Is this possible: Appending disambiguation to Album tag?

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1

I’ve been a Picard user for nearly 12 years now. I dabbled in Beets for a little a few years ago and just couldn’t get things how I wanted it. I’m wanting to come back to try Beets again, but there’s one thing that’s a must-have: the ability to append disambiguations to Album tags. I collect multiple versions of albums, and having the disambiguation in the Album tag is essential. Picard’s scripting gives me this as an option.

What an example artist would look like in my Music Player with disambiguations in the Album tag:

Killswitch Engage:
-Killswitch Engage
-Alive or Just Breathing
-Alive or Just Breathing (Re-Release)
-The End of Heartache
-The End of Heartache (Special Edition)
-As Daylight Dies
-As Daylight Dies (Special Edition)
…

When using Beets, without the option to write this information to the Album tag, my Music Player would display:

Killswitch Engage:
-Alive or Just Breathing
-Alive or Just Breathing
-The End of Heartache
-The End of Heartache
-As Daylight Dies
-As Daylight Dies
…

Obviously, not having that information in the album’s name is a huge problem.

Is there a way to do this in Beets? Beets seems to be amazing and capable of so much. If I can do this simple thing, I’ll be on board instantly.

Thank you in advance for your wisdom, everyone!

2

And what makes you look away from Picard?

3

Oooh boy, where to begin.

-CLI interface is more appealing to me
-PLUGINS. The thought of importing music and automatically having it apply ReplayGain, transcoding a copy from FLAC to mp3 for a secondary library, fetching lyrics, and fetching artwork just sounds heavenly. Picard…well, it sure can tag.

1 Like
4

I don’t think this is possible in base beets. definitely something I’ve wanted for ages. We have a plugin list on the wiki but it’s opt-in: there are some smaller and in-development plugins that are not listed.

This is the closest thing I found on the wiki but I could have missed something closer:

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/ftintitle.html

There might be a plugin out there that does what you want. Try searching github for beets plugins?

You can use album disambig in folder names and file names, however.