How do I handle an album by the name of '★'? #ThanksBowie

[frijolie]

I need some help on how to get out of this mess. I have an album by David Bowie whose title is the literal character '★'

When it is imported in beets, it causes grief with both the file and folder names. The '★' is obviously not a legal character in folder or filename. So after import in Beets, it cannot create either folder or filename so it drops them into the Artist root folder like so:

/Music/David Bowie/
01 - .flac (this track is also titled '★')
02 - Some Track.flac
03 - Another Track.flac
cover.jpg
/Album Name One/
/Album Name Two/
/Album Name Three/

Reading the docs, there's an %asciify{} template function. However, that also doesn't appear to work because '★' is not an ASCII character, it's unicode.

As part of my troubleshooting, I have manually tagged all of the tracks with the album name of "Blackstar" (instead of the symbol formerly known as Prince). I then tried to beet import -L path:/music/David Bowie/Blackstar and we're right back where we started (with the same problem). the -L option is supposed to import AS-IS, no?

So, how do I fix this mess? If I run beet ls -a artist:"David Bowie" I see this result:

David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
David Bowie - ★
...

So, oddly enough, the album is stored in the DB as the symbol, but the file and foldernames remain problematic.

I have asciify_paths: yes in config.yaml and my paths looks like this:

...
paths:
    default: $albumartist/$album%aunique{}/%if{$multidisc,Disc $disc_padded/}$track_padded - $title
...

How do I clear out the database entry with the symbol and force Beets to re-import them with the word instead of the symbol? I would expect -L or the %asciify{} to work

pls help? TIA

[InvisibleFunction]

me@compy:~$ ls /Volumes/Music/Music/David\ Bowie| head -n 1
★/

What filesystem is your library on?