More > JRiver Media Center 25 for Mac
Library sorting and tags
eruse:
Sadly, that did not work. I added the "Artist Sort" to the "Sort by" option from the "Artists" drop down as suggested. As a test, I entered information into the "Artist Sort" tag to the CDs for a couple of different artists, Alex De Grassi, Allan Holdsworth and Adrian Legg. The "Artist Sort" tag for each was changed, respectively, to "De Grassi Alex", "Holdsworth Allan" and "Legg Adrian." When I used the Auto Import option to refresh the library, those artists are now listed as the first, second and third artists in the entire library. They are not sorted as expected. I checked the "Artist Sort" tag for each of them and the tags are correct (i.e., last name is shown first).
The way the "Data" section of the "Sort Artist" field is configured (from "Tools", "Options", "Manage Library Fields") is as "String" for Data Type, "Not relational" for Relational, "Standard" for Edit Type, Acceptable Values is blank and the "Save in file tags (when possible)" is checked.
Other suggestions are welcome,
Thanks.
blgentry:
Well this is actually good news. It's working. Let me explain:
You are now sorting that view *only* by [Artist Sort]. So, for the artists you gave values for [Artist Sort], they are being sorted alphabetically. But what about the others with no value? They are not being sorted in the right place because they have no value at all for Artist Sort. What you really want is a merge of the two: If Artist Sort exists, sort on it. If not, sort on Artist.
One decent way of doing this is to create two new fields:
[Artist Sort Manual] = This is where you put Artist Sort information that you type in manually.
[Artist Sort] = Calculated Field. Takes the value of [Artist Sort Manual] if it exists. Otherwise, it takes the value of [Artist]
This way, they will all sort correctly and will prefer Artist Sort, but fall back to Artist.
You can probably use an expression for Artist Sort something like:
--- Code: ---firstnotempty([Artist Sort Manual],[Artist])
--- End code ---
This is untested. It's worth what you paid for it. :)
The other way to do this is to make sure that absolutely every song in your library has an [Artist Sort] tag filled out. There are probably other ways I'm not thinking of; these are the most obvious to me.
Good luck.
Brian.
eruse:
Thanks again Brian-
You're correct. MC is sorting using the "Artist Sort" tag. It just wasn't obvious (to me) with the 3 example files I used. I added the information to the "Artist Sort" tag for all of the "A"s of my library and refreshed the MC library and the CDs were sorted as per the "Artist Sort" tag. So sorting the way I want is "easy" as you suggested. The hard part is filling in all that info for my 1000+ CDs. Shouldn't take too long, though. Better than learning MC's expression language. :)
Many thanks for helping me sort this out (sorry for the pun).
blgentry:
You can add this information inside MC pretty easily.
Let's talk about one track for a moment.
Select your track and open the Tagging Window (Edit > Tag). Go find your Artist Sort field (tag). It should be empty, because we are working with a track that you haven't fixed yet. Type this into that field:
--- Code: ---=[Album Artist (auto)]
--- End code ---
After you press enter (or click somewhere else), you should see that the [Artist Sort] field now has the value from [Album Artist (auto)]. Magic! But that's just one track. Try selecting all the tracks in an album at once and then do the exact same thing. Now all the tracks in that album have the correct value in [Artist Sort].
This works across albums too. You can select 50 albums at once and do this same thing... and it will give each track the correct value. This is part of the power of MC. You're now learning a teeny tiny little bit of the expression language.
You could do this for all of your albums at once.... except that you need to exclude the ones that already have a value in [Artist Sort]. There are several ways of doing this. I'll leave it up to you to do that if you'd like.
Now... why did I use [Album Artist (auto)] instead of [Artist] ? Because [Album Artist (auto)] should have the correct value for Album sorting, which is probably what you want for this purpose. You could use [Artist], but on compilation albums, each track will have individual artists and that probably is not how you want to sort compilation albums. [Album Artist (auto)] normally has the correct value.
Brian.
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