Path naming

[xstrex]

Currently I've got a music directory which contains a mix of 'artist' folders, and 'albumartist' folders, and frankly it's a mess.

As an example here's a few folder names:
deadmau5
deadmau5 & Chris Lake
deadmau5 & Kaskade
deadmau5 & Kiesza
deadmau5 & Lights

I'm wondering if there's a better way to create folders for albums with multiple artists; instead of having a separate folder for each of them on the root of the music directory?

I've read the note about artists, and the logic makes sense. But it also doesn't make sense to me to have a folder at the root of the music directory each time 2 artist get together and make an album.

My current default path is: $albumartist/$album%aunique{}/$albumartist - $album - $track - $title
( I name the tracks as such in case they get copied to a single directory, they will still sort properly by artist, album, track.. )

In the example in the documentation it makes sense how a single album could be split into multiple root level artist folders; I guess that's why this feels so messy to me.

Is there a template I'm unaware of for 'release artist' that would always be deadmau5 since that's the artist who released the album, even though the album contains tracks from multiple artists? Feel like I'm not fully grasping this, but I hope that makes sense.

[DjSlash]

I think these collaborations are mostly producing singles. Since you can use queries for your paths configuration and use combinations, you could do something in the likes of:

paths:
    albumartist::deadmau5 albumtype:single deadmau5/$album%aunique{}/$albumartist - $album - $track - $title

It should match albumartist that contains "deadmau5" (as a regexp) that are singles.

Plugins that might be of help:

• rewrite
• subsitute

[xstrex]

Thank you for your help on this; though I'm not exactly sure how to implement it. deadmau5 is just one example, and in reality I have 325 folders in my music directory containing multi-artist singles, so my understanding is that I would have to make a unique paths: statement for each of them, and what happens when a new artist gets added? Even if I used substitute would I have to make a substitute line item for each and every artist? Am I misunderstanding something?

[DjSlash]

You understood correctly. However, in the recently released 2.2.0, there is a change for the subsitute plugin. It allows to group things together with a more generic rule.