

Maybe you can only use album fields in the actual path itself, and not in the query part?

adrian · August 4, 2020, 2:00am

Yes indeed, that’s exactly it. The PR above is a (very tricky!) attempt to solve that problem with queries.

DavidGA · August 4, 2020, 10:59pm

I “solved” the problem by moving my album ratings into the item metadata. They’re duplicated across every track, but I set them using a script that can batch set them all at once, so it’s not a huge problem in the end.