Romanized artist name

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1

Is there a plugin that tags certain foreign <artist> under their romanized versions? I often run into a problem were I can’t easily find Asian and Eastern European music on my own library because I don’t know how to spell the names. I have to look them up online and copy-paste the result in the search bar of the music player, really inconvenient. I so wish there was a better way to do this!

2

You might be interested in the languages option to the importer, which tries to fetch localized names from MusicBrainz, if they’re available there.

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3

That’s fantastic! Looks exactly like what I need. May I ask how can I retag my current database now that I’ve appended languages: en to my config? I’ve looked up the modify command, but I’m not sure how to use it here.

4

You’d need to re-import to fetch the new data from MusicBrainz.

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5

I feel like the process didn’t work. I reimported a bunch of albums, and I still have a ton (if not all from before) of glyph artists. Or maybe I misunderstand. Is it expected that “Святослав Вакарчук” doesn’t translate to “Svyatoslav Vakarchuk” for this album?

Here’s the pertinent part of my config:

plugins: missing lyrics fetchart duplicates replaygain zero discogs badfiles chroma lastexport

autotag: yes

art_filename: cover

clutter: .sfv .nfo .m3u Thumbs.DB .DS_Store

original_date: yes

languages: en

va_name: Various

import:
    copy: no
    write: yes
    move: yes

paths:
    default: $albumartist/$album%aunique{albumartist album, tracktotal albumtype year label,()}/$track. $title
6

For this to work, the artist will need to have an appropriate alias. For that artist, it would need to be listed here:
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/4cf37a71-081f-459f-8b23-1aa9197f6fcb/aliases

But there’s no Latin-script alias I see there. Perhaps you’d like to add one! :smiley:

7

Oh! Ok, thanks, that makes sense. I will run it again hoping it catches some and then will edit the rest manually and import them as is. I’m very hopeful someone will make a Sonemic plugin in the future when they open their API, which will incidentally “fix” this (they have a most complete database for romanized aliases).

8

Could sort names be a solution? It’s not as satisfying but it exists for every artist.

9

Using sort names is actually a good idea. I’ve been using these since ever so many years and it really helped to keep my collection clean.

MusicBrainz’s official style guideline on sort names states these should be “Latinized” and “de-stylized”.

Nevertheless, I’ve run across a lot of wrong entries in the MB database (and changed those) where people put arbitrary data in this field (like “great dance music” or simply copied the artist name), so if you detect errors like these, please

  • get an account on MusicBrainz
  • add language-specific aliases
  • correct sort names

for the benefit of all of us.

I really like beets because it closely interacts with MusicBrainz, which is a real great source of data.

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