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[eruse]

Hi-
I am using the Standard View for viewing my audio library and have the library view set to "Artists."  I like the thumbnail display of the CDs in the library but want to have the library sorted by the artist's last name or band's name.  I've tried a couple of suggestions from the forum but could not get them to work:

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=92092.0
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78210.0

Is it possible to configure MC to use a specific CD tag to sort the library but use a different CD tag to display the artist or band name while maintaining proper grouping of CDs under a specific artist or band?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[blgentry]

The short answer:  Yes, you can.  But it's hard.

Slightly longer answer:

You can tell MC to sort any view using any field.  The thumbnail display text is totally configurable.  So you can (for example) sort by a field called [Artist Sort], and display [Artist] for each artist's thumbnail.

However, it's "hard" because:

1.  You can make an automated expression that will swap first and last name and then sort by that.  This is easy.   But...
2.  This doesn't work for things like 38 Special, Aldo Nova, Alice In Chains, Joy Division, etc.  For those you want to sort by the first word.
3.  So this means you need an override field too.  Which means that you need 3 new fields:  One to hold the auto swapped Artist name, one to hold the optional override value (or check box), and a third to hold the final value that's actually used to sort by (because it might be the swapped name, or it might be an override using the original name).
4.  "The", "A", etc are a consideration in this.  MC normally ignores these articles if you turn on "ignore articles" in it's sorting options.  But I'm not sure if this is obeyed or not on custom fields, which we are talking about.

I have not done this myself.  It's too much work for me.  There are numerous discussions about it.  You've linked to two of them.  There are lots more.  Glynor and MrC are both quite good at this king of thing, but I'm not sure if either one of them have a full working "recipe" that you can use.  That would be nice since this one has several elements.

I hope this helps rather than confuses the issue.  Good luck to you.

Brian.

[eruse]

Thanks Brian-

I would prefer not to use expressions or need to figure out the expression language at all.  I know the Wiki page tries to convince you that it’s easy, but it isn’t nearly easy enough in my opinion.

Each of my CDs has an “Album Artist” tag (such as “Art Blakey”) that I would like to use to display the name of the artist.  Each CD also has an “Artist Sort” tag that I can configure (such as “Blakey”) for the purpose of sorting the library the way I want.  For the example you gave of “Alice in Chains”, I would just have the 2 tags be the same.  What I don’t know how to do is to configure MC to use the contents of the “Album Artist” tag to display the artist or band name but use the “Artist Sort” tag to sort the library.  That seems like it should be easy, not hard.

I’m a bit dismayed that MC has not implemented a simple way to do this.  It’s clearly a feature that users have wanted for at least 5 years and it is a feature that is very easy to control in other media libraries such as Plex and iTunes.

Hope that clarifies what I would like to do and that MC is able to do it.

[blgentry]

What I don’t know how to do is to configure MC to use the contents of the “Album Artist” tag to display the artist or band name but use the “Artist Sort” tag to sort the library.  That seems like it should be easy, not hard.

Well... that's pretty easy actually!  Here's how to do it:

Go to your Artists view.  Now, look up at the top just underneath the big playback information area is.  You should see that your view you are looking at has a little tab with the name of your view on it.  It probably says "Artists".  Just to the right of the name is a little down arrow.  Click the down arrow and you'll get a neat little menu.  Notice that it has a submenu called "Sort by".  Click that and you'll get lots of options.  At the bottom you'll see "Custom".  Click on that and it will let you add one or more fields to sort by.  Go find your [Artist Sort] field, and select it.

That should do it.  Your Artists view should now sort by that field.

Best of luck.

Brian.

[eruse]

Many thanks Brian-

I’ll give that a try when I’m back at my computer but that won’t be for a couple of days.  Will let you know the results.

[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: [Select]

firstnotempty([Artist Sort Manual],[Artist])
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: [Select]

=[Album Artist (auto)]
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.