Multiple album artists creating inconsistant long folder names

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Hello! New to Picard here, and I’m trying to sort my music library using the default naming script for use in my Plex media server.

According to the Plex docs, the best naming convention to use is
“Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/DiscNumberTrackNumber - TrackName.ext.”
And the default naming script works pretty well for this, however in some more niche albums (particularly Japanese) I’m encountering an issue where it creates inconsistent long folder names where there are multiple album artists.

For example, I have three albums from the Lucky Star anime where the album artist should be the same but the three folders gets named to the following (linking to MusicBrainz listing):

泉こなた( CV.平野綾), 柊かがみ( CV.加藤英美里), 柊つかさ( CV.福原香織), 高良みゆき( CV.遠藤綾) 他

泉こなた(平野 綾)、柊かがみ(加藤英美里)、柊つかさ(福原香織)、高良みゆき(遠藤 綾)

泉こなた（平野 綾）、柊かがみ（加藤英美里）、柊つかさ（福原香織）、高良みゆき（遠藤 綾）

1.) These three “artists” should ideally be under one folder, as each one is the same but with slight variations

2.) Plex doesn’t do a good job on handling multiple artists as a folder name, so is it possible to just have one contributor as the artist name for the folder?

I realize that this could probably be solved with a more advanced naming script, but I’ve tried to edit the default one with no luck. Any advice is appreciated!

2

The problem is the variation of how the artist credits are constructed with different join phrases.

You have multiple options to solve this with scripting:

  1. If you only care about getting this consistent for the filesystem folder, you could use in your naming script %_albumartists% instead of %albumartist%. The variable %_albumartists% holds a list of all artist names. If you use it like this the folder will have all the artist names separated by semicolon like this:

    泉こなた; 平野綾; 柊かがみ; 加藤英美里; 柊つかさ; 福原香織; 高良みゆき; 遠藤綾

  2. If you also want to have it in the tags you can use a script in Options > Scripting like this:

    $set(albumartist,$if2(%_albumartists%,%albumartist%))

    Again you will have a semicolon separated list of artist names, and this will also show up like this in plex. You will loose the nice formatting of the full credit as shown on MB, though.

  3. Similar to the above, but store actually separate artist entries:

    $setmulti(albumartist,$if2(%_albumartists%,%albumartist%))

    This requires the player to actually support multiple artist entries. Many players, especially older ones, don’t. Plex actually might deal with that well (but I’m not 100% sure, others here will know better). If it does this also helps finding albums by artist. Again you loose the nice formatting, though.

Also generally I would recommend you enable Options > Metadata >
Use standardized artist names. It doesn’t help in this specific case, but it helps otherwise to have consistent artist names even if the spelling differs on different releases.

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3

Thanks! Setting %albumartist% to %_albumartists% made everything sort nicely. It looks like Plex doesn’t support multiple album artists, rather it just sorted everything under 泉こなた which works for me.

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