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[jrdiandrea]

It's been several years since I set up my views. For music, Album Artists sort by the artists first name. I would prefer they sort by the artists last name BUT display 1st name Last name.  I'm pretty sure i tried to get this to behave this way long ago but couldn't figure it out. I quick search turned up nothing. Is this possible and if so ls direct me to a link or instruction. I'd appreciate it. i did look thru the wiki but didn't find anything....but maybe I missed it.

Thanks

[blgentry]

The short answer is that there's no easy straight forward way to do this.  What makes this a difficult problem is trying to determine what is a first or last name.  For regular 2 word names that are obviously proper names, it's easy:  Bob Dylan should be sorted under D, and James Taylor should be sorted under T.

But what about Stevie Ray Vaughan?  Under V of course, but how does the computer know that?  For example, Flock Of Seagulls has the same number of words, but it should be sorted under F, which is the first word.  What about The Miles Davis Quintet?  M?  D?  Certainly not Q.  Probably M.  But if you also have Miles Davis by himself in  your collection, do you want all Miles Davis variants to sort next to each other? 

So this becomes an exercise for a human being to do.  You can easily make your own field called something like [Artist Sort], which becomes the key for your view to sort by.  Then you display [Album Artist (auto)] and you get what you want.

There are ways to intelligently pre-populate your Artist Sort field with a best guess, and then override the ones that don't work automatically.  I would do a 3 tiered system like:

[Album Artist (auto)]
[Album Sort Manual]
[Album Sort]

[Album Sort] would use a calculated value of something like

Code: [Select]

swap([Album Artist (auto)]) OR the value of [Album Sort Manual] if it exists.  Using the firstnotempty() function.

I just tried the "swap" expression on my library and it produced (seemingly) many more wrong values than correct ones.  I guess I have a lot of bands with band names, as opposed to individual artist names.  I would have a lot of work to do to make my artist list sort the way you are wanting.  Perhaps your collection is different than mine.

I hope that helps answer the question.

Brian.

[jrdiandrea]

Brian....thanks for your clear post. I understand what you're saying is that, while possible, it would domino into other complications that would obviously be very time consuming to correct.

 I have about 4500 albums and associated files. I think the sorting I have been using for years now will be just fine!

[blgentry]

It's really about the number of Artists within your collection, and more specifically, the number of artists which would be an exception to the rule of "swap first and last names".

If you have 100 artists that are exceptions, that wouldn't be too bad.  If you have 1000 artists that are exceptions, that might be a different story.  Maybe look through your artists list in a Panes view.  Try the swap expression in a column and see how many of the swapped names look correct versus incorrect.

Brian.