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SiftSift

Audio

[organize]
strategy = "audio"
template = "{artist}/{album}"

Placeholders

Section titled “Placeholders”
{artist}
{album}
{album_artist}
{genre}
{track}
{title}
{year}

How it reads metadata

Section titled “How it reads metadata”

Reads embedded audio tags directly (ID3 and equivalents) across mp3, flac, m4a, ogg, opus, wav, wma, aiff, and more — no external tool required.

Missing metadata is a skip, never a guess

Section titled “Missing metadata is a skip, never a guess”

If a file lacks a tag the template references (an mp3 with no artist tag, say), that file is skipped with a clear reason — Sift never invents a fallback folder like Unknown Artist/. A file with no tags at all is treated the same as any other file missing the specific field it needs, not as an error.

Recursion

Section titled “Recursion”

audio does not support --recursive — free-text values like an artist name can’t be structurally distinguished from a same-named folder that already existed for another reason, so recursive descent is refused outright rather than risking unbounded nesting on a second run. See Recursive Organization for the full explanation (shared by all four metadata strategies).

Section titled “Related”