Import Question

Help
1

Hi, I am a bit of a beginner and had a (hopefully easy) question about importing. I was trying to import this album:

https://musicbrainz.org/release/ad4df9c7-ceb1-49c9-81f2-59e8a2fbf811

You can see at the musicbrainz page the artists are listed correctly, but apparently Ayah now goes by a different name?

$ beet import -t /Volumes/Music/DJ\ Jazzy\ Jeff\ \&\ Ayah/Back\ For\ More/

/Volumes/Music/DJ Jazzy Jeff & Ayah/Back For More (13 items)
Correcting tags from:
    DJ Jazzy Jeff & Ayah - Back For More
To:
    DJ Jazzy Jeff & Merna - Back for More
URL:
    https://musicbrainz.org/release/ad4df9c7-ceb1-49c9-81f2-59e8a2fbf811
(Similarity: 97.4%) (artist, tracks) (Digital Media, 2011, US)
 * Back For More            -> Back for More
 * One Life ft Tona         -> One Life (title)
 * Maybe We Can Just ft STS -> Maybe We Can Just (title)
[A]pply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,

What should I do here, I don’t want beets to change the artist?

2

OK. So your artist (Merna) has an alias (Ayah) under which he is credited on the album Back For More. MusicBrainz understands the distinction between the two names and beets is trying to tag your files accordingly:

albumartist: DJ Jazzy Jeff & Merna
albumartist_credit: DJ Jazzy Jeff & Ayah

This is correct behaviour and should bring order in your collection.

When you say you don’t want beets to change the artist, you mean you don’t want to see any mention of Merna in the tags, or you wish to see Ayah in the file name? If the latter, you need to configure your file naming scheme.

But I would just leave things as they are. As long as MusicBrainz data is in order, so will be your collection (thanks to beets).

1 Like
3

I guess that makes sense for an artist who released a bunch of albums under one name and then changed names. You’d want all those together. This seems like an interesting situation because it’s two artists and they’ve only collaborated on this one album? There are no albums credited to “DJ Jazzy Jeff & Merna” so it’s weird that there’s a folder for that “artist” and that’s where I have to look for this album.

Thanks for the link!

4

If you’d like to override the behaviour here, the rewrite plugin is for exactly this situation! You can have it rewrite the tagged artist to your preferred form for the purpose of templates and path formats.