How do you guys deal with multiple different artists sharing the same artist name? Thanks to MusicBrainz, beets could tell identically-named artists apart and append an alias or ask users to enter a custom tag for this purpose. Is there already a plugin or some other way to do this, or does beets assume that “artist name” is synonymous to “artist id”? The main issue is that even if beets does keep them separate in its database, the “artist name” tag must be unique per artist for virtually every (mobile) music player out there to tell identically-named artists apart.
The beets database doesn’t currently have any bookkeeping for keeping different artist separate, although it does (of course) keep track of the MBID for artists. This is unlike the situation with albums, where tracks are explicitly grouped into album structures that are distinct even when they share the same title.
In case it’s helpful, you might be interested in the $artist_credit field that keeps track of how an artist was named for a particular release.