# Can I tell beets to whitelist/blacklist certain tag fields?

**URL:** <https://discourse.beets.io/t/can-i-tell-beets-to-whitelist-blacklist-certain-tag-fields/95>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [May 14, 2017, 7:21pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/can-i-tell-beets-to-whitelist-blacklist-certain-tag-fields/95 "2017-05-14T19:21:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ags369](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/ags369/32/20_2.png) [@ags369](https://discourse.beets.io/u/ags369)\
**Post date:** [May 14, 2017, 7:21pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/can-i-tell-beets-to-whitelist-blacklist-certain-tag-fields/95/1 "2017-05-14T19:21:26Z")

</div>

There are a lot of tags that I don’t want in my music that beets seems to sync by default. For example, on one of the songs in my library, there is ALBUM ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ALBUMARTIST\_CREDIT, ALBUMARTISTSORT, ARTIST, ARTIST\_CREDIT, and ARTISTSORT. These are all the exact same value. All I need is one tag for album artist and one tag for artist. There are also many tags that exist but are empty, such as ARRANGER and ENCODER.

I also like my track numbers to be padded with zeros (01, 02, 03, etc), but it appears that by default, beets does (1\1, 2\2, etc). Is there any way to change this?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![adrian](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/adrian/32/4_2.png) [@adrian](https://discourse.beets.io/u/adrian)\
**Post date:** [May 14, 2017, 7:39pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/can-i-tell-beets-to-whitelist-blacklist-certain-tag-fields/95/2 "2017-05-14T19:39:48Z")

</div>

Hi! Have you tried the [`zero` plugin](http://beets.readthedocs.io/en/v1.4.3/plugins/zero.html)?

There’s not currently a way to add padding to the way tracks are stored in files. In some formats, it’s not even possible—i.e., when the number is stored as an actual integer, not a string.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dosoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f6c823/32.png) [@dosoe](https://discourse.beets.io/u/dosoe)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2017, 8:16pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/can-i-tell-beets-to-whitelist-blacklist-certain-tag-fields/95/3 "2017-05-15T20:16:35Z")

</div>

btw it’s weird that albumartist and albumartist\_sort have the same value

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ags369](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/ags369/32/20_2.png) [@ags369](https://discourse.beets.io/u/ags369)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2017, 8:28pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/can-i-tell-beets-to-whitelist-blacklist-certain-tag-fields/95/4 "2017-05-15T20:28:39Z")

</div>

The particular artist does not have a name that needed to be changed (ex. The Smiths -\> Smiths, The). There would be some cases where it would be different, but I figured why keep the tag if it’s not one of the cases
