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[RedJ]

I have a hard time believing I'm the first person to want to do this, but after spending about an hour trying to locate a thread about this on the forums I assume I'm just plain using the wrong keywords in my search, or it has in fact not been addressed, at least not in awhile.

What is the best way to sort artists by their last name, given that names of bands and groups should not be sorted by the last word in their name?  i.e., would sort as follows:

James Gang
Rick James
Jane's Addiction
Jethro Tull
Billy Joel

and also...

Lynyrd Skynyrd
Dave Matthews
The Dave Matthews Band
Dave Matthews and Friends
Metallica

Is there some way, other than renaming all my solo artists to lastname, firstname, or entering all the lastnames into an extended field and doing custom views?  I don't see how it could be completely automatic given MC can't tell the difference between a group or solo artist's name, however it would be nice to be able to mark tracks as either a solo artist or group, and then have a view scheme option to allow solo artists to be sorted by last name, much like groups starting with "The" can now be sorted ignoring the "The".
This could get even more complicated where a group’s lead is really the part of the name you key off of (I would want to look up Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band under Springsteen, right next to his solo work)

Thanks for any insight or tips.

[Matt]

I gave up years ago and now just always categorize (in MC and my physical media) by the first letter of the artist / band's name.

There's just too much grey area for my anal-retentive personality otherwise.  I mean, is "Bon Jovi" a band or an artist?  When it's all last name, do you still flip it?  Should I skip "El" and "Das" or am I only skipping English articles?

If you use the first letter of whatever you call it, you don't need to walk that giant logic tree.

[RedJ]

I agree that there's a lot of grey area in this, which is why I don't see an automated solution being possible.  However, record stores somehow manage to make sorting by artist last name an industry standard and I personally think it would be powerful to be able to get my music collection sorted the same way I think about it.

I think the only possible solution would be to be able to tag a part of the name as "Sort by" so that if you want to have a Jon Bon Jovi solo track sort right next to the band Bon Jovi in MC, you could do that.  At that point, it's not trying to come up with a one size fits all solution, but one that empowers the end user.

[PollyQ]

Since starting with Media Jukebox, I've used the "Album Artist" field for the 'sort' Artist (manually entered data), which worked perfectly there -- used Album Artist if there was a value, and Artist if there wasn't.  This doesn't quite work in MC (or at least it didn't several versions ago), because of the "Various Artists" functionality, so I've created a new calculated field, "Alpha Artist" for that.

Still, all of "Last, First" had to be manually entered, so I don't know how much help this would be for you.   

[Link]

I store all my files on the hard drive in folders like X:\Music\James, Rick\Greatest Hits\

I then tell MC to sort by filename(path)...

Works out great for me... with one minor request (Matt or someone listening?):
In the new library display, I can choose between panes, or the artist/album/genre displays....  I display all my music as album thumbnails, and love the new ability of 11.1 to show the list of files at the bottom - Now here is my problem.

-The panes view allows sorting by filename(path), but does not support the list window at the bottom
-The new browser view shows the path at the bottom, but does not support this sorting. 

Put the 2 together, and you have my perfect view.  Either add more sorting options to the browser view, or add a bottom list to the panes view.


It is also confusing that the place to look for sorting is under customize current view for the one, and in the options pull down for the other.  Especially for someone who hasn't followed the whole library browser format debate, the differences between the bahaviors of these views is hard to understand.

[Alex B]

-The panes view allows sorting by filename(path), but does not support the list window at the bottom
-The new browser view shows the path at the bottom, but does not support this sorting.

Put the 2 together, and you have my perfect view. Either add more sorting options to the browser view, or add a bottom list to the panes view.

Just add the Filename (path) item to the view scheme:



The "Panename" word is a bug, it should be "Filename" (probably will be fixed soon).

[Alex B]

Though, this option is missing:



The filename paths can be long and it would be very nice to have a freely configurable thumbnail text.

The option should be in the Edit View Scheme Item dialog so each item could have a different rule. If left empty, it could work as it does now.

[RedJ]

Thanks Polly and Link, I appreciate the ideas.  I admit that both are technically valid solutions, however I would ideally want a cleaner solution to custom sorting, as I wouldn't want to have to re-enter each artist name as last, first in a custom field or the visual artifacts such as the drive letter, folders, and slashes of using the filepath solution (as Alex's screenshot shows)  Maybe an advanced expression would take care of that, but I don't know enough about AEs to know if that would work.

* Alex addressed this just as I was typing *

The filename paths can be long and it would be very nice to have a freely configurable thumbnail text.

I would like to be able to tag a part of the artist name as the Sort-by keyword, but I don't know what a good interface for doing that would be.  I think realistically, I'm probably left with a lot of manual data entry if I want to change the sort order and have it integrate nicely into the MC UI.

[Link]

I didn't realize we could add filename(path) as part of the browser style scheme.... That would get them in the order I am looking for (and have in panes view)..... But the inability to modify the thumbnail text is bothersome.....

Once again... If we could just get the good parts of one view added to the other, we would be set.