The rewrite
plugin lets you easily substitute values in your path formats. Specifically, it is intended to let you canonicalize names such as artists: for example, perhaps you want albums from The Jimi Hendrix Experience to be sorted into the same folder as solo Hendrix albums.
To use field rewriting, first enable the plugin by putting rewrite
on your plugins
line. Then, make a rewrite:
section in your config file to contain your rewrite rules. Each rule consists of a field name, a regular expression pattern, and a replacement value. Rules are written fieldname regex: replacement
. For example, this line implements the Jimi Hendrix example above:
rewrite:
artist The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Jimi Hendrix
This will make $artist
in your path formats expand to "Jimi Henrix" where it would otherwise be "The Jimi Hendrix Experience".
The pattern is a case-insensitive regular expression. This means you can use ordinary regular expression syntax to match multiple artists. For example, you might use:
rewrite:
artist .*jimi hendrix.*: Jimi Hendrix
As a convenience, the plugin applies patterns for the artist
field to the albumartist
field as well. (Otherwise, you would probably want to duplicate every rule for artist
and albumartist
.)
Note that this plugin only applies to path templating; it does not modify files' metadata tags or the values tracked by beets' library database.