Clean Artists Transform

The cleanArtists feature moves featured artist credits from the Artist field into the Title field during sync. For a user-friendly introduction and setup guide, see Artist Transforms.

Origins

This transform is inspired by and ported from the beets ftintitle plugin, which does the same thing when importing music into a beets library.

Original: Copyright 2016, Verrus Source: https://github.com/beetbox/beets/blob/master/beetsplug/ftintitle.py License: MIT

Configuration Reference

The simplest form is a boolean:

cleanArtists = true

For more control, use the table form (implies enabled):

[cleanArtists]
drop = false         # If true, drop feat. info entirely (default: false)
format = "feat. {}"  # Format string, {} is replaced with featured artist
ignore = ["Simon & Garfunkel"]  # Don't split these artist names

Key	Type	Default	Description
`drop`	boolean	`false`	If `true`, drop featuring info entirely instead of moving to title
`format`	string	`"feat. {}"`	Format string for featuring text in title (`{}` is replaced with artist names)
`ignore`	string[]	`[]`	Artist names to ignore when splitting on ambiguous separators (`and`, `&`, `with`)

Per-Device Override

Device-level settings override the global cleanArtists setting:

[devices.myipod.cleanArtists]
format = "feat. {}"

[devices.nano]
cleanArtists = false  # Uses original metadata

Patterns Recognized

The transform recognizes these featuring indicators (case-insensitive):

feat. / feat
featuring
ft. / ft
with
vs
and / & / con

Before and After Examples

	Artist	Title
Before	Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams	Get Lucky
After	Daft Punk	Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams)

	Artist	Title
Before	A ft. B	Song (Radio Edit)
After	A	Song (feat. B) (Radio Edit)

	Artist	Title
Before	Artist A featuring Artist B	Track Name
After	Artist A	Track Name (feat. Artist B)

Bracket Positioning

When the title contains brackets like (Remix) or (Live), the featuring info is inserted before them:

Input: Artist "A ft. B", Title "Song (Radio Edit)"
Output: Artist "A", Title "Song (feat. B) (Radio Edit)"

Keywords that trigger this positioning: remix, edit, live, remaster, version, mix, instrumental, extended, demo, acapella, club, radio, vip, rmx

Edge Cases

Scenario	Behavior
Title already has feat. info	Skip (don’t double-add)
No featuring indicator	Pass through unchanged
`drop = true`	Remove feat. from artist, don’t add to title

The ignore List

Some artist names naturally contain words like “and”, ”&”, or “with” that the transform would otherwise treat as featuring indicators. Add these to the ignore list to prevent incorrect splitting:

[cleanArtists]
ignore = ["Simon & Garfunkel", "Hall & Oates", "Earth, Wind & Fire"]

CLI Output

When cleanArtists is active, podkit sync --dry-run shows what will change:

Clean Artists:
  enabled (format: "feat. {}")

Summary:
  Tracks to add: 5
  Tracks to update: 147
    Clean artists: 145
    Metadata changed: 2
  Tracks to remove: 0
  Already synced: 1,262

Tracks to update (clean artists):
  Artist A feat. Artist B - Song Name
    -> Artist: "Artist A"
    -> Title: "Song Name (feat. Artist B)"