Store songs from different albums in a common directory if only a few songs are present from that album

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1

for many albums i only have a few songs from that album, so i want them all to be together in the same directory, not in the default Artist/Album directory, for eg i have only 1 song from album A and B then i want them both in the same directory, not in ArtistA/AlbumA/ and ArtistB/AlbumB/ dirs, so if the album has less than a given number of songs then i don’t want them to be in their differnt Artist/Album/ directories, i want them all in a common directory

Edit 1:
i tried this
default: %if{$disctotal < 4, Misc/$albumartist - $title, $albumartist/$album%aunique{}/$track $title} but it doesn’t work, is there a field that stores how many songs present in the album, not how many total songs are there in the album but how many of those are present in my pc

3

Hi! There is not a built-in field exactly like that, but here are two ideas:

  • You can invent a special field. Use beet modify -a incomplete=1 to set the $incomplete field on the albums you want to “collapse” in this way.
  • You could define an item-counting field using the inline plugin (and the types plugin to treat it as an int). The inline declaration would look something like len(items).
4

I think you want to use the singleton functionality. First run through and get all of your complete albums out of the way and imported, then on the remainders, use singletons. You can name your folders how you would like so ignoring the album name and just using the artist. By default, the naming convention is to put them all in a single folder with the files named with artist / track (or something similar). This worked for me, but if you want to have an artist folder and those tracks sorted that way, you should be able to set up the folder structure.

What this doesn’t explicitly do is alter the name based on a count of the tracks toward an album (e.g., do this only if there are 3 or fewer tracks available for the album). A poor man’s version might be to be selective when you are doing the initial import. Obviously allow complete albums to be imported, but when you are prompted for what to do when an album has missing tracks, you could make the call then if you want it to be imported into the Artist / Album type scheme by selecting Accept or if the number of tracks missing is too many select Skip and then process those separately using the Singleton approach from above.