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[dcbw]

I use MC as a music server (replacement for iTunes). My music library is imported from iTunes, and I spent many an hour manually fixing the iTunes artist/album artist sort fields so that (e.g.) "Eric Clapton" sorts as "Clapton, Eric". This is one thing that iTunes does really well if one takes the trouble to optimize these fields for each artist (I did). Trying to get MC to work in the same way is a long-term frustration for me (I happen to by picky about such things!).

I've seen threads that seem to suggest workarounds but haven't yet figured out how to implement. The sort field from the metadata for each file appears in the tag dump, but apparently nowhere else, and does not seem to be editable or usable for sorting! Perhaps I am missing something blindingly obvious? This is pretty basic library management stuff and I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a *simple* solution that uses pre-existing metadata in the files without creating customized tags and somehow magically making them do what you want.

Any help greatly appreciated!

[dtc]

You can import the tags from the file into the MC database. Select a file, right click, select Library Tools and Update Library (from Tags). That copies the file tags to the library. The tag names need to be the same as MC uses - e.g. Artist.  Try a few and see if it does what you want.

There is a SWAP function which will swap the first and last name, but it is by no means perfect. For example, it does not always do the right thing if there are 3 names in the artist name. You can use it going forward, but to start you should be able to update the database with your existing tags.

[JimH]

It can be done in MC.

Try a search for lastname, firstname.  Here's an example of what you'll find:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78210.0

Please don't start multiple threads on the same topic.

[dtc]

Since that thread, a SWAP function has been added which does basically what the regex expression does in the older thread.

Also, look here

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,117089.msg810232.html#msg810232