Artist Transforms

Classic iPods don’t use the Album Artist field for navigation — when you browse by Artist, it uses the track-level Artist field. If your music tags tracks as “Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams”, you end up with dozens of one-off artist entries cluttering your artist list.

For the full configuration reference including all recognized patterns, bracket positioning, and edge cases, see the Album Artist Transform Reference.

The ftintitle Transform

The ftintitle transform moves featured artist credits from the Artist field into the Title field during sync. Your source files are never modified.

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

Your iPod artist list goes from a mess of one-off entries to a clean, browsable list — and you still see who’s featured in the track title.

Quick Setup

Enable it globally in your config file:

[transforms.ftintitle]
enabled = true

That’s all you need. podkit recognizes common featuring patterns (feat., ft., featuring, with, vs, &) and handles them automatically.

Protecting Artist Names

Some artist names naturally contain words like ”&” or “with” that the transform would incorrectly split on. Add these to the ignore list:

[transforms.ftintitle]
enabled = true
ignore = ["Simon & Garfunkel", "Earth, Wind & Fire", "Hall & Oates"]

Per-Device Override

You can enable the transform for some devices and not others. Devices can be referenced by their config name or mount path with --device:

# Global: transform enabled
[transforms.ftintitle]
enabled = true

# This device uses the global transform
[devices.classic]
volumeUuid = "ABCD-1234"
volumeName = "CLASSIC"

# This device uses original metadata
[devices.nano.transforms.ftintitle]
enabled = false

Reversibility

Transforms are reversible. If you disable a transform and re-sync, podkit updates the iPod tracks back to their original metadata — without re-copying or re-transcoding the audio files.

More Options

For the full list of configuration options, recognized patterns, bracket positioning rules, and edge cases, see the Album Artist Transform Reference.