How do people create paths for libraries with album artists with non-Latin characters and names that start with "The"?

[shimizurei]

paths:
    # DEFAULT: A/Artist/Album [YEAR]/Disc 01/01-01. Track Name.ext
    default: %bucket{$albumartist,alpha}/$albumartist/$album%aunique{} %if{$year,($year),0000}$atypes/%if{$multidisc,Disc $disk_num/}$disc_and_track $title

Let's say I have the artists

• 和楽器バンド ==> Romanized: Wagakki Band
• Angela Aki
• The Beatles
• 汪東城 ==> Romanized: Jiro Wang
• GYROAXIA

to be sorted.

How does the program sort them into buckets?

My ideal:

• A => Angela Aki
• B => The Beatles
• G => GYROXIA
• J => Jiro Wang
• W => Wagakki Band

[RollingStar]

Some stuff that might help:

One way could be to adjust bucket_alpha_regex. There is an example in the docs.

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/bucket.html

It looks like if you can define a regex mapping between each character and an English/latin letter, Bucket plugin can work with them. E.g. 和 = W?

One other way is to adjust the album artist field.

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9a197894-1a40-4650-89a2-928dcfcd1ef6/aliases

Adjust your config to prefer EN/roman text:
https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html#languages

This method depends on accurate alias information being in musicbrainz. Beets pulls from the English (primary?) alias if you set e.g. "languages: en".

For the, we have another plugin, but I'm not sure if you can wrap Bucket(The(Artistname)). https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/the.html

For the, you probably want MB field sortname.