'Album Sort' - unexpected behaviour

[DavidL]

(09-03-2022 14:16)RSJ Wrote:  So... If I have two version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, I can call one 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 [Karajan]' and the other 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 [Haitink]' and assign different AlbumSort tags.

Is it possible then to exclude the conductor name (e.g. [Karajan]) from the Album title as it appears in, say, Kazoo. I would like to do this, as the album name is already formatted as 'Conductor - Album'.

I have several recordings of (for example) Beethoven - Symphony No.9, which is all I use for 'album'. I distinguish between the different versions using 'Album artist': 'Karajan' in this case. Furthermore if you have multiple recordings of this symphony conducted by Karajan I distinguish between them by adding a date to the Album artist name e.g. 'Karajan (1964)'

[simoncn]

If you are using Conductor - album for display, you cannot remove the conductor from the album title.

If you want albums sorted by conductor without including conductor in the album title, you could use this setting:

Album.sortTags={Conductor, Album, Composer}

[RSJ]

That is exactly what I do at the moment (I am responding to DavidL's comment). However, I also use the AlbumSort tag as a way of listing albums in the correct order. Otherwise, all dual-symphony albums which start, for example, 'Beethoven - Symphonies Nos. 6 & 7' appear before single symphony albums - e.g. 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 3'. I have got around this by have an AlbumSort tag of (for the example above) 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 6 & 7'.

However, Simon has indicated that different AlbumSort tags cannot be used for albums that have the same name - e.g. three versions of Beethoven's 9th symphony cannot have different AlbumSort tags if they all have the same Album tag.

What I had wanted to do was create a 'flight' of, say, Haitink's recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with the LSO, followed by the Karajan BP recordings. My plan was to do this by including the conductor's name after the first part of the album name in the AlbumSort tag (e.g. 'Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 3'). This works if the Album tags/names are all different, but not if they are the same. So, where there are dual symphony recordings with different pairs of symphonies, there is not an issue. But a conflict is created for the single symphony recordings which have the same Album name.

[simbun]

(09-03-2022 15:13)RSJ Wrote:  However, Simon has indicated that different AlbumSort tags cannot be used for albums that have the same name - e.g. three versions of Beethoven's 9th symphony cannot have different AlbumSort tags if they all have the same Album tag.

It's because of the album.value.sort setting.

(08-03-2022 22:37)RSJ Wrote:  tagOptions
Album.sortTags={Album, Composer}, all.ignore.sort={The, THE, the}, Composer.reverseName.display

tagValue
Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}, album.value.sort={AlbumSort}

I might be having a moment here, but what are you using album.value.sort for, can't you just use Album.sortTags={AlbumSort, Album, Composer}?



EDIT: Sorry, it's probably not fully populated! I'll have a try applying a .default to AlbumSort

[RSJ]

(09-03-2022 16:36)simbun Wrote:  I might be having a moment here, but what are you using album.value.sort for, can't you just use Album.sortTags={AlbumSort, Album, Composer}?

I think it is probably the way that I am explaining what I am trying to do...

Assume for the moment that the only recordings of Beethoven symphonies I have are conducted by Karajan and Haitink. What I am trying to achieve is that the listing of the Haitink recordings appears in symphony order and then the listing of Karajan recordings. This is a change from the way that I previously had them displayed, which was simply in symphony number order, regardless of the conductor. I thought that I could use the AlbumSort tag to achieve this.

[simbun]

If you change tagValue to:
Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}, AlbumSort.default={Album}

and then have tagOptions:
Album.sortTags={Composer, AlbumSort}

Does that give you what you want?

[RSJ]

Thank you for the suggestion. I will give that a try tomorrow evening (I am not at home at the moment).

[simoncn]

I'm not sure whether you saw this post. It suggests a small change to what you already have that I think will do what you want.

[simbun]

As much for my own understanding as anything else...

@RSJ, hopefully to clarify a few things...

Unless I'm mistaken, it looks like you've:

• Copied Album to AlbumSort
• Modified to the singular form Symphonies and Nos., so that the symphonies are sorted in the correct order e.g. so that 'Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 4 & 7' comes after 'Beethoven Symphony No. 3'
• Included the Conductor after the word Symphony so that it'll sort by '%COMPOSER% Symphony %CONDUCTOR% No. X' e.g. 'Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 1'
  

The configuration being used is:

Code:

tagOptions: Album.sortTags={Album, Composer}, all.ignore.sort={The, THE, the}, Composer.reverseName.display
tagValue: Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}, album.value.sort={AlbumSort}

NOTE: If you have Composer in your AlbumSort values then you don't need it in the Album.sortTags as well.

You say that it's mostly working apart from a few exceptions, and I believe those exceptions (highlighted in the log) are because of the setting:
album.value.sort={AlbumSort}

<source-tag>.value.sort={<target-tag>} is used to tell MinimServer how to sort the values in <source-tag>, it's like saying Mon = 1, Tue = 2, Wed = 3 ...., so you can't have 'Beethoven Symphony No. 9' (the album tag) map to both 'Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 9' and 'Beethoven Symphony Karajan No. 9' (the albumsort tags); it's typically used for defining the sort order of tags used in Indexes (as all the unique values of <source-tag> are presented in a list), but also tags like AlbumArtist and Artist that have a one to one mapping.

So, without that configuration option you're able to have one AlbumSort value per "Album" (as defined by MinimServer as mostly a unique combination of Album and AlbumArtist).
In your case you said you use the same logic as @DavidL, so have Conductor as AlbumArtist, which means you can have:

Code:

AlbumArtist    Album                        AlbumSort
Haitink        Beethoven Symphony No. 9    Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 9
Karajan        Beethoven Symphony No. 9    Beethoven Symphony Karajan No. 9

So to get your [%COMPOSER% Symphony %CONDUCTOR% No. X] sort you would need to change your original config to:

Code:

tagOptions: Album.sortTags={AlbumSort}, all.ignore.sort={The, THE, the}, Composer.reverseName.display
tagValue: Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}

NOTE: This assumes you always have Composer in AlbumSort, otherwise change it to: Album.sortTags={Composer, AlbumSort}

If AlbumSort isn't always populated you'd also need:

Code:

tagValue: AlbumSort.default={Album}

This fills in the empty AlbumSort tags with the value from Album.

Hope that makes sense.

[RSJ]

(09-03-2022 14:57)simoncn Wrote:  If you are using Conductor - album for display, you cannot remove the conductor from the album title.

If you want albums sorted by conductor without including conductor in the album title, you could use this setting:

Album.sortTags={Conductor, Album, Composer}

Unfortunately, this does not work, because it simply sorts by conductor and then album, whereas I want to sort by conductor at a lower level (i.e. within certain musical works by a composer).