# Help with update artist and album fields by parsing title

**URL:** https://discourse.beets.io/t/help-with-update-artist-and-album-fields-by-parsing-title/1625
**Category:** Help
**Created:** [December 23, 2020, 6:54pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/help-with-update-artist-and-album-fields-by-parsing-title/1625 "2020-12-23T18:54:23Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![lems111](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/lems111/32/507_2.png) [@lems111](https://discourse.beets.io/u/lems111)
#### Post date: [December 23, 2020, 6:54pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/help-with-update-artist-and-album-fields-by-parsing-title/1625/1 "2020-12-23T18:54:23Z")

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Hi there,  
Is there a way to update the artist field by grabbing a portion of the title please?  
the format for the title of these songs are [Artist] - [Track]

screenshot below shows a list of songs. with the following fields output format:  
[Album] - [Artist] - [Title]

 ![2020-12-23_13-49-01](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/beets/original/1X/4c30417beb31f9cd0a9e17c66184b859740c4695.png)

I don’t have a preference of whether updating the DB metadata of actual file tags because I can sync the other as long as one of them can be updated per the problem I mentioned above.

Thanks in advance, take care!

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### 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: [December 23, 2020, 8:16pm UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/help-with-update-artist-and-album-fields-by-parsing-title/1625/2 "2020-12-23T20:16:01Z")

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Hello! I can’t think of a way to do that with built-in tools. If we had this feature:

> <https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/488>
>
> There are a number of cool things we could do if the modify command supported templates in the value part. For...

…then it could help hack something together, I imagine. As it stands, it seems like this would be a pretty straightforward custom plugin to write, if you know a little Python.

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### Author: ![lems111](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.beets.io/lems111/32/507_2.png) [@lems111](https://discourse.beets.io/u/lems111)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2021, 1:07am UTC](https://discourse.beets.io/t/help-with-update-artist-and-album-fields-by-parsing-title/1625/3 "2021-01-11T01:07:53Z")

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I was able to resolve this by using the sqlite browser app:  
[https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/](https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/)

I am comfortable with sql queries. I was able to update the different item properties as needed; then used the write command to update the file tags