Way to automate a single "Album artist?"

[volcs0]

I like my folder structure to be Music --> Artist --> Albums
But I want it to be as clean and simple as possible.
I do not want my artist list to look like:
Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer, Collaborator 1
Hans Zimmer, Collaborator 2 and 3
Hans Zimmer and the Yada Orchestra
etc.

I want all of that in my Hans Zimmer folder.
The actual artists will be linked to each track.

My current workflow is to use MusicBrainz Picard to load in all of the albums from my Downloads folder. Then once I try to match everything, I change all of the albumartist tags to one thing (in this example “Hans Zimmer”). And then I save the tracks, in the process moving everything to my Music folder. If there is not an album match, I try to find it via Scan or even using the browser search for MusicBrainz, but in the end, if there is no match at all, I still change the albumartist and save it.

Can I automate a similar process using SongKong?

Thanks.

[paultaylor]

Okay so you have the albumartist field which should always be the same for all songs on one album, and then you can make use of the albumartist field to rename your folder/filename.

Now if you have run Fix Songs against your files to match to MusicBrainz and/or update songs already matched with Picard with latest data you will also have an albumartists field (note the s at end) and this stores each album artist as a separate value

e.g

• Johnny Cash
• June Carter

rather than

Johnny Cash & June

Then in your rename mask instead of using albumartist just use albumartists_index[0] so that it only ever uses the first album artist when renaming files, although of course this will only work if you only rename files that have been matched to a release (by SongKong).

This solution fixes the folder structure without modify the value of the albumartist metadata field itself. For non classical if you want to remove featured album artists from the albumartist field as well you can do that by setting Fix Songs:Format:When albums contains featured album artists to Only use main artist and discard other artists, but this only remove featured artists, it would not remove genuine collborations where multiple artists have equal billing.

For Classical you might want to enable Fix Songs:Classical:Remove Composer from Album Artist to reduce what the albumartist field contains.

So in summary to automate:

• Modify Rename Files mask as required
• Run Fix Song (adjusting options as necessary)
• Run Rename Files using modified rename mask