I’ve been experimenting with beets for the past two weeks and it’s awesome.

When importing music, I started to notice that sometimes I don’t want albums grouped by the usual [a-z]/artist/artist - album structure. There’s 148 different artists in the 8bitpeoples collective and I thought it would be neater if I could group all of them releases under a main directory, 8/8bitpeoples.

Turns out it’s way easier than I thought, because we can use custom path setups like so:

paths:
  label:8bitpeoples: 8/8bitpeoples/%title{$albumartist} %if{$hasyear,│${year}│} %title{$album} [$alb_type$media_type$format]/${padded_tracknr} %title{$title}

Which puts all releases from the 8bitpeoples record label inside the main 8bitpeoples directory, while still keeping the individual artist names.

$ beet move '8bitpeoples'

/mnt/music8/+TAGGED/Y/Yuppster/Yuppster │1999│ The Okinawa Campaign 1 [WEB, MP3]/10 Boomstick.mp3
  -> /mnt/music8/+TAGGED/8/8bitpeoples/Yuppster │1999│ The Okinawa Campaign 1 [WEB, MP3]/10 Boomstick.mp3

Check beet fields for all the available fields you can use in a setup like this.

You can also categorize things with custom tags:

beet modify 'green lantern' -a mixtape_host="DJ Green Lantern"

mixtape_host: mixtapes/$mixtape_host/...