Hi,
When an album is by the same conductor and orchestra throughout all tracks I like to add their names in the album directory name. This is to distinguish between similarly named albums for a same composer.
On the opposite, if the album has tracks from multiple conductors/orchestras, then I do not because that would obviously mean a bunch of directories for a same album.
To detect these two cases I thought I could rely on the “%_multiartist%” variable, but it seems it’s never at true. That’s probably because by default MusicBrainz Picard use the composer name as the album artist and thus the artist is indeed the same for the whole album. But I use the “Classical extras” plugin which instead put the performers’ names in the artist tags. Yet “%_multiartist%” still stays undefined/false.
I also cannot rely on ‘compilation’ from the ‘releasetype’ tag because same conductor/orchestra albums are often rightfully compilations.
So, is there any way – even a manual one with some script or addon – I could use to detect that the album has multiple artists (performers and/or conductors) ?
Thanks
You could probably do something with the “Persistent Variables” plugin and a script to check if the artists are the same on all tracks, and set a (persistent) variable accordingly. Then use the (persistent) variable in your file naming script.
The tagger script would look something like (untested code):
$set_a(_all_artists,$if2($get_a(_all_artists),%artist%))
$if($ne($get_a(_all_artists),%artist%),$set_a(_all_artists,*different*))
Then in your file naming script you would put the following wherever you want the artists shown in the file path: $if($ne($get_a(_all_artists),*different*),/$get_a(_all_artists)).
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This is a bug with the Classical Extras plugin which should have updated %_multiartist%.
If I can dredge the details back out of my mind from 2 decades ago, I believe that when I wrote the code to set %_multiartist% the purpose was to distinguish a genuine compilation album (e.g. Now That’s What I Call Music volume 548,758) from e.g. an Elton John album with a couple of tracks which feature other artists which doesn’t make it a compilation as defined by MusicBrainz, or indeed e.g. Queen’s Greatest Hits which is a compilation album despite all tracks being from a single artist.
P.S. Are there enough hints in this for you to guess my age?
What I good coincidence! I was indeed browsing through the available plugins for the last minutes and when I saw the “persistent Variables” plugin I thought “I found a solution!”. And then just seconds after I noticed I got answers from the forum. And what do I see? This! 
I’ll definitely try your script excerpt.
Thanks!
EDIT: Code works like a charm! 
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